In this week’s story The Leech by Robert Sheckley, we explore a tale of a spore—a seemingly lifeless entity that has drifted through the cosmic void for millennia, until the fateful day it lands on Earth. Unbeknownst to humankind, this tiny seed holds within it a hunger that defies comprehension, an insatiable thirst for energy and mass. As it stirs to life and begins to grow, it falls to an unwitting professor and an overconfident general to confront the unknowable.

This week’s story is “Big Stupe” By Charles V. De Vet. If the human exploration of space goes anything like our exploration of Earth, we probably won’t think very highly of the aliens we meet, which means it would serve us right if they thought the same thing about us.

This week’s story is “The Luckiest Man in Denv” by Simon Eisner. In a future dystopia where social climbing and technological manipulation intertwine, a man stumbles upon a disturbing conspiracy.

Our story this week is “The Snowbank Orbit” by Fritz Leiber. It’s the story of a young spaceman grappling with the surreal and isolating vastness of space and the shadow of interstellar conflict.

This week’s story is The Snowball Effect by Katherine MacLean. In a clash between academia and administration, a university president challenges the real-world value of sociology, prompting an experiment that could change the world forever or at the very least one sewing circle.

This week’s story is “A Matter of Protocol” by Jack Sharkey. A lot of writers have speculated about what aliens would do here on Earth if they ever showed up, but what if humans were the aliens visiting a new world?

Here’s a little bonus content from our narrator Darren Marlar’s podcast Weird Darkness. H.G. Wells was a prolific sci-fi author, but with The Red Room he showed he could hold his own in the horror genre as well.

This week’s story is “Welcome Martians” by S.A. Lombino. What if we landed on Mars and discovered people who were so much like us that they wouldn’t actually believe you were from Earth?

Our story this week is “Don’t Shoot” by Robert Zacks. If you invent something Earth-changing, you need to be careful who you sell the technology to. You might end up inadvertently creating a cryptid.

This week’s story is “The Merchants of Venus” by A. H. Phelps. If you were trying to recruit people for a new colony, who would you choose? Most people would be looking for the next George Washington, or at the very least the next Neil Armstrong. History suggests, they’d be wrong.

This week’s story is “The Undersea Tube” by L. Taylor Hansen. Back when Hansen wrote this story in 1929, a project like the Chunnel was a far off dream. Of course he envisioned things going a little differently when we started digging under the sea.

They say scent is so strongly tied to our memory that it can help trigger all sorts of long lost memories even years later. Now one man learns it can also help you meet different version of yourself from alternate realities

As human beings venture out into the cosmos, it’s pretty certain they’re going to run into all sorts of unexpected threats to their health and well-being. It happened to explorers hundreds of years ago when European explorers arrived in the New World and were exposed to all sorts of new diseases… then they decided to return the favor by giving blankets infected with small pox to the people they met. Of course it’s also entirely possible that explorers out in space will run into problems that are a little more familiar. As is the case in this week’s story, Operation Distress by Lester Del Ray.

People have been dreaming of living forever since the dawn of time, but there are a couple of potentially problematic details they probably didn’t consider.

If we’ve learned anything from pop culture, it’s that there are rules for time travel. This week’s story, “Security Plan” by Joseph Farrell introduces us to one inventor that probably should have spent a little more time watching time travel movies for educational purposes.

Did you know that in 2024 a person making the average salary in the United States can’t get qualified for the average priced home? It’s bad out there. So much so that many are giving up on the idea of owning a home all together. In this week’s story “Time Arbitrage” a couple is just about ready to give up themselves, when they learn about a company offering an unexpected solution to the problem.

This week’s story is Man’s Best Friend by Evelyn E Smith. It’s an election year and it’s easy to get annoyed at the constant barrage of political ads and hot takes. But always remember, there are worse ways to pick our leaders