Compared to last week’s bumper crop, we’ve a fairly small serving of free fiction this Friday … but there’s always something fresh to read on the intarwebs.

Webzines!

• Orion’s Child SF/F webzine returns with Vol. 2, #5.
• Subterranean Online‘s Fall 07 issue is now complete – de Lint, Bear, Lansdale, Stross and more!
• We mentioned it once already, but I’ll give a second crack of the whip to Steampunk Magazine issue #3, available as a free-to-download PDF file.

Only one new item at ManyBooks.net (that I’ve seen linked, at least): "Pagan Passions" by Gordon Randall Garrett.

Mac Tonnies has had his CC-licensed short story "The Reenactment" published at Alterati.

The current edition of Chris Roberson‘s free fiction feature that occurs on a Friday has an entire stand-alone short story for your perusal: "Penumbra".

The Friday Flash gang is a few writers short this week, but there’s still some super-short fiction from Shaun C. Green ("Satisfaction"), Neil Beynon ("When I was bad"), Gareth D. Jones ("The Man Behind The Throne") and yours truly ("The Mud-Crab"), if you want to keep it bite-sized.

If you’re hungry for more, and you’re keen on a bit of heavy-duty lit-crit, you can always go and read a transcript of John Clute‘s talk that he gave to the American Centre in Prague back in September, wherein he discusses ‘Fantastika’ – a bracket term he uses for "that wide range of fictional works whose contents are understood to be fantastic". Like all of Clute’s work, it’s intensely brilliant and very complex, and always worth the read.

Enjoy your weekend!

Writers, editors and anyone else – if you have some material published for people to read toll-free here on the wonderful intarwebs, drop me a line using the email address listed for me (Paul Raven) on the Futurismic staff page, and I’ll add it to the next batch.

Partly, I suspect, due to us getting BoingBoinged last week, we’ve got a mailbox full of free fiction this time round:

From Karl Schroeder:

… I just thought I’d let you know that I’ve released a free ebook version of my first novel, Ventus, under a Creative Commons license.  It’s available in a variety of formats from my website at www.kschroeder.com.

I’m delighted to be able to give something back to the community in this way, and I’m hopeful that people who haven’t been familiar with my work previously will get a good introduction to it with Ventus.

I’ve read quite a few of Karl’s novels now, and I’ll be making sure I get this one too.

From L. Lee Lowe:

You can read my online YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost at  http://mortalghost.blogspot.com ; it’s also going out as a podcast at http://lleelowe.com

More general short stories can be found at  http://lowelands.blogspot.com

Next year I hope to begin serialising Corvus, my F/SF hybrid. It’s set in a slightly alternate future in which the minds of teen offenders are uploaded into computers on the pretext of rehabilitation – a form of virtual wilderness therapy. The novel is part thriller, part love story, part riff on the nature of consciousness. If you’re interested, you can read the first chapter here: http://corvus-lowe.blogspot.com

From Edward Willett (who mailed this in before he heard I’d hired him onto the team here at Futurismic):

I recently posted my 1999 YA SF novel Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star (originally published in paperback by the now-defunct Roussan Publishers of Montreal) online in its entirety; it’s at www.edwardwillett.com/andynebula.htm.

I also have several previously published short stories online, and some sample chapters of books, all accessible at http://www.edwardwillett.com/sfanfantasy.htm. I’ll also be posting some sample chapters from my upcoming DAW book Marseguro in a couple of months

From Nancy Jane Moore:

In case you’d like to provide info on free SF in Spanish, here’s a
link to the latest issue of the Argentinian magazine, Sinergia:
http://www.nuevasinergia.com.ar/

The current issue has one of my stories (in translation) and also a
translation of one by Lewis Shiner, as well as stories from writers from Argentina, Mexico, Peru and the Ukraine. Truly an international
publication.

From Rudy Rucker:

Flurb #4 is live!

It’s another fat and juicy issue, including stories and essays by: Charlie Anders, Kathleen Ann Goonan, John Kessel, Marc Laidlaw, Kim Stanley Robinson; also my meeting with Hieronymus Bosch; also pieces by three newer writers: David Agranoff, Gord Sellar, and Penlope Thomas; and also a group-written jam by “Gustav Flurbert”!

Crikey!

Now the stuff that we spotted elsewhere:

Cory Doctorow wrote a Creative Commons licensed story for Radar about ‘the day Google turned evil: "Scroogled". Read, share, rehash, remix, enjoy!

Strange Horizons publishes original short fiction every single week, as you probably already know … but Futurismic’s own Jeremy Tolbert especially recommends the latest from Eliot Fintushel, "How the Little Rabbi Grew".

The regulation selection from Manybooks.net:

• "Wind" by Charles Louis Fontenay
• "The Vortex Blaster" by E. E. "Doc" Smith

We have audio-books, too. From Darusha Wem:

I thought I ought to draw your attention to the podcasts at podiobooks.com . There are lots of SF novels serialized in audio there for free downloading pleasure, including my own cyberpunk novel Beautiful Red.

Added odd-ball bonuses, both via Metafilter:

• Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment … as a Batman comic. Seriously. And don’t worry, it’s much shorter than the original novel.
• The University of Oxford’s Online Text Corpus Of Sumerian Literature. There’s got to be a few good ideas for modern stories in there.

And finally, more from the Friday Flash Fiction gang (because sometimes small is beautiful): Gareth L. Powell, Gareth D. Jones, Shaun C. Green, Neil Beynon and yours truly.

Enjoy!

**EDIT for late addition! From Beth Wodzinski:

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, we’ve made one of the stories from our upcoming pirate-themed issue (guest-edited by John Joseph Adams, release date Nov. 1) available for free download. The story is "The Sweet Realm," by Jill Snider Lum, and eager readers can grab a copy on our site: www.shimmerzine.com

That’s your lot.

Writers, editors and anyone else – if there’s something you want included in next week’s round-up, drop me (Paul Raven) a line using my email address on the Staff page.

As we say here in the UK, “Cor blimey, guv’nor, wotta lotta free stuff!” Actually, there’s probably a grand total of twenty people on the face of the planet who’d even consider saying that, but the point remains – it’s a bumper crop of free fiction this week, and no mistake.

Manybooks.net just keeps on giving with the old-school classics:

• Beyond the Vanishing Point by Raymond King Cummings
• The Hunters by William Douglas Morrison
• Cubs of the Wolf by Raymond F. Jones.
• The Devil’s Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman
• The K-Factor by Harry Harrison
• The Misplaced Battleship by Harry Harrison
• A World is Born by Leigh Brackett
• Space Prison by Tom Godwin
• The Day of the Boomer Dukes by Frederik Pohl
• The Worshippers by Damon Knight
• The Burning Bridge by Poul Anderson
• Spell of Catastrophe by Mayer Alan Brenner
• Warning from the Stars by Ron Cocking
• –And Devious the Line of Duty by Tom Godwin
• Jubilation, U.S.A. by G.L. Vandenburg

Plus the Free Speculative Fiction Online gang have updated once again; lots of fresh meat for genre carnivores right there.

More modern stuff:

There’s a lot of taster excerpts about; Orbit Books has posted the first chapter of The Awakened Mage by Karen Miller, and SciFiChick has a list of thirteen (thirteen!) current genre titles with free excerpts available online in hope of hooking you into lashing out for the full book.

Chris Roberson has obviously been so impressed by our efforts here that he’s cloned the idea (it’s OK, Chris, we won’t sue! ;] ) and is doing his own Free Fiction Friday posts – his first offering is an excerpt from his out-of-print book Cybermancy Incorporated.

[link expunged]

Extra webcomic goodness – an online reworking of War Of The Worlds in comic form … which has the ultimate merit of being completely devoid of Tom Cruise. [via Ectoplasmosis]

And now, for the interminably busy, podcasts!

From Librivox, a 28-part audiobook version of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

If you like genre podcasts, you probably already know and love Escape Pod – but I wish to draw your special attention to Transcendence Express by Jetse de Vries, not just because he’s one of my fellow editors at Interzone, but because he’s a damn fine writer in his own right, and this is one of his best pieces of work.

And finally, if you’d like something bite-sized, there’s a growing clade of people doing a piece of flash fiction every Friday: Gareth L. Powell, Neil Beynon, Gareth D. Jones, Martin McGrath … and even yours truly.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

PS – compiling this list would be impossible without continual cribbing from the diligent chaps at SFSignal. If you like what we do here at Futurismic, you should definitely be subscribed to them, too.

Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.

First, the old-school:

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Warlord of Mars is available as a free audiobook, or a free e-book at Manybooks.net, who also have The Players by Everett B. Cole.

I’ve always meant to read The Complete Works of H.G. Wells. I didn’t realise there’s nearly five thousand pages involved, but the PDF linked to there should be a little easier to carry around.

Now the new-school:

The website for John Joseph Adams’ Wastelands anthology has the full text of M. Rickert’s “Bread and Bombs” as well as stories by Cory Doctorow and Richard Kadrey

Some slightly sad news: after ten years, Infinity Plus is calling it a day. But the archives will stay available for some time yet, and there’s masses of good stuff in there – Bruce Sterling recommends Paul Di Filippo’s “What’s Up Tiger Lily?”

Non-fictional extra:

Michael Swanwick wrote an essay to present at a convention; Dinosaurs, Space Flight, and Science Fiction talks about three of the more recent literary movements on the genre fiction landscape, namely Interstitial Arts, The New Weird and Mundane Science Fiction. Infernokrusher appears to have been missed out …

Enjoy!

Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.