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S.A. Barton
Books in Order: 95 titles
The book list is sorted in publication date order - newest first. You can sort the list by clicking on the Sort button. To see a simple list or a cover view list, click on the icons below.
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That's All
A chance meeting with a star's daughter saves Chad Miklos from giving up on his dreams and launches him into TeleVicarious fame. When she unexpectedly dies, the emotional tracks the camera picks up from him are all off-script. With his reality show i...
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Carrying Salt to Heaven
Krig is one of the People, the last humans on Earth: a static society that waits for the end and no more thanks to the bots that tend to their needs and a society bound to tradition. When he boards one of the bot ships that carries the dead to Heaven...
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Starts With A Flame
Harv has a dream: become a firefighter. But he lives in a world where the firetrucks and extinguishers don't need humans to fight fires. Still, he's determined to find a way. The way he finds is fraught with danger: rage, anger, obsession, secret pla...
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More. More. More.
This is flash fiction, under 1000 words. Teddy is a strong man, driven to become ever stronger - and with the aid of technological advances like medical nanomachines and vat-grown muscular implants, his dysmorphic drive has made him something both mo...
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The Glass Key
Daniel is apprenticed to a master tinker in the Kingdom of Chicagoland, a society built in the ruins of the old high-tech world. When he breaks a piece of precious ancient glass, Master Nieve commands him to journey to a landfill guarded by ancient w...
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Closer Than You Think
A short story collection: 21 stories and about 64,000 words.Closer Than You Think is a journey from the near future -- self-driving cars, automation, 3D printing -- to the far future where, who knows? houses may own humans or climate change might for...
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Broken Rice: Third Serial Installment
Part 3 of a serial, about 4800 words.Jewel, the living doll Caleb created, has come up in the world -- he has become the owner of the brickyard where Caleb slaves away for a pittance. How? Why? On the point of venturing out to find Jewel and demand a...
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Broken Rice
First episode of a serial, about 5000 words.Caleb is a poverty-stricken child laborer in the Republic of Texas, a fragment of the former United States. The demands of simple existence means his family has little time for togetherness, and he has litt...
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Broken Rice: First Serial Installment
First episode of a serial, about 5000 words.Caleb is a poverty-stricken child laborer in the Republic of Texas, a fragment of the former United States. The demands of simple existence means his family has little time for togetherness, and he has litt...
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Broken Rice: Second Serial Installment
Part 2 of a serial, about 6500 words.Caleb is a poor child laborer who used to work in a sweatshop, until he stole materials to sew a doll to be the brother he never had. But the doll sprang to life and flew away, leaving him to be beaten and fired f...
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One More for the Road
Angela's world is automated - the cars drive themselves. Houses and tablets and phones are always listening to tell you how to do things and warn you against things you're not supposed to do. When she and her boyfriend inherit an old-style manual-dri...
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Brittany And Dustin Depart This Earth
A short story of about 1500 words.Brittany and Dustin have had a long, happy marriage and now it's time to retire. They're headed for Little Heaven, an orbital habitat where elders can enjoy low-gravity living.Dustin, however, wanted to live out his ...
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The Last Trump
When Donald Trump becomes President in 2016, nothing seems amiss -- aside from Donald Trump being President. But by the time 2020 rolls around, he's more popular than ever but things are beginning to fall apart. President Trump just doesn't seem to b...
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Only Thirty Cents A Day
When Frederick Bolling encounters a garishly-dressed fast-talking weirdo in a parking garage, it's pretty routine -- just another day in New York City. But when he returns, he discovers that his car has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica ...
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It Could Be Anyone
Ms. Gaither has lived a long time, and once again it's time to go shopping. It's a difficult task for her. But it's not difficult because of her age. Rather, it's difficult because of what she sees: endless possibilities, and things that might have b...
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Not Gruntled
Not Gruntled is a collection of 21 short stories. Dissatisfaction is a fact of human existence, and it will always be so. These tales are tales of the disgruntled. From unusual present-day immigrants to near-future activists and impoverished children...
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To Labor No More
Buddy is a worker in an increasingly automated world. He depends on robots to take care of him both at work and at home. But lately, the robot workers have been making more work, not less, with their constant need for approval. Eunice thinks she has ...
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New Housing Starts Increase For Twenty-Second Consecutive Year
A 1500 word short story.When more new houses are built than the year before, we call that a good thing. But for Daniel, Rosetta, and little Iris --and many others-- it has become not just a bad thing, but an intolerable oppression....
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Dawn Across The Craze
A short story, about 3500 words. Fair warning: it's a relationship story: NO erotic content. Dawn and Tarik have had a long-range relationship-an interstellar one, with days or weeks passing between messages. Tarik is determined that it is finally ti...
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I Pledge Allegiance
A short story, about 6100 words.Keshawn Bolling lives in a future of total government control. His religion, his education, even the length of his hair are dictated to him, Worse, his own father is one of the enforcers. He wants out; rumor says there...
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A Pornodroid's Tale
A short story, about 3900 words. Jimmy Babe has it all -- he's an interplanetary pop star. He has the adulation of billions, a starship that doubles as a mansion, a pornodroid devoted to his every physical need. But stardom has become a burden to Jim...
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Flower On The Moon
A short vignette, about 1300 words. A vignette is not a story, but is a scene. In this scene, a very old man sits in his study and contemplates his end. It is an end he has brought on himself, out of frustration and discontent. And it is an end he is...
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Kitty Itty And The Seawall Broke
Jonny lives with his mom on the hardscrabble coast of North Carolina. The old coast is underwater -- Jonny's dad makes a living diving to salvage valuables from drowned towns, rarely home. It's a hard life. When Jonny rescues Kitty Itty he learns a b...
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Garbage Music
A short story, about 5000 words. Young Jacinta Jaara likes to sit by the old landfill mine and listen to the music ancient Neyerneyemeet plays. The music speaks of her of the old days, when the people of Australia were divided, before the war that c...
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Meow Right Now
Meow Right Now" is a short story, about 5100 words. Archaeologists often find strange and even dangerous things during their explorations. When Clay and Sandy uncover an ancient frozen cat on the Siberian plains, they have done just that, for Kwirrrf...
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Bunny With A Saw
On a long drive in the middle of the night, it's a bad sign when the stars begin to move. You're seeing things. It's time to pull over and rest. Or maybe something impossible is happening instead...Bunny With A Saw is a short story of about 1300 word...
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Adventure Club
Hays is a very peaceful man in a very peaceful world. When he digs into the conflicted past, he discovers some very unsettling things about humanity...and he also discovers Anjelle, who will give him a closer look at the unsettling elements of humani...
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The Moon Under the Stars
A 3400 word short. Ms. Rhesus is a moon -- a member of superhero fandom, people who devote large amounts of energy and imagination to following the exploits of their superhero idols, otherwise known as stars. When Doctor Geiger dies, it wracks Ms. R...
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Down on the Farm
In the not-so-far future, one of the few middle-class professions left is organ farming -- growing extra human organs in your own body for transplant. Unfortunately, these extra organs make a person a prime target for organleggers. And if you manage ...
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The Tomatoes Bloom in Winter
The Tomatoes Bloom in Winter is the story of a widower who is struggling to adapt to life alone. When, in the winter, his tomato plant begins to grow verdant again. The tomatoes it yields when the snow falls may just break him out of his solitude... ...
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Riding the Drone
'Nobody gets blown up in the Air Force,' the legless Army vet who hung out in the public library all day used to tell him.Find out if that's true or not.Riding the Drone is a very short story of about 1150 words....
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Ice Age, Space Age
Ice Age, Space age is a collection of thirteen stories previously released as ebook singles, together under a single cover. The stories range from the most recent ice age to farther in the future than the human race is now from the dawn of civilizati...
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Half Sour, Half Sweet
David Brown is a lonely 70 year old man driving into the country to fish in a trout stream behind the house he grew up in. A place he hasn't seen in a half-century or more. But of course, there's more to it than that. While fishing, he notices someth...
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Two Fantasy Endings
Two Fantasy Endings contains two short fantasy stories. In the first, "All But One", the human race pursues the elves to the edge of extinction. As all seems lost, there is one final chance for survival. In the second, "Winter Turns to Spring", a ban...
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Isolation and Other Stories
Isolation is a collection of stories --- two novellas, a novelette, and two short stories --- that relate to the isolation that we all feel from our fellow beings on occasion, and the belonging that we all seek....
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Prairie and Stars
Evan has been exploring the galaxy for most of his long, long life--thousands of years. Although nobody has found intelligent life, there has been grass on nearly every Earthlike planet. It's a great mystery that Evan is about to unravel. On the way,...
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Blood on the Corn
Blood on the Corn follows two policemen who aren't quite policemen as they investigate a murder that isn't quite a murder. Their real mission might be familiar to humans, but it's not for their eyes at all. Blood on the Corn is a short story, about 3...
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Spoken Wood
When Randall encounters an alien being deep in the forest, he finds himself struggling to understand what they are and what they intend for Earth. How quickly he can understand may determine not the fate of the world, but of humanity itself....
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The Unfettered Dream
It is often said that wisdom comes with pain. Long ago in the north of the Indian subcontinent, a being of great wisdom arose. There is pain in his story, but perhaps the story we know is not all of the truth. Perhaps wisdom came at a greater price t...
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Pixel People
Pixel People is a story of the last days of a war that has gone on so long that it has become ritual. Through the eyes of the dehumanized, we see what has become of the humanity of the participants---and what indestructible hope is still left to the ...
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My Name Is Gerald
Gerald is a lonely man, a shut-in who spends his time dreaming and watching the skies over his rural Nebraska hometown on the eve of the quincentennial. What he observes in those skies may lead him to find his own freedom... or into a new captivity. ...
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3 From The Edge
'3 From The Edge' contains 2 short stories and 1 flash-length piece totaling about 6,500 words. These 3 stories depict events that bring the world rushing to the edge of enormous changes that will alter the lives of everyone on Earth forever... at th...
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Speed Glacier
Speed Glacier is a farce of ecoterrorism and the human urge to belong. It brings together a very unlikely and slightly misnamed weapon with a group of individuals that seem just as unlikely... unless you've been paying attention to popular culture an...
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Child Full of Stars
Meet a man who is dying, face-down in an alley on a strange world, with a knife wound in his guts. He is surely doomed, until a child comes to help him. But why is this filthy street child helping him, and where will this child take him? The answers...
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Everything Is So Different Now -And- Revolting
This volume compiles two ebook anthologies in print, "Everything Is So Different Now" and "Revolting." Everything Is So Different Now: This collection contains stories and heroes dealing with big changes. From the end of the world to the beginning of...
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A Hell of Heaven
Willem has grown up in the City, an intensely crowded society in which no detail goes unmonitored and no deviation is tolerated. When he sees what is outside for the first time in his life, the sight will change him forever and introduce him to the u...
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In Memoriam
Clayton Taliaferro II is an idle man, living a life of solitary indulgence--though he has ideas for greater indulgence if he figures out how to get his hands on the full balance of his trust fund. When he eats a crayfish in a local restaurant and sud...
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Out Of The Cold
As the Ice Age comes to an end, Bear Paw and The People follow the glaciers as they retreat to the north. The ice and snow are all that they know, but they may learn something new when a strange spirit falls from its place among the stars......
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Everything Is So Different Now
The stories in this collection previously appeared in two ebook anthologies, combined here under a single cover.Everything Is So Different Now:This collection contains stories and heroes dealing with big changes. From the end of the world to the beg...
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Ignorance of the Law
When a pack of backwoods local yokels begin to lumber toward civilized space in their slapped-together warp speed jalopy, a working-Joe cop has to take action. He soon finds himself in the eternal dilemma of the policeman on the beat: how to strike a...
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Outsourced
Imagine life as a young man in a run-down neighborhood in a big city. There are few jobs to be had outside of crime and the future is bleak. Until, that is, a job opens up unexpectedly... but it's not on Earth and the boss isn't human. In fact, he's ...
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Baby Wipes
William, a Chicago suburbanite living in the not-so-far future, suddenly finds himself dead. When he recovers, Chicago is gone, leaving only open prairie and an alien offering him a baby wipe to clean his face. This would be hard enough for anyone to...
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The Fourth Dog
Dusker is a traveling loner in a dangerous future, and he doesn't like surprises. When a fourth dog mysteriously joins the three trusted dogs he already keeps, he isn't happy-- but he's far less happy to discover unwelcome followers on his trail. Now...
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The Always-House People
Ba'el, a pre-historic youth, strikes out on a quest to prove his manhood to himself and to his clan. Soon, he will discover the truth behind the religion of his people. Soon after, he will lose everything... and so will all of humanity....
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Sexually Transmitted Intelligence
On a world of friendly aliens, Richard discovers that all of them are dying young as the result of an unsuspected sexually transmitted disease. and how to cure it. Soon, it will become a race to cure the cure before it destroys everything....
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Bullets For Buddha
A short story duo: Bullets For Buddha in which an excess of zeal leads to the Dalai Lama hunted down by militants, and Looks Like God in which Jesus and several companions decide to take a second look at Earth. ...
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Hits On Earth
In Hits On Earth, alien websurfers arrive unannounced, and the relationship of one alien and one human will set the tone for the future of both species. Hits On Earth includes the bonus flash fiction piece Velocity, in which a message from an alien c...
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Not The Droids
As Austin ages, society increasingly frowns on direct human interaction in favor of telepresence androids. When his unfashionably in-person wife dies and his family moves on, will he be alone forever? Short story, about 1900 words....
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Those Hands
Richard was attacked as a young boy and has kept it a secret for decades... even from himself. When he has the chance to confront his attacker before the attack, it will change both of their lives forever. Warning: may contain triggers for survivors ...
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Visions Of Odd
A collection of word-doodles from S.A. Barton's early writing 2007-2011. These are vignettes, not truly stories, explorations of possible futures for humanity -- some near-future, some far, some through alien eyes. Some themes appear in later stories...
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Who Wants To Be The Emperor
Short science fiction story, about 4900 words. Harvey Short, the Emperor of the Human race, has a lot of regrets as he nears the end of his life. As he recalls how humanity won the Empire, he's busy trying to figure out how to get the humans out of i...
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Black Grail
A short story, about 3500 words. Parkhar's father has a plan to wrest an ancient talisman from the glittering City of the ancients and the godlike, deathless Bots that guard it - but it will be Danwill, Marjay, and their cohort who take the risks. Wh...
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Empty Plastic Father
A short story, about 3900 words. Danny is a young man who doesn't see eye to eye with his father. When dad won't help Danny realize his college dreams, he does what any reasonable person would do: he cuts his dad out of his life and buys a new one....
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He Shot First
A short story, about 3600 words. Dan Tippdale is a human among aliens on an unfamiliar world. A bar fight lands him in jail - and he shot first. The charge might not be murder, but that might not matter - from the looks of things, he might not live t...
