Friday Free Fiction for 8th August

Paul Raven @ 08-08-2008

It’s Friday, and that can mean one thing and one thing only – it’s free fiction time! Let’s see what we’ve got in the magic bag of RSS this week…

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A couple from Manybooks.net:

“The Machine That Saved the World” by Murray Leinster
“The Success Machine” by Henry Slesar

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A couple at FeedBooks:

“Citadel” by Algis Budrys
“A Choice of Miracles” by James A Cox

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And a couple at Gutenberg:

“Pandemic” by Jesse F. Bone
“Next Door, Next World” by Robert Donald Locke

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Via Klima’s Weekend Getaway at Tor.com:

I had suggested that people read stories from a generation different from the one they belonged to. To that end, we have:

“The First Commandment” by Gregory Benford
“The Sky is Large and the Earth is Small” by Chris Roberson

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If I’m not very much mistaken, Peter Watts is sneaking out microfiction at his blog again. Much like Futurismic’s very own Mac Tonnies, Watts is “Loving the Alien“:

We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to wake me every few weeks, burn a little more of my candle just to check up on it; but it doesn’t seem to be trying to slip anything past me this time.

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Here’s issue 4 of Oddlands Magazine:

Short Fiction

�Black Roses� by Jaime Samms
�The Darkmoon Pearl� by John Kratman
�Dark Wing� by Tracie McBride

Poetry

�His Eye Ever Watches Me� by John Nichols
�Antigone, at the Mall� by Jacqueline West

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Likewise, the latest Clarkesworld:

“Blue Ink” by Yoon Ha Lee
“Tetris Dooms Itself“ by Meghan McCarron
“Her Mother’s Ghosts“ by Theodora Goss

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And Apex Online:

“Just an Old Man” by Maurice Broaddus
“House Cleaning” by Wrath James White

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And also SpaceWesterns.com:

“The Horse Thieves” by Patrick Scalisi
“Coraz�n” by Jens Rushing

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke breaks off the twentieth chunk of his Memory:

The peq blinked at Flavius, considering the question. �I�m not sure, Sir. That�s why I asked.� It licked its lips with a broad, black tongue. �If Sir is having some difficulty, I will find someone to assist if I cannot. If Sir is not having difficulty, might I suggest dinner? The first course will have already been served, but you should make it in time for the second. Her Imperial Majesty will hold me personally responsible if you are not there by the third course.�

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More extras fun from Shadow Unit: Vigil, Part 11 and 12.

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There’s a comic-style short fiction from Wesley Allsbrook over at Tor.com – “The Leviathan“.

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Also at Tor.com is a full-length exclusive and (naturally) remixable novella from Cory Doctorow – “The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away”

From the nearby cubicles, Lawrence heard the ritualized muttering of a thousand brothers and sisters in the Order of Reflective Analytics, a susurration of harmonized, concentrated thought. On his display, he watched an instrument widget track the decibel level over time, the graph overlaid on a 3D curve of normal activity over time and space. He noted that the level was a little high, the room a little more anxious than usual.

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Fancy stretching your linguistic muscles a bit? Nancy Jane Moore reports that there’s a blog called Qu�micamente Impuro…

“… an Argentinian blog of very short stories — microfictions. They’re in Spanish, but they come from a wide range of authors, including translations of some work in the public domain by people like Kafka. I had a story on there awhile back (translated from English, since my Spanish isn’t good enough to write in), but there are more than a thousand posted, I think. Grab a Spanish dictionary and read!”

Thanks, Nancy!

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There’s a new issue of Flash Fiction Online for you to poke through, including an essay by Suzanne Vincent explaining the ins and outs of sf and fantasy flash.

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And following on from that, here’s a smattering from the Friday Flash Fictioneers: