- Maybe Just A Little One (short story, 1947)
- The Doorstep, first published in Astounding and later in The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy.
- The Man On Top'
- Cat
- Genius of the Species
- The Past and Its Dead People
- Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and All
- The Proud Foot of the Conqueror
- The Timeless Tales of Reginald Bretnor (posthumous collection of 15 short stories)
Papa Schimmelhorn series
- The Gnurrs Come From the Voodvork Out (short story, 1950)
- Little Anton (novelette, 1951)
- Papa Schimmelhorn and the S.O.D.O.M. Serum (1973)
- Count Von Schimmelhorn and the Time-Pony (novella, 1974)
- The Ladies of Beetlegoose Nine (novella, 1976)
- Papa Schimmelhorn's Yang (novelette, 1978)
- The Schimmelhorn File: Memoirs of a Dirty Old Genius (collection, 1979)
- Schimmelhorn's Gold (novel, 1986)
- Nobelist Schimmelhorn (novelette, 1987)
Anthologies
- The Future at War I: Thor's Hammer (1979, editor)
- The Future at War II: The Spear of Mars (1980, editor)
- The Future at War III: Orion's Sword (1980, editor)
Ferdinand Feghoot series
Under the pseudonym
Grendel Briarton (an anagram of Reginald Bretnor), he published a series of over eighty science-fiction themed shaggy-dog vignettes featuring the time-traveling hero Ferdinand Feghoot. Known as "Feghoots", the stories involved Feghoot resolving a situation encountered while traveling through time and space (à la Doctor Who) with a bad pun. In one example, he explained his inability to pay his dues for a Sherlock Holmes fan society by turning out his empty pockets and declaring "share lack". In his adventures, Feghoot worked for the Society for the Aesthetic Re-Arrangement of History and traveled via a device that had no name but was typographically represented as the ")(". In 1980, "The Compleat Feghoot" collected all of Bretnor's Feghoots published up until that time and included a selection of winners and honorable mentions from a contest run by
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The book is, as of 2006, out of print and very rare.
Non-fiction
Arthur Bretnor invited leading SF authors and science writers to participate in virtual "symposiums" by contributing essays (to fill Bretnor's own table of contents) discussing the science fiction genre.
- Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow: A Discursive Symposium (1975, with Frederik Pohl, Poul Anderson, Jack Williamson, Ray Bradbury, Hal Clement, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Hugo Gernsback, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Cory Panshin, Larry Niven, James Blish, Harlan Ellison, E. E. Smith)
- The Craft of Science Fiction: A Symposium on Writing Science Fiction and Science Fantasy (1976, with Robert A. Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Harlan Ellison, Hal Clement, A. E. van Vogt, Frank Herbert, Jerry Pournelle, Isaac Asimov, Jack Williamson, Norman Spinrad)
- Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future (1953, second edition 1979, with John W. Campbell, Jr., Anthony Boucher, Fletcher Pratt, L. Sprague de Camp, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip Wylie, Gerald Heard)
In 1969, Bretnor published a book on warfare titled
Decisive Warfare: A Study in Military Theory. Largely unnoticed by his science fiction readership but hinted at by his
Future at War series, it proved him a scholar of varied talents.
The collection
Of Force and Violence and Other Imponderables: Essays on War, Politics, and Government was published in 1992.
Bretnor also wrote nonfiction articles for the survivalist newsletter
P.S. Letter, edited by Mel Tappan.