Looking for sci-fi short stories you can read in one sitting? Here you'll find science fiction short stories about robots, alien worlds, space voyages, time machines and dystopian futures, all in PDF.
Most of these stories first ran in the pulp magazines of the 1930s to the 1960s, when short fiction was the heart of the genre. You'll read Philip K. Dick before his novels made him famous, next to earlier visions from H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.
Most are complete stories you can finish in one sitting, plus three H. G. Wells collections for longer evenings. All of them are free to read online or download as PDF.
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Classic
Classic Sci-Fi Short Stories
Long before rockets were real, writers were already sending people to Mars, to distant planets and into the year 2889. These classic sci-fi short stories by Jules Verne, Stanley G. Weinbaum and other pioneers show where the genre's big ideas started.
An astronaut stranded on Mars crosses the desert with Tweel, a birdlike alien who thinks in ways no human can follow. Published in 1934, it gave science fiction its first truly alien alien.
A man ready to end his life dreams he is carried to a distant planet where no one has ever sinned, and watches what happens after he arrives. Our own Project Aldus edition of Dostoevsky's 1877 story, an early vision of space travel and utopia.
A short story that follows a newspaper magnate through one ordinary day a thousand years from now, complete with video calls, piped news and weather on demand. Ten pages, and startlingly close to the mark.
Professor Challenger drills eight miles into the crust to prove the Earth is a living creature, and the whole planet answers back. A wild 1928 story from the creator of Sherlock Holmes.
A brilliant scientist becomes obsessed with removing a tiny birthmark from his wife's cheek, whatever the cost. Hawthorne's 1843 tale is one of the first stories about science going too far.
Spaceships, colonies on distant planets and first contact with aliens. These space short stories come straight from the golden age of sci-fi magazines, with Philip K. Dick and H. Beam Piper leading the way.
A spaceship crew buys a fat, pig-like creature on Mars for dinner, then discovers it can talk and think. Philip K. Dick's very first published story, from 1952.
Archaeologists on Mars try to read the language of a dead civilization with nothing to translate it from, until they find the one text every intelligent species shares. A 1957 classic about science and discovery.
Slippery Jim diGriz, the Stainless Steel Rat, chases a stolen interstellar battleship before it falls into the wrong hands. A fast, funny 1960 space adventure from Harry Harrison.
To beat an alien enemy, engineers wire a living human brain into a warship, and the brain has plans of its own. A 1953 Philip K. Dick story about minds, machines and escape.
The last ship leaving Mars before war breaks out carries three passengers with a secret: an entire Martian city shrunk inside a glass globe. A 1954 Philip K. Dick heist in space.
What happens if you step into a time machine and change one small thing? These time travel short stories play with paradoxes, travelers from the future and trips to the past.
A man opens his door to his older self, who explains how he will build a time machine that nobody ever invented. Lester del Rey's 1951 story is a perfect little time paradox.
A convict is sent two hundred years into the past to kill the founder of a movement, carrying the man's own skull to recognize him. A 1952 Philip K. Dick story whose ending loops back on itself.
Over drinks, a reporter tells the story of a New Yorker who built a time machine to visit old New Amsterdam, and of the woman he brought back. A 1953 tale by August Derleth with a chilling last line.
An old man in a wheelchair meets a young stranger from the future at a train station, and the stranger proposes a very unusual trade. A playful 1961 story about age, freedom and second chances.
A machine that runs the world, a government that decides who gets born, a planet left in ruins after the war. These dystopian short stories are short, sharp and more relevant today than when they were written.
Humanity lives underground in separate cells, talking through screens and worshipping the Machine that runs everything. Written in 1909, it predicted video calls, online lectures and life inside a network.
In a future without disease or old age, a baby can only be born when someone volunteers to die. A short, dark satire from Kurt Vonnegut, first published in 1962.
After a nuclear war, self-replicating killer robots start building new models that look exactly like people. One of Philip K. Dick's most famous stories and the basis for the film Screamers.
H. G. Wells wrote dozens of short stories before and after The Time Machine. These three collections gather his best tales of space, science and strange inventions.
Three long stories and two short ones, ranging from the stone age to a future city of thirty million people. Includes A Story of the Days To Come, the closest Wells came to writing cyberpunk.
Thirty-three stories that Wells selected himself as the ones worth keeping, with his own introduction explaining how he wrote them. The single best entry point to his short fiction.
Wells' first short story collection, fifteen pieces written while he was still making his name. Anarchists with test tubes, carnivorous orchids and a man who steals a comet, all in a few pages each.
Short fiction is where science fiction tested its wildest ideas first, and many of these stories later became novels and films. If you prefer longer reads, the same authors are waiting in our science fiction novels.
For more quick reads in every genre, explore our full collection of short stories.
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