Readers' Choice 2023 - Science Fiction - Stories

Lonely spaceport worker Devin McSmith meets Bastian Drago, an exotic and beastly alien from the planet Dega, and begins an adventure that takes him to the stars and beyond.

Arad Ansari is a homeless street slug in the Grey District A-5 colony. Work is hard to come by and he has to compete with the animal/human hybrids called DemiShou, forcing him to make his way in less than savory methods. Getting off-planet sounds like a godsend, but fate has a way of complicating the best opportunities of a man with little luck.

Sergeant Liam Jacks has made a life for himself on the cargo vessel the Santa Claus to escape the memories on civil unrest on Alpha Centauri.

Life should be simple enough, but one mysterious passenger can unravel the quiet in ways he hadn't imagined.

***NOMINATED FOR BEST PROMISING AUTHOR STORY IN THE 2013 READERS CHOICE AWARDS***

A lone man picks up a battle standard cast down three hundred years before. beginning a journey that will lead him to find the lost fleet, and a forgotten ship at the edge of nowhere. Darien Taine must accept his role, guiding his crew on the long road to free their people from Amsus tyranny. Uncovering along the way the sins that led to humanity's downfall, and reforging alliances long thought forgotten. Three hundred years of slavery, of persecution and of tyranny are at an end.

An extraterrestrial condemned to a long exile on Earth is forced to experience pain the way humans do. A bittersweet story of rebellion, punishment, and eventual triumph.

LIVES + LOVES + LOSSES = LESSONS

Micah was a goon. He knew it and everyone else knew it. But he had connections and it put him in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Stanley lives a life of quiet desperation with nothing in his life having gone as he'd have wished. After a tragedy, a device shows up that could make everything better than ever, or worse than he thought imaginable. What would you do?

Sure, alien shifters lost their planet lived on Earth. Miah'd never met one, so he ignored all the gossip. Then he moved to the city for school. After years of focus he let loose on the cusp of graduation and headed to a bar with his roommate. How could one conversation about shifters hunting humans would cause so much trouble? Ambushed and trapped, he refused to give in. His life, everything he'd ever wanted, is at risk. Will he find the right way out?

Ryker thought he volunteered for an experiment that would help his government in a war against an alien planet. He didn't know he would become the experiment, or that he'd end up on a planet full of aliens that killed humans on sight. He wasn't exactly human anymore though.

Summer vacation had started out well for Derry and Caleb. There was much to occupy two adventurous boys in the rural landscape in which they lived. They had the woods, and the fields, and the waterways to occupy them.

And they had each other.

But then they made a discovery - a strange place hidden in the forest, a pathway to lands beyond description. And suddenly, the summer was not quite so simple any longer.