We asked New Scientist writers to pick their favourite sci-fi short story. From H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine to Octavia E.

Read 'Blood Brother' by Jeremy Haworth, Best Short Story selection for the second annual Best In Rural Writing Contest.

though of course you can base your story on something that has really happened. Is a short story the same as a novel? A short story is not a cut-down novel. In a novel the author has time to ...

“A short story, generally speaking, is about one thing, and one big thing needs to happen in it,” says Neil. “Which is not to say that you can’t have lots of different events. It’s just ...

In their spareness, novellas and short novels — I’m counting any story longer than about 80 pages and any novel shorter than about 200 — reward a word-by-word reading. This form combines the ...