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This novelette originally appeared in the anthology Cosmic Powers: The Saga Anthology of Far-Away Galaxies (2017), edited by John Joseph Adams, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, Issue 106, March 2019.

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From the editor-in-chief of io9.com, a stunning novel about the end of the world -- and the beginning of our future

Childhood friends Patricia Delfine and Laurence Armstead didn't expect to see each other again, after parting ways under mysterious circumstances during high school. After all, the development of magical powers and the invention of a two-second time machine could hardly fail to alarm one's peers and families.

But now they're both adults, living in the hipster mecca San Francisco, and the planet is falling apart around them. Laurence is an engineering genius who's working with a group that aims to avert catastrophic breakdown through technological intervention into the changing global climate. Patricia is a graduate of Eltisley Maze, the hidden academy for the world's magically gifted, and works with a small band of other magicians to secretly repair the world's ever-growing ailments. Little do they realize that something bigger than either of them, something begun years ago in their youth, is determined to bring them together -- to either save the world, or plunge it into a new dark ages.

A deeply magical, darkly funny examination of life, love, and the apocalypse.

From the author of the Hugo-winning "Six Months, Three Days," a new wrinkle on the old story of three wishes, set after the end of the world.

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This short story originally appeared in the anthology Drowned Worlds (2016), edited Jonathan Strahan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2017. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fourth Annual Collection (2017).

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This short story appeared more or less simulateously in the anthology The End Is Nigh (2014), edited by John Joseph Adams and Hugh Howey, and Lightspeed, March 2014. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2015, edited by Rich Horton.

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This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, November 2017.

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Answering the question asked by innumerable readers of the author's novel All the Birds in the Sky: what happened to Patricia's cat?

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This novelette is a 2017 Tiptree finalist and Sturgeon Award winner. It first appeared in the anthology Global Dystopias (2017), edited by Junot Díaz. The story can also be found in the anthologies The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2018, edited by Rich Horton, The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Twelve (2018), edited by Jonathan Strahan, and The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018, edited by N. K. Jemisin and John Joseph Adams.

Read this story for free at the Boston Review.

In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary.

The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.

A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.

Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they'll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.

The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, "this generation's Le Guin."

Table of Contents:

• xi - Introduction (Even Greater Mistakes) - essay
• 1 - As Good As New - (2014) - short story
• 17 - Rat Catcher's Yellows - (2015) - short story
• 28 - If You Take My Meaning - (2020) - novelette
• 49 - The Time Travel Club - (2013) - novelette
• 73 - Six Months, Three Days - (2011) - novelette
• 92 - Love Might Be Too Strong a Word - (2008) - short story
• 105 - Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie - (2011) - short story
• 119 - Ghost Champagne - (2015) - short fiction
• 135 - My Breath Is a Rudder - short story
• 147 - Power Couple - short story
• 160 - Rock Manning Goes For Broke - [Rock Manning] - (2018) - novella
• 205 - Because Change Was the Ocean and We Lived By Her Mercy - (2016) - short story
• 221 - Captain Roger in Heaven - (2016) - novelette
• 242 - Clover - [All the Birds in the Sky] - (2016) - short story
• 257 - This Is Why We Can't Have Nasty Things - (2019) - short story
• 262 - A Temporary Embarrassment in Spacetime - (2017) - novelette
• 290 - Don't Press Charges, and I Won't Sue - (2017) - novelette (variant of Don't Press Charges and I Won't Sue)
• 308 - The Bookstore at the End of America - (2019) - short story
• 326 - The Visitmothers - (2020) - short story
• 331 - Acknowledgments (Even Greater Mistakes) - essay

This short story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Issue Five, July-August 2015.

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By now, it's hard to tell how human my father still is. But we're still family. What that means... is another question.

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This short story originally appeared in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, #22, June 2008, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, August 2012.

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This short story originally appeared in the anthology ParaSpheres: Extending Beyond the Spheres of Literary and Genre Fiction: Fabulist and New Wave Fabulist Stories (2006), edited by Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan, and was reprinted in Lightspeed, September 2016.

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This novelette originally appeared in Bridging Infinity (2016), edited by Jonathan Strahan. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2017, edited by Rich Horton.

This short story originally appeared in the anthology Press Start to Play (2015), edited by John Joseph Adams. It can also be found in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016, edited by Karen Joy Fowler and John Joseph Adams.

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Vikings vs. Steampunks! Ice cream sundae hearse disasters! Roman gladiators meet vacuum-cleaner salesmen! Inappropriate uses of exercise equipment and supermarket trolleys! Unsupervised fires, and reckless destruction of public property! Nothing is off limits.

Rock Manning lives and breathes slapstick comedy, and his whole life is an elaborate tribute to the masters, like Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and Jackie Chan. With his best friend, Sally Hamster, he creates joyfully chaotic short movies that are full of mayhem and silliness.

But Rock and Sally are becoming famous at a time of unrest, when America's economy has collapsed and people are taking refuge in highly addictive drugs. America's youth are being drafted to take part in endless wars against imaginary enemies overseas, while at home, a fascist militia known as the Red Bandanas is rising to power. As America becomes more mired in violence and destruction, Rock Manning's zany comedy films become the escapist fun that everybody needs.

Over-the-top physical comedy and real-life brutality collide, as Rock and Sally find themselves unable to avoid getting sucked into the slow implosion of their country. The Red Bandanas want Rock Manning to star in propaganda films promoting their movement, and soon Rock and Sally are at the center of the struggle for the soul of America. The trauma and death that Rock witnesses begin to take a toll on him.

When a botched weapon test plunges the world into deeper chaos, Rock and Sally must confront once and for all the outer limits of comedy.

Doug and Judy have both had a secret power all their life. Judy can see every possible future, branching out from each moment like infinite trees. Doug can also see the future, but for him, it's a single, locked-in, inexorable sequence of foreordained events. They can't both be right, but over and over again, they are.

Obviously these are the last two people in the world who should date. So, naturally, they do

Six Months, Three Days is the winner of the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. It is included in the anthologies As Time Goes By (2015), edited by Hank Davis, and Worlds Seen in Passing: Ten Years of Tor.com Short Fiction (2018), edited by Irene Gallo.

Read this story online for free at Tor.com.

Before the success of her debut SF-and-fantasy novel All the Birds in the Sky, Charlie Jane Anders was a rising star in SF and fantasy short fiction. Collected in a mini-book format, here--for the first time in print--are six of her quirky, wry, engaging best:

In "The Fermi Paradox Is Our Business Model," aliens reveal the terrible truth about how humans were created--and why we'll never discover aliens.

"As Good as New" is a brilliant twist on the tale of three wishes, set after the end of the world. "Intestate" is about a family reunion in which some attendees aren't quite human anymore--but they're still family.

"The Cartography of Sudden Death" demonstrates that when you try to solve a problem with time travel, you now have two problems.

"Six Months, Three Days" is the story of the love affair between a man who can see the one true foreordained future, and a woman who can see all the possible futures. They're both right, and the story won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

And "Clover," exclusively written for this collection, is a coda to All the Birds in the Sky, answering the burning question of what happened to Patricia's cat.

This novelette originally appeared in Helix, Winter 2008. It can also be found in the anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2009, edited by Rich Horton.

Time travel doesn't actually solve problems. It just makes them more complex....

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If you control our sleep, then you can own our dreams... And from there, it's easy to control our entire lives.

January is a dying planet--divided between a permanently frozen darkness on one side, and blazing endless sunshine on the other. Humanity clings to life, spread across two archaic cities built in the sliver of habitable dusk.

But life inside the cities is just as dangerous as the uninhabitable wastelands outside.

Sophie, a student and reluctant revolutionary, is supposed to be dead, after being exiled into the night. Saved only by forming an unusual bond with the enigmatic beasts who roam the ice, Sophie vows to stay hidden from the world, hoping she can heal.

But fate has other plans--and Sophie's ensuing odyssey and the ragtag family she finds will change the entire world.

Jon and Toku travel the universe suspended in Interdream, only waking up to check up on certain business ventures. Simple. Until one of the business ventures, something called "Earth," objects.

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This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, October 2013. It can also be found in the anthology The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight (2014), edited by Jonathan Strahan.

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This short story originally appeared on Slate.com in January 2018, and was later anthologized in Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow (2019) from Unnamed Press.

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This novelette was originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, October-November 2013 and was reprinted in Lightspeed, December 2015. It can also be found in the anthology Time Travel: Recent Trips (2014), edited by Paula Guran.

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"The Unfathomable Sisterhood of Ick" explores the bonds and boundaries between friends in a future where one's most intimate memories can downloaded and shared.

This story originally appeared in Lightspeed: Women Destroy Science Fiction! Special Issue.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Tina never worries about being 'ordinary' – she doesn't have to, since she's known practically forever that she's not just Tina Mains, average teenager and beloved daughter. She's also the keeper of an interplanetary rescue beacon, and one day soon, it's going to activate, and then her dreams of saving all the worlds and adventuring among the stars will finally be possible. Tina's legacy, after all, is intergalactic – she is the hidden clone of a famed alien hero, left on Earth disguised as a human to give the universe another chance to defeat a terrible evil.

But when the beacon activates, it turns out that Tina's destiny isn't quite what she expected. Things are far more dangerous than she ever assumed – and everyone in the galaxy is expecting her to actually be the brilliant tactician and legendary savior Captain Thaoh Argentian, but Tina... is just Tina. And the Royal Fleet is losing the war, badly – the starship that found her is on the run and they barely manage to escape Earth with the planet still intact.

Luckily, Tina is surrounded by a crew she can trust, and her best friend Rachel, and she is still determined to save all the worlds. But first she'll have to save herself.

Rachael Townsend is the first artist ever to leave Earth and journey out into the galaxy - but after an encounter with an alien artifact, she can't make art at all.

Elza Monteiro is determined to be the first human to venture inside the Palace of Scented Tears and compete for the chance to become a princess - except that inside the palace, she finds the last person she ever wanted to see again.

Tina Mains is studying at the Royal Space Academy with her friends, but she's not the badass space hero everyone was expecting.

Soon Rachael is journeying into a dark void, Elza is on a deadly spy mission, and Tina is facing an impossible choice that could change all her friends lives forever.