Too long to be a short story, too short to be a novel—welcome to the surprisingly potent world of the novelette. The award-winning magazine Orson Scott Card’s IntergalacticMedicine Show has been an online haven for this powerful form of storytelling since 2005. Now its editors have selected their all-time favorite science fiction novelettes from the magazine’s eight-year history and reprinted them together in one big book of reading pleasure. Anything that is remotely possible—futures near and far, artificial intelligence and alien encounters, alternate timelines and alternate theories about creating universes, planet-eating black holes and lunar racetracks—is all here under the big tent of Orson Scott Card’s IntergalacticMedicine Show.

This anthology features stories by such award-winning authors as Orson Scott Card, Wayne Wightman, Aliette de Bodard, Eric JamesStone, Mary Robinette Kowal, Stephen Kotowych, Jackie Gamber, Greg Siewert, Jamie Todd Rubin, Brad R. Torgersen, and Marina J. Lostetter, plus an all-new essay by Orson Scott Card about writing the character of Ender.