Astonishing Stories

Tag Area: Periodical
Novelette

Taa the Terrible

After a run-in with an oppressive governor on the planet Arania, tourist Larry Frazer and a helpful human Nelda must decide what they’ll do with their knowledge that all the planet’s natives are entering a long sleep to protect them from Taa the Terrible. —Michael Main
My people now go into the long sleep. We do that out of terror of Taa, for when he roams the land in wrath no thing that can feel, see or hear can survive.Only in these catacombs is it possible to bear his thunders and live. We call it the Sleep of Ten Thousand Years, though no one knows how long the time really is.
Pen-and-ink drawing of a man with a ray gun and a woman in a slinky dress emerging from a temple topped by a dragonman with a futuristic city in the background.
  • Science Fiction
  • Time Phenomena
Short Story

The Retreat from Utopia

A newspaper reporter from 2175 describes his strict, puritan world where nobody is happy because nothing ever happens, and even the criminals off in Borneo refuse to rejoin that society, so the story’s 1934 narrator visits the future to set things right. —Michael Main
You twentieth-century folks don’t know how lucky you are.
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  • Science Fiction
  • Definite Time Travel
Short Story

The Message

No image currently available.
  • Undetermined
  • Undetermined Time Travel
Short Story

The Band Played On

When Mac hits a high one on his trombone, he first slips into a fantasy world filled with duck people (where he’d rather not be because, well, ducks); then he slips into the far future where he meets Ann, “a lovely little number of about twenty (where he doesn’t mind being because, well, Ann). —Michael Main
Well, I close my eyes and I am shaking so that I hardly notice the vibrations of the horn begin, but when I reach the E in the third measure, I know I am feeling what I felt in Benny’s.
A man holding a trombone confronts a large, two-armed duck.
  • Undetermined
  • Definite Time Travel