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Short science fiction stories to read online
Near-future science fiction about ordinary people, one strange machine at a time, and about eleven minutes a story.
If you are looking for short science fiction stories to read online, these are built for one sitting. Each one is three episodes of about eight hundred words, so a whole story takes around eleven minutes, and every one of them is finished.
There are no galactic empires here and no chosen ones. The science fiction is one step past today, and it lands on somebody with an ordinary job or an ordinary Sunday. A waitress at a highway diner whose regular has been dead for thirty two years. The safety monitor riding in an autonomous freight truck that keeps pulling onto the same empty ramp for nine minutes. A retired electrician teaching a night class on home assistants, one of which has started taking notes. A retired science teacher on her weekly call to a daughter on the Moon. A farmer who buys his rain by the inch and cannot work out why his crop is dying.
The rule these stories are written to is that the strange thing is shown working before it is ever explained, and mostly it is never explained at all. You learn how it works the way the people in the story do, by what it costs them: a docked paycheck, a rationed twenty minutes, a bill by the acre inch, four minutes on a wall clock. When there is a puzzle, every fact you need is on the page before the answer, and the numbers add up if you check them.
They are written for readers who like the speculative idea to serve the people rather than the other way around. If you want hard science fiction with a heart, or time travel stories with a twist that stays fair, start here.
Free, complete, no account, no app, and nothing locked behind the last episode.
Every science fiction story on Wrendell
- Four Minutes Fast by Megan Pruitt — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 9 minutes, complete and free. For six Thursdays a man sat in booth four for eleven minutes, paid for his pie with a 1994 five, and left. I knew who he was. I knew where he was going when he left. He didn’t.
- Nine Minutes on the Ramp by Travis Underwood — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. For nine runs straight, the truck I’m paid to watch has pulled onto the same empty ramp and waited exactly nine minutes. The log says it never happened, and pulling the stop has already cost me $90.
- Keep Her Company by Gail Ferraro — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I teach a Tuesday night class on living with the talking box in your kitchen. This fall, one of the boxes started coming to class.
- New Earth Tonight by Rebecca Sorensen — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. My daughter calls me from the Moon every Sunday at seven, twenty minutes, with 2.6 seconds of lag. I taught science for thirty-one years, so I should have looked harder.
- An Inch a Week by Jim Hadley — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I pay eleven dollars an acre for an inch of rain a week, and the gauges swear I get it. So why is my milo knee-high and dying while my neighbor’s, who never paid a dime, stands waist-high and green?
More stories tagged small town
- The Seven Second Delay by Nadine Greer — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- Every Tuesday at Station Two by Cass Ewing — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- Four Minutes Ten by Marcy Loeb — Thriller, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- The Tomatoes Were His by Ada Rowe — Romance, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- Purple Dauber by Beth Callahan — Family Drama, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- Let the Record Show by Joan Pemberton — Humor, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free.
- Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick by Ron Esposito — Humor, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- Feet on the White by Calvin Truax — Fantasy, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free.
- Thirty Days, Not a Month by Lorraine Petty — Fantasy, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free.