Other Worlds, Explained

A bored girl follows a rabbit into a world where eating cake changes your height and logic is optional.

A student builds a giant from old parts, abandons it, and spends the rest of his life being stalked by it.

A solicitor visits a client in the mountains, only to find the client has teeth.

A doctor creates a chemical shortcut to immorality and finds the commute is impossible to stop.

A ship's surgeon visits a land of six-inch politicians and a kingdom of giants who treat him like a doll.

An inventor travels to the year 802,701 to find humanity split between fruit-eating toddlers and subterranean cannibalistic mechanics.

A rogue captain drives a submarine around the world; his guests want off.

A scholar finds a coded note in an old book and decides the only logical response is jumping into a volcano.

A gentleman-amphibian develops a dangerous motor-car habit. His friends stage an intervention that includes a prison break.

Earth is watched by creatures with vast, cool intellects. They are not interested in missionary work.

Five Union escapees drop from a balloon into a Pacific wilderness and build a civilization using only a pocket watch.

A nineteenth-century engineer wakes up in Camelot and attempts to outpace sixth-century magic with gunpowder and electric current.

An undercover detective infiltrates a cabal of anarchists, only to find the revolution is surprisingly bureaucratic.

Knights errant, runaway sparrow-hawks, and swords for bridges: the standard operating procedure for Arthur's table.

The Sheriff of Nottingham wants a tax collector, but he gets a headache instead.

A giant born from an ear grows up to drink, fight, and philosophize.

Bored Civil War veterans decide the only logical use for their giant surplus cannons is to shoot three men at the moon.

Alice steps through a mirror and finds that in this world, checkmate is a career move.

A stranger moves in, refuses to leave, and treats the host like a midnight buffet.

A man walks into the mountains to avoid his chores and sleeps through a regime change.

A prince brings a rose, a princess brings a pea, and everyone is vaguely dissatisfied.

A water spirit marries a knight to gain an immortal soul, only to find that human love is terrifyingly fragile.

A girl loses her house in a storm and demands a way back from a local bureaucrat.

Telepathy and horse racing collide; it turns out human nature is still just as messy as ever.

A scientist claims he can blow up the world. One man tries to save it, mostly by sabotaging the math.

An Arizona prospector wakes up on Mars, discovers he has superpowers, and joins a six-limbed green warrior tribe.

A man lands on an island where surgery turns forest animals into people with existential dread.

A scientist achieves invisibility, loses his clothes, and decides the best use of his discovery is a murderous crime spree.

An old friend visits a crumbling estate where the architecture is as unstable as the family’s sanity.

Three Englishmen attempt to solve the mysteries of the Nile by floating across the continent in a double-walled hydrogen balloon.

In a world where thinking alone is a crime, one man discovers the most forbidden word.

A square describes his flat world, until a sphere appears to ruin his two-dimensional certainty.

A professor deciphers a runic note, ignores all safety protocols, and takes his nephew to the Earth's core.

A giant king crosses a sea on foot while his sister’s wedding feast is ruined by a very angry brother.

A knight prepares for the Crusades, but first he has to finish his cigarette commercial.

Two men land on the moon, only to find the locals are better at engineering than philosophy.

A stranded English infant is raised by apes, learns to read from a primer, and discovers a complicated inheritance.

A man leaves Earth to find his wife, but Mars has better dungeons.

Three explorers find a country of only women and realize they are vastly outnumbered.

Jefferson Turck expects to find a lost cousin civilization; he finds zebras grazing on London.

Amphibious aliens invade Earth to mine its iron, forcing humanity to invent inertialess travel and survive a high-speed orbital war.

A traveler finds a kingdom where having the flu is a felony but robbery earns you a get-well card.

A Cambridge professor and his handsome ward follow an ancient pottery shard to a murderous, immortal queen in a volcanic cave.

A young man steps through his bedroom door into a forest where trees hunt, shadows cling, and marble breathes.

A family tree grows around a divine sword, but its branches eventually buckle under the weight of cursed dragon treasure.

An inventor hunts a metallic whale, but finds a shipwrecked comedy of errors instead.

The goblins want the princess as a bride, but they forgot about the mountain's plumbing.

A traveler flies to the moon, only to find the locals have some very pointed questions about him.

A girl chases a rabbit, ignores the laws of arithmetic, and develops a very inconvenient neck.

Two children meet a fairy in their garden and he invites historical ghosts to tea.

A British peer's son runs to the jungle, becomes a killer, and brings a surprise home.

A collection of Irish myths where druids hide future kings, men turn into stags, and Faery time moves at its own pace.

An insomniac wakes up 113 years late to find Boston has abolished money, competition, and the entire 19th-century headache.

He lives in the canopy, talks to apes, and remains entirely perplexed by snakes.

A simple earthquake turns a buggy ride into a long, subterranean haul through weird civilizations.

King Rinkitink loves jokes, his goat loves sarcasm, and their island just lost its entire population.

Tarzan loses his memory, a thief steals his retirement fund, and the priestess of Opar wants a husband.

An escaped convict kidnaps an infant, leading a nobleman to recruit a panther and a pack of apes for revenge.

Five siblings find a grumpy, sand-dwelling creature that grants one daily wish, which rarely ends in anything but trouble.

An American traveler falls down a hole and finds a winged master race fueled by a world-ending energy source.

A weary traveler promises the absolute truth about moon-men, space-spiders, and living inside a whale, then admits he is lying.

Four strangers get stuck in an elevator and end up as someone's oversized present.

Billions of parallel timelines, one persistent gang of kidnappers, and zero room for error.

An ambassador warns New Texas of a canine alien invasion. Texans remain unimpressed by talking dogs.

A stage play turns its readers into walking disasters. The city is just collateral damage.

Big Jake runs the city through fear, until his goons start slipping on soap and bad luck.

A man wakes up married to a stranger, only to discover he is actually an alien impersonator.

A century of tragedy in a cellar, until the narrator brings a carboy of acid.

A rash of graft, riots, and resignations suggests the American government isn't just failing — it is being mentally nudged.

A sky-cop loses his fiancée to a high-tech pirate and goes undercover in Cornwall to ground a flying fortress.

A boy grows fast, hides his twin in the attic, and everything goes wrong.

A lieutenant visits a space station only to find the entire facility hijacked by impostors.

The FBI has a telepath problem, and 1973 is already busy enough.

A man inherits a box of clippings and discovers the stars are finally aligning for a giant, gelatinous apocalypse.

Two newlyweds take a gap year, except it is in space and they are fighting Martians.

Uncle Peter cleans up the local mob by turning gangsters into dust, confusing everyone.

A scientific expedition to Antarctica discovers that the continent’s original inhabitants are not extinct, just very, very irritable.

A galactic con man turns detective when a massive warship vanishes from a shipyard using nothing but forged paperwork.

A princess gets kidnapped, a prince pursues, and they both stumble into a city of imaginary people.

A man's garden contains a pit of pig-men and a doorway to the end of time.

A man builds a machine to force marriages, then watches his own business strategy fail.

A professor claims he found dinosaurs; a reporter goes to prove him wrong.

The Solar Queen carries a cargo of spice, but unfortunately, they also brought home a space-plague.

The United States discovers its government is actually a board of directors, and they aren't hiring.

Three cadets take a summer vacation to Venus and accidentally dismantle a planet-wide conspiracy.

An Earthman navigates Martian politics, religious zealots, and a very inconvenient kidnapping to save his wife.

A wealthy orphan travels with a dead-eyed lord who dies in Greece and returns to London to marry his sister.

A tug-of-war over a submarine ends with British and German sailors stranded in an Antarctic valley full of dinosaurs.

A princess is blown off course, captured by telepathic heads, and forced into a live-action board game where every move is fatal.

A group of children tries to hide a full-sized dragon under a bed. Logistics ensue.

The Mirans need a steady star, and Sol is currently occupied by humans.

Tarrano intends to rule three worlds, but Lady Elza has other plans for his future.

A fugitive teenager hides on a Lhari ship and accidentally learns how to navigate the stars.

A prince kneels, a hermit chats with ospreys, and the frost paints pictures on a bedroom window.

A captain and his orderly are launched into space when a comet hits the Mediterranean.

A stranded chemist makes a friend on Mars. His friend is a bird-thing that talks in whistles.

A physicist and his friend travel 28,000 years into the future to find New York under ice and hierarchy.

Bradley looks for a way out of the island but finds bird-men instead.