Friday Free Fiction for 13th June

The intarwebs are my dumpster, and you are my fiction-freegan cohorts – come round for a Friday fiction feast!

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Here’s a handful from Manybooks.net:

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FeedBooks is proving to be quite a rich vein (though I’m seeing titles there that ManyBooks had first):

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Free stuff from the High Lord of Free Stuff, Cory Doctorow:

IDW adapted six of my short stories for a comic book, publishing them as singles in 2007. In 2008, they published the full collection in a single set of covers, and I released them as a Creative Commons download under the Attribution-ShareAlike-Noncommercial license. Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories “Craphound,” “Anda’s Game,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “After the Siege,” “I, Robot” and “Nimby and the D-Hoppers.”

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A message from Fred Himebaugh:

In case Tony C. Smith hasn’t let you know, the Starship Sofa Podcast features the following free fiction this week:

Main Fiction: Secret Life by Jeff VanderMeer

A vision of the building from on high: five glittering floors surrounded by a dull concrete parking lot. To the west lay a forest. To the east, the glint of a shopping mall, substantial as a mirage. To the north, highways and fast food restaurants. To the south, a perpetual gloom through which could be seen only more shadow.

Article – Fouque by Amy Sturgis; Flash Fiction – “Toujours Voir” by David Brin; Poetry – “Confessions Of A Body Thief” by Bruce Boston

Cheers, Fred!

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Here’s instalment 15 of Memory from Jayme Lynn Blaschke:

Beneath the palace, running the length of the perimeter was a colossal Ketza’qua. The yellow-bronze specimen was old and reeked of power. The trusses and cables holding it in place groaned and cackled every time the serpentine body flexed, but showed no signs of breaking.

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Michael Roberts just missed the boat last week, but his mention on BoingBoing probably more than made up for that. He says:

This week I wrote two more Tales of the Singularity: “Paul Bunyan and the Spambot“, and “Bruce Schneier and the King of the Crabs“. If and when I write more, they’ll be found in the relevant category of my website.

Thanks, Michael – sorry I missed your email last week!

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The Friday Flash Fictioneers are a trifle thin on the ground this week, but there’s still a skeleton crew:

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Non-fiction bonus, via BoingBoing:

Jonathan Zittrain gets so many things right in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, his book about what he calls ‘generative technology’ and why it’s so important. It’s chock-full of all sorts of issues that make Boingers salivate – freedom of speech, copyright, open source software, digital rights activism, privacy, censorship – put together into a very convincing argument in favor of unbridled innovation. This is definitely a book that you don’t want to pass up. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license and freely downloadable from the book’s website.”

Looks like it’ll be worth your time; I scanned through a few pages after downloading it, and there’s plenty of food for thought in there.

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Webcomic collection bonus! If you’re a fan of Diesel Sweeties, you probably already know that R Stevens has collected the first 2000(!) strips into ten Creative Commons licensed PDF books that you’re free to download, trade and share.

If you’re not a fan yet, here’s an ideal opportunity to become one – Stevens’ wit is like Distilled Essence of Intarwebs, and his pixellated characters are surprisingly sympathetic. Or maybe it’s just me that identifies strongly with Indie Rock Pete

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Anyway, that’s about your lot for this week. Don’t forget to hit us up with plugs and suggestions* – in the meantime, have a good weekend and happy reading!

[ * For future reference, the deadline for submissions to Friday Free Fiction is 1800 hours GMT; adjust for your local timezone, please! 🙂 ]