Short Story

If you love holiday stories, holiday movies, made\-for\-TV\-holiday specials, holiday episodes of your favorite sitcoms and, especially, if you love holiday anthologies, you’re going to fall in love with My True Love Gave To Me: Twelve Holiday Stories by twelve bestselling young adult writers, edited by international bestselling author Stephanie Perkins. Whether you enjoy celebrating Christmas or Hanukkah, Winter Solstice or New Year's there's something here for everyone. So curl up by the fireplace and get cozy. You have twelve reasons this season to stay indoors and fall in love.

Steelheart may be dead, but Epics still plague Newcago and David and the Reckoners have vowed to fight back.

Don't miss this exciting short story that connects The Darkest Minds to its much-anticipated sequel, Never Fade. Gabe's life has been devastated in the wake of the economic crash. The only option left for someone like him to escape his tragic past is to leave his small town behind and to attempt to become a skiptracer. This already almost impossible task is made all the more difficult by his first score, a young girl who won't speak, but who changes his life in ways he could never imagine.

From its launch in 2005 to its final issue in 2014, Subterranean magazine published stories by the leading lights of science fiction and fantasy literature. From Hugo and Nebula winners to Pulitzer and Booker Prize finalists to New York Times bestsellers, this anthology collects 30 pieces of Subterranean’s best, representing diverse, breathtaking short fiction from today’s modern masters. In “Last Breath” Joe Hill spins the tale of a man who collects the breaths of the dying for his haunting museum. Catherynne M. Valente’s “White Lines on a Green Field” chronicles what might happen if Coyote became a small town high school quarterback. Karen Joy Fowler’s “Younger Women” finds a woman confronting her daughter’s new boyfriend, who happens to be a vampire. Visit the Twilight Zone via George R.R. Martin in the script “The Toys of Caliban”. In Ted Chiang’s “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” the narratives of a journalist and a young man are told in contrast, both impacted by technology and literacy. And in Kelley Armstrong’s “The Screams of Dragons” a boy is declared a changeling and things only get stranger from there. Other pieces visit far-flung space and intimate sick rooms, the futuristic pyramids of the rich and a jungle where a man-eating tiger stalks a village. Contents: \- Perfidia (2004) by Lewis Shiner \- Game (2012) by Maria Dahvana Headley \- The Last Log of the Lachrimosa (2014) by Alastair Reynolds \- The Seventeenth Kind (2007) by Michael Marshall Smith \- Dispersed by the Sun, Melting in the Wind (2007) by Rachel Swirsky \- The Pile (2008) by Michael Bishop \- The Bohemian Astrobleme (2010) by Kage Baker \- Tanglefoot (2008) by Cherie Priest \- Hide and Horns (2009) by Joe R. Lansdale \- Balfour and Meriwether in The Vampire of Kabul (2011) by Daniel Abraham \- Last Breath (2005) by Joe Hill \- Younger Women (2011) by Karen Joy Fowler \- White Lines on a Green Field (2011) by Catherynne M. Valente \- The Least of the Deathly Arts (2012) by Kat Howard \- Water Can't Be Nervous (2012) by Jonathan Carroll \- Valley of the Girls (2011) by Kelly Link \- Sic Him, Hellhound! Kill! Kill! (2012) by Hal Duncan \- Troublesolving (2009) by Tim Pratt \- The Indelible Dark (2013) by William Browning Spencer \- The Prayer of Ninety Cats (2013) by Caitlín R. Kiernan \- The Crane Method (2011) by Ian R. MacLeod \- The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn (2011) by Robert Silverberg \- The Toys of Caliban (script) (2005) by George R.R. Martin \- The Secret History of the Lost Colony (2008) by John Scalzi \- The Screams of Dragons (2014) by Kelley Armstrong \- The Dry Spell (2009) by James P. Blaylock \- He Who Grew Up Reading Sherlock Holmes (2014) by Harlan Ellison \- A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong (2011) by K.J. Parker \- The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling (2013) by Ted Chiang \- A Long Walk Home (2011) by Jay Lake

Originally published in The Other Half of the Sky, 2013, edited by Athena Andreadis & Kay T. Holt. Reprinted in Gardner Dozois' The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-First Annual Collection, and later in Clarkesworld Magazine, Issue #129 ~~~ The derelict ship ward was in an isolated section of Outsider space, one of the numerous spots left blank on interstellar maps, no more or no less tantalising than its neighbouring quadrants. To most people, it would be just that: a boring part of a long journey to be avoided–skipped over by Mind-ships as they cut through deep space, passed around at low speeds by Outsider ships while their passengers slept in their hibernation cradles.

Thirty years ago, Elma York led the expedition that paved the way to life on Mars. For years she's been longing to go back up there, to once more explore the stars. But there are few opportunities for an aging astronaut, even the famous Lady Astronaut of Mars. When her chance finally comes, it may be too late. Elma must decide whether to stay with her sickening husband in what will surely be the final years of his life, or to have her final adventure and plunge deeper into the well of space.