Friday Free Fiction for 25th July
Good grief, it’s Friday again - and Friday means free fiction! Here’s what flowed through town on the RSS river this week:
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From Manybooks.net:
- “The Memory of Mars” by Raymond F Jones (“As soon as I’m well we’ll go to Mars for a vacation again,” Alice would say. But now she was dead, and the surgeons said she was not even human. In his misery, Hastings knew two things: he loved his wife; but they had never been off Earth!)
- “Hail to the Chief” by Gordon Randall Garrett
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More Who stuff from FeedBooks:
- Doctor Who and the Scales of Injustice by Gary Russell
And some shorts by Philip Francis Nowlan:
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Apex Online have a story by none other than Nick Mamatas, outgoing Clarkesworld editor: “Summon, Bind, Banish“.
Alick, in Egypt, with his wife, Rose. Nineteen aught-four. White-kneed tourists. Rose, several days into their trip, starts acting oddly, imperiously. She has always wanted to travel, but Alick’s Egypt is not the one she cares for. She prefers the Sphinx from the outside, tea under tents, tourist guides who haggle on her behalf for dates and carpeting. She wanted to take a trip on a barge down the Nile, but there weren’t any.
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Via BoingBoing and elsewhere: not only is there fresh new fiction on the new-look Tor website, but you can get your virtual mitts on all the freebies they gave away during the run-up to the launch if you were subscribed to the email newsletter - make sure you do so before Sunday 27th July!
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Via JJA at the F&SF blog:
The following stories by Dale Bailey originally appeared in the pages of F&SF. Now they’re all available online:
- “Heat” [Sep. 2000]
- “The Rain at the End of the World” [Jul. 1999]
- “Night of the Fireflies” [Jan. 1998]
And from the same source on a different day:
- “Footnotes” by Charles Coleman Finlay originally appeared in our August 2001 issue.
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Via SF Signal, here’s “Scary Monsters” by Jonathan Wood.
What are we doing here?
Big question. And some of us have answers. And some of us don’t.
What am I doing here, outside this door? What am I doing with this gun in my hand?
I knock with the butt three times. I wait. I hear feet on the far side of the door. I hear them hesitate.
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How about you cut your eyes on the nineteenth shard of Jayme Lynn Blaschke’s Memory?
The spherical bath beckoned from an alcove on the far side of the room. A vermillion glow spilled through the panoramic window filling the opposite wall as the sun slipped below the horizon at the far end of the valley. Flavius sighed. The crushing weight of the previous week–had it really been a full week since he’d fled Culloden?–came down upon Flavius in a rush. His back ached. His feet throbbed. With every movement his joints seemed to grind bone against bone. Somebody or someone was still out there, trying to kill him, so naturally he was hiding out in the palace of the one person who, without a doubt, actually had executed Flavius in the recent past.
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Here’s an invitation from Illya Szilak:
I invite you to explore the website for a new novel called Reconstructing Mayakovsky.
Set in the future, the novel revisits the past to make sense of the chaotic present. Inspired by Vladimir Mayakovsky, the Russian Futurist poet who killed himself in 1930 at the age of thirty-six, the novel imagines a world where uncertainty and tragedy have finally been eliminated through technology. Like the novel, the site uses appropriated objects (image, sound, text) and combines elements of historical fiction, science fiction, poetry, and the detective novel, to tell the story of Mayakovsky in a radically different way.
“Illya uses a variety of medias and methods, including manifestos, texts, animations, podcasts, music, and data visualisations. The result is a engrossing multilayered digital ‘novel’, well worthy of the artist who inspired it.” - Chris Joseph, digital writer, co-author of Inanimate Alice.
If you enjoy it, I hope you’ll share it with friends. Thanks very much!
Sounds interesting, Illya, thanks - has anyone taken a look yet?
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To get you in the mood for flash (oo-er), here’s an email from Peter Tupper:
My flash story “Sparkers” is available now on Every Day Fiction.
Cheers, Peter!
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Yet more DVD extras from Shadow Unit - here’s a ‘deleted scene’ called “Therapeutic Policy“.
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And a scattering of Friday Flash Fiction for garnish:
- Greg O’Byrne stole “The Blue Stone of the Incas“
- Gareth D Jones chipped out his last Triple-F for a while from the “Stone Quarry“
- Gaie Sebold says “Goodnight Moon“
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Novelty religion-based comics bonus! How do you achieve the nigh-impossible and create a cheerful and universally congratulatory MetaFilter thread?
By posting a link to a comic book version of the Bardo Thodol, the Tibetan Book Of the Dead, of course! If you get the feeling you’ve clicked this link before, there’s an explanation for that. 
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That’s all for this week, folks - keep your tips and recommendations coming in the meantime. Deadline for announcements is 1800 GMT every Friday… cheers!
July 28th, 2008 at 12:08 am
To see really exciting new multimedia literacy try out Inanimate Alice. http://www.inanimatealice.com And its a free online resource!
More an interactive piece of fiction than a traditional game, Inanimate Alice: Episode 4 continues the story of the young game animator as she leaves her home in Russia and travels abroad. Inanimate Alice serves as both entertainment and a peek into the future of literature as a fusion of multimedia technologies. The haunting images and accompanying music and text weave a remarkably gripping tale that must be experienced to be believed.
And better still for schools there is a piece of software now available that allows learners to create their own stories. Valuable for all forms of literacy and this is being sold as a perpetual site licence for schools at £99 ! http://www.istori.es