When an experiment to study quantum uncertainty goes spectacularly wrong, physics student Bill Rustad and his friends find that they have accidentally created an inter-dimensional portal. They connect to Outland - an alternate Earth with identical geology, but where humans never evolved. The group races to establish control of the portal before the government, the military, or evildoers can take it away. Then everything changes when the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts in an explosion large enough to destroy civilization and kill half the planet.

Edgar Hill is 35 and caught in his own headlock. Overweight slob, underperforming husband, and reluctant father - for Ed, the world may as well have already ended. So when it does end in a catastrophic asteroid strike and Edgar and his family find refuge in an Edinburgh army barracks, it comes as something of a relief. But nothing's ever that simple. Returning from a salvage run in the city, Edgar finds his family gone, taken to the south coast for evacuation by an international task force.

The cabin had always been a special retreat for Isherwood Williams, a haven from the demands of society. But one day while hiking, Ish was bitten by a rattlesnake, and the solitude he had so desired took on dire new significance. Ish headed home when he finally felt himself again—and noticed the strangeness almost immediately. No cars passed him on the road; the gas station not far from his cabin looked abandoned; and he was shocked to see the body of a man on the roadside near a small town. Without a radio or phone, Ish had no idea of humanity’s abrupt demise.

Five hundred years in the future, earth is no longer populated by humans. The new guardians of Earth, the genetically engineered Erta, have reversed climate change. They are now faced with a dilemma; if they reintroduce the rebellious and violent Homo sapiens, all of their work will be undone. They decide to raise one final child, a sole human to help decide if humanity should again inherit the Earth. But the quiet and clinical Ima finds that there is more to raising a human than she had expected and that there is more to humanity's history than she has been told.

Fourteen-year-old Greg Dixon is living a nightmare. Attending boarding school outside of Boston, he is separated from his family when a pandemic strikes. His classmates and teachers are dead, rotting in a dormitory-turned-morgue steps from his room. The nights are getting colder, and his food has run out. The last message from his father is to get away from the city and to meet at his grandparents' town in remote New Hampshire.

From the safety of the Deep Hole Sanctuary, two are sent to the surface for the first time in nine years. Rumors, tales, and expectations for the world above are that they will find a desolate wasteland filled with mutated animals and bands of roving hoards of starving people.

My name's Griz. I've never been to school, I've never had friends, and in my whole life I've not met enough people to play a game of football. My parents told me how crowded the world used to be, before all the people went away. But we were never lonely on our remote island. We had each other and our dogs. Then the thief came.

The gigantic comet had slammed into Earth, forging earthquakes a thousand times too powerful to measure on the Richter scale, tidal waves thousands of feet high. Cities were turned into oceans; oceans turned into steam. It was the beginning of a new Ice Age and the end of civilization. But for the terrified men and women chance had saved, it was also the dawn of a new struggle for survival--a struggle more dangerous and challenging than any they had ever known....

In the wake of a summer storm, a strange malady takes hold, slowing mental and physical response. For many exposed, it proves fatal. As scientists race to find a cure for the unexplainable, it spreads.

Before the lights went out, Jack Warrant never considered himself a prepper. That was someone on the edge, a conspiracy theorist or a doomsday cultist who had a fatalistic view of the world. He was neither a theorist nor a cultist. He was an optimist. At least that was what he told himself when the darker thoughts creeped into his psyche as he stared at the ceiling in the middle of the night. Whenever he started down the rabbit hole, he always clawed his way back into the sunlight.

Located in a nameless desert somewhere in the great American Southwest, Night Vale is a small town where ghosts, angels, aliens, and government conspiracies are all commonplace parts of everyday life. It is here that the lives of two women, with two mysteries, will converge.

When a killer comet hurtles toward Earth, 18-year-old Joanna Murphy is selected to wait out the apocalypse in an underground bunker. She enters cryosleep with her close-knit team, preparing to resettle the planet after the atmosphere clears in 200 years. Joanna is the only one who wakes up. Faced with a bunker full of bones and a blocked exit, Joanna must claw her way to the surface, figure out what happened to her team, and try not to panic - or die. That’s going to be tricky if she’s the only person left in the world.

In 2035, in a hopelessly broken world, Nick Ritter is The Posh Prepper, a gifted crisis consultant who sells disaster-survival plans to rich and powerful clients. Haunted by corrupt clients and a tragic past, Nick lives a reclusive life in overcrowded Boston, counting the days until he can retire to his survival ranch in New Zealand. But when he gets an insider tip that a deadly virus is tearing through Boston, Nick has 24 hours to escape the city and flee to New Zealand. He has the perfect survival plan, but there’s just one problem…it doesn’t account for company.

Short novels are movie-length narratives that may well be the perfect length for science fiction stories. This audio collection presents the best-of-the-best short science fiction novels published in 2014 by current and emerging masters of this vibrant form of storytelling.

In the wake of the cataclysmic events that reshaped our world in 2020, a sense of relief washed over us all. By late 2023, I think we were ready to just live life again. I know I was. It was a time to make new friends and put the past to rest. Rayne and I hadn’t known each other long, but we were building a solid friendship, nothing more. It was our common interests that sent us on vacation together to my remote cabin. What we didn’t, couldn’t know, was that we were on a collision course with the end of the world as we knew it.