Enjoy this reprint of Austin Grossman’s “Professor Incognito Apologizes: An Itemized List,” a short story from John Joseph Adams’ recent anthology The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination. Austin Grossman’s second novel You is available now from Little, Brown. For more information on the Mad Scientist's Guide, check out it's website here!

“Professor Incognito Apologizes” is both a heartfelt mea culpa by Professor Incognito on the event of his beloved discovering his disturbing experiments and an in-depth FAQ on how to adjust to that newfound knowledge. It provides an excellent blueprint for young mad scientists to follow when confronted with investigatively inclined significant others.

[Read “Professor Incognito Apologizes: An Itemized List” by Austin Grossman]

Enjoy this reprint of the title story from Tim Maughan’s short story collection Paintwork, a collection which also contains the BSFA Award nominated “Havana Augmented.” His collection comes highly recommended by Cory Doctorow and Ken MacLeod. His short story “Limited Edition” has been shortlisted for the 2012 BSFA Award.

“Paintwork” is a near-futuristic story of a virtual-reality graffiti artist specializing in defacing and reprogramming QR codes who is confronted with a series of impossibly fast takedowns of his latest series. He must find the artist who is dissing his works while struggling to face the validity of their critiques.

[Read More]

Ghost Week continues with this Mark Twain story, simply titled “A Ghost Story,” though sometimes published as “A Ghost's Tale.” As with our other Ghost Week reprints, this comes from the Random House/Vintage anthology The Big Book of Ghost Stories edited by Otto Penzler. “A Ghost Story” was originally published in Werner's Readings and Recitations (New York, Edgar S. Werner Company, 1888).

[Read “A Ghost Story”]

If you need solid, convincing spooky tales, Southern writers are often a good bet. Noted writer Ellen Glasgow grew up in the south and went on to be the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1941 for the novel In This Our Life. Please enjoy this wonderful Glasgow story originally published in Scribner's Magazine in 1916, which is now found in The Big Book of Ghost Stories edited by Otto Penzler, out last month from Random House/Vintage.

[Read “The Shadowy Third”]

To kick off Ghost Week, please enjoy this classic H.P. Lovecraft chiller straight from the new  from Random House/Vintage Books; The Big Book of Ghost Stories edited by Otto Penzler! In “The Terrible Old Man,” the inhabitants of Kingsport are harboring a strange, secret person...or is he a person at all? This story was originally published in July of 1921 in a magazine called The Tryout. 

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Enjoy “On 20468 Petercook,” a new original story by author Andy Duncan about Stanley and George, two resolute employees of Trans-Space Enterprises tasked with adjusting reflective sheets on solar sails attached to asteroids, miniature planetoids, and the like. It doesn’t seem like an exciting life, but perhaps you’re simply not realizing the full dramatic potential of two mates sitting amongst asteroids, adjusting sails.

Ah, tea’s up.

This story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

[Read “On 20468 Petercook”]

Presenting a new original story, “Among the Silvering Herd,“ by author A.M. Dellamonica, the voice behind Tor.com’s Buffy: The Vampire Slayer Rewatch, and the author of short story “The Cage,” a contemporary fantasy love story centering around werewolves which made the Locus 2010 Recommended Reading List.

“Among the Silvering Herd” is about loyalty, tradition, and the things people will do to protect what is theirs. For centuries, the island nation of Redcap has been obligated to pay tribute to the powerful nation of Sylvanna. Suffering under the heavy burden of the contract that by rights should be declared illegal, the princesses of Redcap summon Gale, a wealthy seawoman, to advise them. Political savvy is only one weapon in Gale’s diplomatic arsenal, but she’s up against a Sylvanner ambassador who will push her to the brink . . . or over it.

This story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by Tor Books editor Jim Frenkel.

[Read “Among the Silvering Herd”]

“The Effect of Centrifugal Forces” is an original story by Maureen F. McHugh first featured in After the Apocalypse, the 2011 collection of McHugh’s fiction released by Small Beer Press, hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the “best books of 2011”.

In “The Effect of Centrifugal Forces,” a teenage girl trapped in American suburbia grimly watches one of her mothers succumb to a brain-destroying disease carried by processed chicken nuggets. Her other relatives are even worse off, creating a landscape of sorrow and self-abuse that makes normal societal functions seem completely alien.

[Read “The Effect of Centrifugal Forces”]

Presenting a new original story, “Uncle Flower’s Homecoming Waltz,“ by author Marissa K. Lingen, a tale in which children and adults must be taught how to daydream properly; a respite against the never-ending war that rages around them.

This story was acquired and edited for Tor.com by Tor Books editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

My grandmother says all stories begin with a death. My grandfather says with a birth. And Aunt Albert says they’re both wrong, and stories begin with someone not getting what they want.

But no one was born, and no one died, and I got what I wanted, and that is where this story begins.

[Continue reading “Uncle Flower’s Homecoming Waltz”]

Experience the familiar perils of office politics in a world eerily different from our own in “The Situation,” an original comic story created by Jeff VanderMeer and Eric Orchard.

“The Situation” is based on a short story by Jeff VanderMeer which Margo Lanagan called “darkly hilarious” and Kevin Brockmeier “a work of surreal humor, bemused sadness, and meticulous artifice...as if the workplace novels of Sinclair Lewis and Joshua Ferris had been inverted, shaken, and diced until they came out looking like a Terry Gilliam creation.” The original short story can be read online in its entirety courtesy of WIRED’s GeekDad and in Jeff’s collection, The Third Bear, available from Tachyon Books. For more of this special brand of weirdness, check out Ann and Jeff VanderMeer’s anthology The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, available in eBook and UK editions now and US print editions on May 8, 2012.

[Read “The Situation”]

This spring brings new imaginings of John Carter of Mars both on film and in print. Please enjoy this exclusive excerpt from Under The Moons of Mars, a new anthology of John Carter stories edited by John Joseph Adams, out on February 7th from Simon & Schuster.

Find out more about this story and the anthology in John’s introduction, or visit the promotional site for more information. You can also see how Gregory Manchess’ art for this story was created.

[Read “The Metal Men of Mars”]

Presenting a new original story, “Swift, Brutal Retaliation,“ by new author Meghan McCarron, a ghost story that cautions one against trying to win a ghostly prank war against one’s dead big brother. You can’t win that sort of war, only survive it.

This novelette was acquired for Tor.com by Tor Books editor Liz Gorinsky.

Two girls in wrinkled black dresses sat in the front pew at their older brother’s funeral. They had never sat in the front pew in church before, and they disliked how exposed they felt. Behind them stood their brother’s entire eighth-grade class, the girls in ironed black dresses and gold cross necklaces, the boys in dark suits, bought too big so they could get another use. Few expected more funerals, but the suits would serve for graduation in May—which, after all, was a funeral, too.

[Continue reading ”Swift, Brutal Retaliation"]

Muscles tire. Words fail. Faith fades. Fear falls. In the Sixteenth Year of the Sixteen Princes the world came to an end when the dragon’s back gave out. Poetry died first followed by faith. One by one the world-strands burst and bled until ash snowed down on huddled masses whimpering in the cold.

The Santaman came reeking of love into this place and we did not know him.

This is his story.

This is our story, too.

Prelude
The Santaman Cycle, Authorized Standard Version
Verity Press, 2453 YD

[Continue reading “If Dragon’s Mass Eve Be Cold and Clear”]

Presenting a new original science fiction story, “A Clean Sweep With All the Trimmings,” by author James Alan Gardner, a Damon Runyon-esque tale of courteous guys, bulletproof dolls, and the fedora-clad spacemen that bring them together.

This week marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the death of American writer Damon Runyon, best known for his delightful, distinctive prose style and for the series of post-Prohibition New York stories that eventually inspired the musical Guys and Dolls.

[Read more]