H.G. Wells' "scientific romance," published first in serial form and then as a book in 1898, attained perhaps its greatest fame in another form, the infamous realistic 1939 radio broadcast "Invasion from Mars" by Orson Welles. It was also made into an early 1950s science fiction adventure movie. Stover (emeritus, Illinois Institute of Technology) describes Wells' story as "a prophecy of startling originality foreseeing the coming of totalitarianism...

"Anna Sinjari--refugee, survivor of genocide, disaffected office worker--has a close encounter that reveals universe-threatening stakes. Enter Ssrin, a many-headed serpent alien who is on the run from her own past. Ssrin and Anna are inexorably, dangerously drawn to each other...While humanity reels from disaster, Anna must join a small team of civilians, soldiers, and scientists to investigate a mysterious broadcast and unknowable horror. If they...

As Frederik Pohl noted in an essay decades after this story was published, much of Galaxy's contents contained stories which were not really about their nominal subject. As editor of Galaxy magazine, Horace Gold's editorial interest was always tilted toward satire and social commentary, which in the main interested him far more than technological extrapolation. These interests put his magazine at the outset in a different place than John W. Campbell's...

"July 25th, 2234: The crew of the Adamura discovers the Anomaly. On the seemingly uninhabited planet Talos VII:a circular pit, 50 kilometers wide. Its curve not of nature, but design. Now, a small team must land and journey on foot across the surface to learn who built the hole and why. But they all carry the burdens of lives carved out on disparate colonies in the cruel cold of space. For some the mission is the dream of the lifetime, for others...

"When Willy Maykit gets stranded on Planet Ed during a class trip to outer space, he's in for an adventure. But will he be able to outwit the monsters inhabiting Ed and find his way back home?"--

"Jon and Katharina spend the winter in Jon's childhood home on the Cantabrian coast, lonely and bored, ambivalent about their precarious freelance jobs and disconnected in their relationship. Yet the couple's routine will soon be disturbed when one rainy night, they witness strange lights in the sky over the village. The next morning, ufologists begin to arrive in the village, anxious to make extraterrestrial contact. The morning brings other unexpected...

It's just another day of high school for Zack Lightman. He's daydreaming through another boring math class, with just one more month to go until graduation and freedom--if he can make it that long without getting suspended again. Then he glances out his classroom window and spots the flying saucer. At first, Zack thinks he's going crazy. A minute later, he's sure of it. Because the UFO he's staring at is straight out of the videogame he plays every...

Author and professional futurist Karl Schroeder, whose novels Ventus and Permanence have established him as a groundbreaking visionary in hard science fiction, extends his imagination into Larry Niven territory, returning to the same distant future in which Ventus was set, but employing a broader canvas, to tell the story of Teven Coronal, a ringworld with a huge multiplicity of human civilizations. Brilliant but troubled Livia Kodaly is Teven's...

A dystopian future Earth is thrown into fear and turmoil by the imminent arrival of extraterrestrials in this alien-contact classic from a sci-fi master. With The Coming, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction Grand Master Joe Haldeman ingeniously combines a troubling dark vision of a dystopian near-future with an alien first-encounter tale as thrilling and thought-provoking as Carl Sagan's Contact and Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters...

When her mother is abducted by aliens on Christmas Eve (or "Smekday" Eve since the Boov invasion), 11 year-old Tip hops in the family car and heads south to find her and meets an alien Boov mechanic who agrees to help her and save the planet from disaster.