12 Free Short Stories by Your Favorite Authors

Like many of Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s stories, “On the Lonely Shore” is a historical story with a speculative twist. A young woman accompanies a sick man to a house by the seashore for him to convalesce, but what ails him is no natural disease. Uncanny Magazine publishes incredible science fiction and fantasy stories. It’s among my favorite places to find great short fiction like this.

This fun story about a robot dog is everything you would expect from Scalzi. An engineer is tasked with creating a robotic dog for the company’s eccentric CEO, but things don’t go exactly as planned. “A Model Dog” is told entirely in quoted exchanges from two employees discussing this project. It takes a moment to get used the format, but it truly is the perfect way to tell this story.

An alien invasion at a presidential inauguration kicks off this Malindo Lo short story, “We Could Be Heroes,” when a UFO appears over the White House during a protest against a former child star turned president.

“Umbra” is a retelling of the the Irish ballad of Molly Bán from the perspective of a girl mistaken for a black swan and killed by a hunter. It’s as lush and gorgeous as any Anna-Marie McLemore retelling.

In a world full of trash-eating fungus, a young scholar and a hound-mutant who eats metal and plastic spend one last day together. Tonight, one will leave for the wilderness beyond the enclaves while the other stays in the safety and security of their home. But is it really safe? “St. Juju” is everything I love in a Rivers Solomon story wrapped up in a tight little package.

In “Drones to Ploughshares,” a surveillance drone created by an authoritarian state is given a new chance at life and sentience. I love two of the drones, and their names are Echo and Bravo. If you read this story, you’ll love them, too.

Tor is one of my favorite SFF outlets for short fiction, and this is the sort of story that proves why. You might know Jeff VanderMeer for his new weird novels, and his short story “This World is Full of Monsters” definitely follows that form. An alien invasion comes to one man’s door in this bizarre short story, and what follows is both the end of the world and the beginning of it.

This brilliant short story about the enslaved people whose teeth were used in George Washington’s dentures is not only exceptional, it’s also a perfect example of why I love P. Djèlí Clark’s writing so much. “The Secret Lives of the Nine Negro Teeth of George Washington” is an absolute must-read. There’s a reason it won the Nebula and Locust awards for best short story.

This inventive fictional article about the history of the history of ant rights could almost be mistaken for fact. You’d have to miss the disclaimer at the top and suspended a bit of disbelief, of course. But it’s that good. “Birth of the Ants Rights Movement” depicts humanity’s reaction to discovering another species with a system of written word. When an eco-friendly graffiti cleaner reveals a pheromonal glyph left behind by a group of Argentine ants, humans realize they aren’t the only intelligent species on the planet. The rest is ants rights history.

A former Academician and AI researcher is called in by the military in “Beyond the Dragon’s Gate” to help them prevent the destruction of their AI-powered fleet. Her expertise is their only hope of preventing its entire annihilations. There’s only one problem: it is exactly that expertise that cost her everything so many years ago.

“The Bookmaking Habit of Select Species” explores bookkeeping habits and recording methods of various species throughout the galaxy. From the spoken-word writing of the Allatians to the Quatzoli, a mechanical race for whom thinking and writing is the same, you will definitely be left thinking about the written word differently after finishing this short story.

“Gator Butchering for Beginners” is exactly the sort of story you’d expect from Kristen Arnett, whose debut novel featured a taxidermist. The story explores a broken relationship cleverly wrapped up in a how-to guide to butchering alligators. It’s witty and personal and brutal, just like Arnett’s best work.