Author: Nicola Griffith

Length: novelette

First Publication: Eclipse Three anthology, 2009

Awards: Hugo Award Nomination for best novelette

What the Story is About: The biochemistry of attraction – and love.

Note: story link is a pdf file.

Listen to the Audio version at StarShipSofa.

Author: Michael Moorcock

Length: novelette

First Publication: New Worlds Anthology, 1997

What the Story is About: A West End ticket scalper finds lucrative work selling pieces of bone from London’s ancient clay-pits.

Listen to the Audio version at StarShipSofa

Author: Poul Anderson

Length: short story

First Publication: Fantastic Universe, 1954

What the Story is About: The story blurb:

One man stood between a power-hungry cabal ?and world mastery—but a man of unusual talents.

You can get additional story formats at ManyBooks

Author: L.E. Symms

Length: short story

First Publication: Abyss & Apex, 2004

What the Story is About: Aliens Chira and Pet need each other more than the humans realize.

Author: Simon Ings

Length: short story

First Publication: Omni Best Science Fiction 3, 1993

What the Story is About: Is there an environmental cause of compulsive behavior dysfunction?

Author: Simon Ings

Length: short story

First Publication: When It Changed anthology, 2009

What the Story is About: The story “gets inside the restless, curious (some might say troubled) mind of a scientist.”

Be sure to read the afterword by Matthew Cobb, Programme Director Biology, the University of Manchester, which describes the work in his lab that inspired the story.

Author: Alan E. Nourse

Length: short story

First Publication: Fantastic Universe, 1956

What the Story is About: “There was no anatomical defect—Dr. Custer was right about that. The eyes are perfect, beautiful gray eyes, he says, and the optic nerves and auditory nerves are perfectly functional. The defect isn’t there. It’s deeper. Too deep ever to change it.” A woman with psi powers is an experimental test subject. See Wikipedia for spoilers.

Author: Alan E. Nourse

Length: short story

First Publication: Galaxy, 1957

What the Story is About: Sometimes fantastic cures have unexpected side-effects.

“When the discovery was announced, it was Dr. Chauncey Patrick Coffin who announced it. He had, of course, arranged with uncanny skill to take most of the credit for himself. If it turned out to be greater than he had hoped, so much the better. His presentation was scheduled for the last night of the American College of Clinical Practitioners’ annual meeting, and Coffin had fully intended it to be a bombshell.”

Author: Alan E. Nourse

Length: short story

First Publication: Fantastic Universe, 1957

What the Story is About:

There was enough mud on Venus to go all the way around twice, with some left over. It was warm, wet, soggy mud—clinging and tenacious. In some places it was gray, and in other places it was black. Elsewhere it was found to be varying shades of brown, yellow, green, blue and purple. But just the same, it was still mud. The sparse Venusian vegetation grew up out of it; the small Venusian natives lived down in it; the steam rose from it and the rain fell on it, and that, it seemed, was that. The planet of mystery was no longer mysterious. It was just messy. People didn’t talk about it any more.

But technologists of the Piper Pharmaceuticals, Inc., R&D squad found a certain charm in the Venusian mud.

(Science-wise, I find the story more believable if I mentally substitute “unknown pharmaceutical” for  tetracycline)

Author: Charles De Vet

Length: short story

First Publication: If, 1952

What the Story is About: “It is man’s most precious possession—no living thing can exist without it. But when they gave it to Orville, it killed him.” Improving an alien’s anatomy can have unintended consequences.

Author: Kay Kenyon

Length: short story

First Publication: New Voices in Science Fiction, 2003

What the Story is About: “Of course, there’s no excuse for ugly these days — or addled. The Physio-Psych Clinics work up your genome and get you your tailored drugs or personalized surgery.” But one girl decides to be different…

Author: Sarah Zettel (with Laura Woody)

Length: short story

First Publication: Analog, 1994

What the Story is About: Learning to speak with aliens is a difficult task, even for scientists.