"Who Goes There?" is the novella that formed the basis of John Carpenter's film The Thing. Campbell's classic story tells of an Antarctic research base that discovers and thaws the ancient, frozen bod…
The magazine version of Lester del Rey's frightening novel of nuclear reactor breakdown appeared in 1942: Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were scarily and accurately predicted. Del Rey was an importan…
Call Me Joe is a science fiction novella written by Poul Anderson and published in 1957. The plot involves an attempt to explore the surface of the planet Jupiter using remote-controlled artificial li…
In this acclaimed short story, a human colonization ship crash lands on a distant planet where the only landmass is completely covered in shallow puddles of water. The planet is uninhabitable to human…
The Machine Stops is a science fiction short story (12,300 words) by E. M. Forster. After initial publication in The Oxford and Cambridge Review (November 1909), the story was republished in Forster's…
In 1941, Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a short story by a little-known writer named Isaac Asimov. The story was called "Nightfall", and many years later it has long been recognized as …
