The 26 best sci-fi short stories of all time – according to New Scientist writers

Sometimes you’re in the mood for a slice of science fiction but you haven’t got the time to embark on a Red Mars or a Dune. All hail, then, the sci-fi short story, bringing you a slice of the weird, the mind-expanding and the futuristic in pocket-sized format.

Did you know that Hugo Gernsback, after whom science fiction’s biggest awards, the Hugos, are named, came up with the term science fiction (or “scientifiction” as he had it) as he launched the first edition of his sci-fi story magazine Amazing Stories, in 1926? “By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H G Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story – a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision,” he wrote. “Not only do these amazing tales make tremendously interesting reading – they are also always instructive.”

Perhaps the stories in the selection below aren’t always instructive. They certainly aren’t comprehensive. But, chosen by New Scientist staff as their own personal favourites and arranged in order of publication, they are definitely a good read. Enjoy reconnecting with the ones you already know, dive into those you don’t – and tell us what we’ve missed on our Facebook page. We have provided links where these stories have been made available to read online.

Wells’s Time Traveller tells us the story of his visit to the far future (the year “Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One, A.D.”), when the world is in a “condition of ruinous splendour”, peopled by the Eloi and the Morlocks. What has really stayed with me from the classic sci-fi novella, though, was his journey even further forward in time, to a terrifying future vision. “I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea, the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air that hurts one’s lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect.” So evocative and brilliant, this was published in 1895 (note the plentiful Trump-esque capitals) and is one of the earliest pieces of science fiction, says Britannica.  Alison Flood

Within the massive apparatus in E. M. Forster’s take on the smart home, each individual lives in an underground room that meets all their physical needs and communicates with other humans via a technology akin to video calls. Most characters are perfectly happy to live out their days in isolation, although some insist on travelling through the hostile environment outside in order to meet face to face. Eventually, the first perspective wins out. But when the machine finally breaks down, its cosseted inhabitants face the end of the world.

More than a hundred years after this story was first published, it feels incredibly prescient. In 2020, I sat in my apartment in front of a glowing computer screen, my friends and coworkers reduced to rectangles in a videoconference app, and I felt the walls of the machine surround me. I felt them again last year, when the air was so tainted with wildfire smoke that the horizon turned orange and any New Yorker who was able retreated indoors once again. As Forster predicted, the machine can be comforting in the face of an unsafe world – and at the same time, it’s so stifling that it makes us long for even “scraps” of the open sky.  Sophie Bushwick

Nightfall by Isaac Asimov (1941)

This fun and absorbing early story from Isaac Asimov is almost as if H. P. Lovecraft had ventured into science fiction, creating astronomy-based cosmic horror. It is a searing study of how humans react in the face of the unknown. Imagine a world lit by six stars, having them near enough that you are always bathed in light from at least one of these celestial orbs, making daylight an unassailable constant for more than two thousand years. This luminance is so much relied on that no one has ever needed to invent artificial lights. And then, in a rare astronomical event, the lights go out, and the eclipse lasts not a few minutes, but half a day. Yes, it would be darkness, but not darkness as we know it, which can be scary and full of the unknown. This is darkness for a civilisation that has never seen a night, that has never had to find a candle or torch during a power cut, or traverse a city park after dark, not knowing what threats might be hiding in the shadows. It is a story that compels you to make the intellectual leap to understand what life on another world might really be like and it is well worth reading for that exercise alone.  Chris Simms

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (1948)

Shirley Jackson is author of one of the scariest novels in the world (The Haunting of Hill House) and one of the most brilliantly unsettling (We Have Always Lived in the Castle). So it is only to be expected that she would also be the author of one of the most quietly disturbing speculative short stories ever written, The Lottery. It takes place in a nondescript rural village, where the locals are gathering for the lottery. It sounds like it’s going to be fun. Kids are collecting stones. Everyone knows what is going to happen; they don’t think much of neighbouring villages who have got rid of their lotteries (“Listening to the young folks, nothing’s good enough for them. Next thing you know, they’ll be wanting to go back to living in caves”). But a trickle of unease begins to spread, as the lottery “draw” looms nearer. If you don’t know what the twist is, I won’t spoil it, but I just read this again and I still feel a little shaky. Jackson is a stone-cold genius.  Alison Flood

There’s a reason the smart home is a staple of science fiction (see my other pick, E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, above). Who wouldn’t dream of a house that doesn’t merely protect you from the elements, but also caters to your every need? The smart home offers the luxury of having servants, without requiring any pesky interactions with other people. But once you remove the humans who serve from the domestic sphere, you start to wonder what would happen if you also eliminated the ones who are served. That’s the scenario that plays out in Ray Bradbury’s creepy, beautiful There Will Come Soft Rains. This story tracks the activity of a smart home devoid of its inhabitants. Still, the reader can figure out what must have been the rhythms of their daily lives, their taste in poetry and even the fate that befell them by observing the home’s layout, decor and its ongoing automated processes. Without humans in the loop, however, the dwelling is revealed as a sterile, heartless place that destroys the lone living creature that enters – and eventually devours itself.  Sophie Bushwick

If a dystopian story where cars dominate cities, people spend sedentary evenings gazing at screens and AI-powered police robots fail to grasp human motivations was published today it may come across as over-egged. But Bradbury’s The Pedestrian is 73 years old.

Its protagonist, Leonard Mead, is hauled away to an institution by a driverless police car that can’t fathom why he’d be strolling at night with no purpose. The incident is mentioned in Bradbury’s later novel Fahrenheit 451, suggesting that they inhabit the same world, and the idea reportedly came to him when he was interrogated by police for walking in Los Angeles in 1949.

Things don’t get much more dystopian than reframing a post-dinner stroll as a rebellious act, but the story has valuable messages about the society we have since constructed that is increasingly difficult to navigate without technology and how we maintain humanity in the face of progress. And the unflinching AI that refuses to accept Mead’s explanation should give us all pause for thought as we entrench large language models into every aspect of our lives.  Matthew Sparkes

This 1953 story from Clarke starts gloriously whimsically – it is the first time, we learn, that “anyone’s been asked to supply a Tibetan monastery with an Automatic Sequence Computer” (they probably all have them these days). The monks want the computer to aid them in their quest to complete a list containing all possible names of God. “What would have taken us fifteen thousand years it will be able to do in a hundred days.” The engineers roll their eyes and comply – but what will happen when – if – the computer fulfils its task? Short, clever – and deliciously unsettling as it ends.  Alison Flood

Before stories such as Dark, Looper, Back to the Future and Doctor Who, Robert Heinlein delivered one of the most memorable time travel paradoxes ever conceived in his 1958 short story All You Zombies. But don’t be fooled by the title – there are no shambling hordes of the walking dead to be found. Instead, the story begins with a bartender serving up shots to a customer while coaxing the latter into sharing their personal circumstances and incredible life story. It is a standard storytelling scene with a twist that is telegraphed in the opening paragraph, because the bartender is actually a temporal agent recruiting the customer to join a shadowy organisation that manipulates the timeline through time travel. Before long, the conversation takes some unexpected but increasingly personal turns for both people. Heinlein supposedly wrote All You Zombies in a single day and you can read it within half an hour – but don’t be surprised if the story slithers into your subconscious and nests in its coils there for years to come.  Jeremy Hsu

Every so often, you come across a story that has such a simple yet brilliant idea that you wonder why no one else thought of it before. Flowers for Algernon charts the progress of Charlie Gordon, a man with an IQ of 68, who is given the same surgical treatment as Algernon, a lab mouse that has had its intellect tripled. Charlie’s rise in intellect is brilliantly portrayed through the standard of his diary entries. But alongside his intellectual development come painful and cruel realisations as Charlie begins to see people around him for what they really are. And then Algernon starts to decline. Will the same happen to Charlie? I read the award-winning novel version of this poignant and moving tale before I found the original short story it was expanded from, which itself won the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. If anything, the short version is better – subtly taking you through sympathy, pity, outrage and sadness. Like all the best science fiction, although based in science, it is actually about the human condition. It puts a critical lens on how people judge others and makes you question what it means to fit in and whether intelligence and knowledge are more important than happiness.  Chris Simms

Vonnegut’s story is set in a world where old age has been “conquered”, and where there are strict population controls. If you want to have a baby, someone has to volunteer to die, by calling “the telephone number of the municipal gas chambers of the Federal Bureau of Termination”. It’s “2 B R 0 2 B”. (Try saying it – the “0” is “nought”.) We are following the choices of a soon-to-be-father of triplets, as a doctor tells him he needs to line up three deaths if his kids are to survive. “‘In the year 2000,’ said Dr. Hitz, ‘before scientists stepped in and laid down the law, there wasn’t even enough drinking water to go around, and nothing to eat but sea-weed—and still people insisted on their right to reproduce like jackrabbits. And their right, if possible, to live forever.’” Written in 1962, it still feels very timely these days.  Alison Flood

If you ever daydream of escaping your mundane job and seeing something incredible, you might well empathise with Douglas Quail, who wakes up every morning wanting to see the wonders of another world. It might be an unobtainable dream for a low-earning clerk, but he wants to do what the rich and powerful can do and visit Mars. Why he yearns so strongly for it is a mystery that is slowly unveiled in this rollercoaster 19-page short story that inspired the two Total Recall films, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Colin Farrell, respectively. The ideas are the same, but don’t expect the same plot. It’s an inventive, irreverent ride, delving into wish fulfilment and reality and scattered with more than a soupçon of humour. There is a rich vein of paranoia running through the tale as you realise that memories and thus reality aren’t to be trusted. And like the central red pill/blue pill dilemma of The Matrix, it leaves you realising we all have a choice to make: is it better to strive and fight for a dream, to make yourself matter, or to bob along as a salaried employee inside a world that somehow doesn’t feel real, but is at least comfortable? Douglas Quail has to make that choice and so do you.  Chris Simms

A contemporary of Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ was one of the preeminent writers in the second-wave feminism era of science fiction. Her stories explored women’s lives with an edge of anger that Russ owned to, proudly, in her conversations with other writers. When it Changed is a perfect, self-contained slice of that anger, laid out against the backdrop of an already-lost utopia. It takes place on a planetary colony called Whileaway, where two women named Janet and Katy live a happy married life. Thanks to a revolutionary technology that merges two ova into a single embryo, they have three daughters that are descended from them both. Katy is a talented machinist, while Janet alludes to a history of combat and necessary violence. Janet narrates as the pair joins the rest of their community in welcoming visitors from their long-forgotten homeland – men.

It turns out these are the first men on Whileaway seen since a plague killed the colony’s entire male population generations earlier. It was a catastrophe the surviving women adapted to, even while mourning the lost. But what will happen as men from Earth, now suffering its own catastrophes, rediscover this planet? There’s not much to say of plot: this story spans a single afternoon, just a handful of conversations that slip back and forth across lines of power and feeling. Yet you know, by the end of it, that what you have witnessed is the beginning of a cataclysm. For whom, well, maybe you can guess.  Christie Taylor

It is the Festival of Summer in Omelas, and everyone is happy. Bells and birds, prancing horses and everywhere children cavort. Omelas is a city with red roofs and moss-grown gardens. It doesn’t matter when in time we are, only that this place should be understood to be singular in the history of humanity. Because everyone, truly, is happy. Our narrator, positioned outside Omelas, speculates: perhaps in Omelas there might be technology the likes of which we could not understand. But definitely not cars, nor war. “As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exchange, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb,” writes Le Guin.

The twist of this story is now famous – I won’t tell you. But even before we find the dark centre of this supposed utopia, the narrator is in conversation with you, the reader, as you look for a catch in all this rollicking joy. Surely the problem is that everyone is too happy, naive? Surely pain is the foundation of intellect? “O miracle,” the narrator responds, the citizens of Omelas are fully formed, mature and passionate adults. This distrust says more about the reader’s failure to imagine.

Speculative fiction writers speak often about our need to dream up better worlds. But you are reminded, with Omelas, to question your imagination even as you nurture it. To find in every utopia someone’s dystopia. And to ask about those centred by this story’s title: what exactly happens to those who walk away?  Christie Taylor

Another of the feminist second wave, James Tiptree Jr. (writing here under the pen name Raccoona Sheldon) was in conversation with Russ and Le Guin – literally, in fact, as the author corresponded in letters with both. Ten years into Tiptree’s writing career, a determined fan discovered that Tiptree was in fact a woman named Alice Sheldon – a former intelligence officer in the second world war and, later, an experimental psychologist. But even as Tiptree, Sheldon posed as a feminist man, whose works often touched on gender – including another story about women learning to get along just fine when men are wiped off the face of the Earth.

The Screwfly Solution is not that story (that story is Houston, Houston, Do You Read?). Instead, it is a series of letters: between a husband, Alan, and his wife, Anne, as Alan conducts research on parasitic flies far from their Michigan home. Meanwhile, an epidemic of violent misogyny is spreading with a strangely precise pattern – will scientists discover the cause?

Many things make this story great: the shifting narration, the assorted uselessness of journalism and research papers, the sinking dread as the end of the story approaches like a slow-moving but underailable train, even the entomological metaphor of the title’s screwflies. But even more so, I think, is how timeless it remains. Even half a century later, the chill of reading it goes deep and lingers long.  Christie Taylor

Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (1979)

This slice of sci-fi horror from the author who is still writing The Winds of Winter (come on George!) opens as pet owner Kress goes out looking for a new animal. “‘I want something exotic. Unusual. And not cute. I detest cute animals. At the moment I own a shambler. Imported from Cotho, at no mean expense. From time to time I feed him a litter of unwanted kittens. That is what I think of cute. Do I make myself understood?’” He ends up with a colony of sandkings, small, insectile alien creatures who share a hivemind and are fed by a “maw” that he keeps in his old piranha tank. Needless to say, things don’t go to plan in this fun and disturbing tale.  Alison Flood

Fire Watch by Connie Willis (1982)

There is a popular what-if scenario of going back in time to assassinate Adolf Hitler before he can start the second world war. Connie Willis’s 1982 novelette Fire Watch takes a completely different tack by immediately plunging its time-travelling narrator into confusion as he appears in London during the Nazi German Luftwaffe’s bombing raids in 1940. The narrator is tasked with joining fellow volunteers in the seemingly Sisyphean task of putting out incendiary bombs on the roof of St Paul’s Cathedral that threaten to burn down the hallowed landmark, even as he struggles with his real assignment of trying to figure out why his history professors have chosen to send him back to that harrowing period without adequate education or preparation. As an added complication, the narrator begins to suspect a fellow fire watch member of subversive wartime activities while he himself struggles to blend in and avoid blowing his cover with the locals. As the narrative follows a series of dated diary entries from the increasingly paranoid and exhausted narrator, Willis’s story shines by treating time travel as a tool used judiciously by historians to bear witness and deepen their understanding of humanity, rather than depicting it as a superpower for manipulating the past or future.  Jeremy Hsu

From the first line, “It was hot, the night we burned Chrome”, this story grabs you and drags you into cyberspace. William Gibson’s vision of the future has always been stark. It’s not a dreamily futuristic world of clean new technology, it is a perhaps more realistic mishmash of old and new, with hands-on people adapting to change by retrofitting and hacking devices together. Neon lights illuminate hard criminals and doomed love. In this fantastic story, we meet Bobby and Jack, two “computer cowboys”. Jack goes to buy the digital equivalent of a knife to help give them an advantage when hacking and comes home with a metaphorical neutron bomb. And it could change everything for them.

It’s a rollicking ride, and a great introduction to Gibson’s Sprawl series, which established cyberpunk as a literary movement. That series kicks off with Neuromancer, still one of my favourite science fiction books ever. If you read Burning Chrome in Gibson’s collection of short stories with the same name, you will also find two other Sprawl stories there, both worth reading and both of which have inspired films. In Johnny Mnemonic, you meet Molly Millions, the chillingly wonderful “razorgirl” or “street samurai” from Neuromancer, for the first time. She will have you wanting to don mirrorshades. And the other, New Rose Hotel, is a wonderful, high-tech, low-life tale of corporate espionage. All the Sprawl stories leave you with the nagging feeling that despite technology allowing people to connect so easily, people are still very much lonely, a dystopian outlook that TV shows like Black Mirror have more recently mined to great success.  Chris Simms

Bloodchild by Octavia E. Butler (1984)

Octavia Butler is, in my opinion, one of the greatest science fiction writers (see my review of her novel Kindred here), but she didn’t write many short stories. Those she did are excellent – imaginative, thought-provoking and worth seeking out. My favourite is Bloodchild, which won the Nebula, Hugo and Locus awards and can be found in the book Bloodchild and Other Stories. A colony of humans have left Earth and now live on a planet inhabited by the Tlic. When the Tlic discovered that humans are the perfect host for their eggs, they let them stay on the proviso that each family provides a child to host Tlic eggs. This compelling story follows Gan as he works through his feelings and the reality about imminently becoming a host. There is a mixture of body horror – Butler said she was partly inspired by the life cycle of a botfly – love and tenderness, and I enjoyed the exploration of the idea of male pregnancy in an unexpected way. Bloodchild is a thoughtful look at relationships between species, and the pressures placed on young people to do what is in the best interests of their families. I think about it often.  Eleanor Parsons

Swarm by Bruce Sterling (1982)

I came across Bruce Sterling’s short story Swarm after finishing his novel set in the same universe, Schismatrix. The short story appeared at the end of the novel and, craving more of Sterling’s kaleidoscopic space society, I dived straight in. After just a few pages, I had this strange feeling of familiarity. A few pages later, it hit me. Swarm had been made into an episode of the Netflix show Love, Death and Robots of which I am a huge fan, and this episode was a particular favourite. The story is set in an alien nest located within an asteroid hurtling through space. The insect-like aliens live in a perfect society where the food is plentiful, the air is warm and everything works as it should. The human characters, Afriel and Mirny, attempt to steal the secrets of this utopia and use it for human purposes. However, their actions lead to the creation of a new insectoid alien designed for intelligence who is charged with preventing Afriel from exploiting the secrets of the swarm. This story has gore, philosophy, romance and aliens all rolled up into one. Read Swarm and then watch the Love, Death and Robots episode, or do it the other way around like me. Both would work.  Finn Grant

The enigmatic dystopian novella I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqeline Harpman has haunted me since I finished it. It opens with 39 women and one girl who have been locked in a cage underground for an unknown number of years, closely watched by three guards at all times. None know how they got there. Then, one day, as the guards are delivering food, an alarm goes off and the guards run off in a panic, leaving a hatch unlocked. The women make their escape into… well, I won’t spoil it for you. The stark prose and use of repetition in the wrong hands would be dull, but Harpman uses them to great effect in this unsettling meditation on the meaning of life and community, hope and hopelessness and the effects of captivity. But be warned: if you like your fiction to be tied up in a neat bow, then this isn’t one for you.  Eleanor Parsons

Better known as Cixin Liu may be for his groundbreaking novels like The Three-Body Problem – the first translated novel to win the Hugo Award for Best Novel – he has also written many rich and rewarding short stories. Cloud of Poems, which features in his To Hold Up the Sky collection, is probably my favourite of them. In some ways, it feels like a drug-induced trip, as it playfully combines the hard science of a hollowed-out Earth with debate between an all-powerful god, a measly human and a space-travelling dinosaur about the relative benefits of poetry and technology. Like many other stories by Liu, while being nested in futuristic technology and advanced science, it incites you to consider the relationship between art and technology and how they relate to humanity, all in a tale imbued with the rich cultural history of China.  Chris Simms

Many time travel stories explore the implications of manipulating past events to shape the future. Ken Liu chooses to illustrate how the act of merely bearing witness to past events can prove disruptive to governments and societies that selectively engage with history through preferred narratives. Liu’s story features an Asian-American couple that is determined to use an experimental physics breakthrough to help individuals witness the second world war atrocities committed by Unit 731 – an Imperial Japanese Army unit that performed deadly experiments on thousands of primarily Chinese civilians and developed biological weapons used on thousands more. The story’s documentary-style format swiftly presents a variety of both emotionally charged and apathetic reactions to the controversial proposal, while highlighting how government-backed narratives that flatter national pride often omit inconvenient truths and flatten the complexities of the past. This is not easy reading – various perspectives recount in unsparing, clinical detail how Unit 731’s medical personnel committed sexual assault and performed vivisections on living people without anaesthesia. But Liu’s story feels incredibly relevant in grappling with thorny questions of how both individual and collective understandings of history continue to shape our present-day world.  Jeremy Hsu

Rebecca Roanhorse’s short story won both the Nebula and Hugo short story awards, and it is easy to see why. I could feel my stomach twisting in knots, combined with a sense of subtle dread as the Native American protagonist of the story is befriended, abused and then replaced by a “White Wolf”. The parallels with both the modern and historical Native American experience are obvious. Jesse Turnblatt (the protagonist) is a Native American “pod jockey” who works at a tourist centre that offers “Indian” virtual-reality experiences for “Tourists”. These experiences range from the depraved to the banal. Seemingly uninspired at work, Jesse breaks protocol and befriends one of his customers. What follows is a not-so-subtle critique of the appropriation of Native American culture and, in my eyes at least, the appropriation of Native American land by white European settlers over the past few centuries. It is written from the second-person perspective, making the funny parts feel funnier and the depressing parts devastating.  Finn Grant

This is the novella where we first meet Murderbot, the security cyborg chasing irritably after freedom, self-knowledge and spare time to binge-watch media – not necessarily in that order. I wrote about this series for New Scientist’s round-up of our favourite science fiction, and All Systems Red introduces many elements also found in the other books, including technology that melds organic beings with inorganic parts (and vice versa), snarky narration and criticism of corporate power. But this novella is crucial because in it, for the first time, Murderbot makes friends – or as it would probably put it, gains teammates – who see it as a full person worthy of respect and independence. And then it kills its way across an alien planet to protect them.  Sophie Bushwick

It is the Day of Good Birds in Um-Helat, and everyone is happy. Among the floating skyscrapers and mica-flecked walls, children frolic wearing hand-made wings.

Yes, another utopia, in conversation with Le Guin’s, with similar cadence and telescopic view. Jemisin directly acknowledges Omelas, “tick of a city, fat and happy”. This is not that.

If Omelas feels flat, a mass of smiling sameness, Um-Helat is a utopia of explicit difference. Special drones help children with mobility impairments enjoy the same play as their peers. You may be unhoused if you like, and sleep under well-swept bridges. If you “dwell… in delusions”, society keeps you safe – but still free. We have “race”, but not racism. “This is… not that barbaric America,” Jemisin, a Black woman, writes.

Where Le Guin urges us to consider whether joy can be wise, Jemisin holds court on whether human variety can be untroubled by hatred. You, the cynical reader, are brought in to insist that wealth requires poverty; health, illness; beauty, ugliness. Maybe you can’t imagine a world without homophobia, or any of the many scarcities we deal in. Jemisin’s city offers evidence to the contrary.

And then in this story too comes the pause, the “yes, but”. If you have already read Le Guin’s work, you are waiting for it. But you will still be surprised. You will be invited to consider, and feel deeply conflicted. But maybe, you’ll stay. Christie Taylor

Lena by qntm (2021)

In my view, the perfect sci-fi short story must have one idea, done extremely well, while also hinting at the larger implications of that idea on a wider world. Lena by qntm does just that, telling the story of the first copy of a human brain uploaded to a computer, and the subsequent consequences, in under 2000 words. Written in the form of a Wikipedia article, it describes how the digital brain has been repeatedly copied and put to work – and the horrifying lessons researchers have learned. While Lena was written in 2021, just before the current AI boom, the methods needed to cajole the brain into working are strangely reminiscent of the prompts used to manipulate large language models like the one behind ChatGPT, though euphemisms like “red motivation” conceal a much darker reality. Even the story’s title is masterfully chosen, named for a picture of Swedish model Lena Forsén published in Playboy magazine in the 1970s and since widely reproduced by computer science researchers as a test image, perhaps becoming one of the most duplicated images in history.  Jacob Aron