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Friday Free Fiction for 12th September

Here it is folks – two week’s worth of free science fiction from around the web. I hope you’re hungry!

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At ManyBooks.net:

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Over at FeedBooks, the Futurismic back-catalogue is nearly complete:

And a few old classics from elsewhere:

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The last ever Oddlands Magazine:

Short Fiction

Poetry

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Clarkesworld Magazine:

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Byzarium:

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Subterranean Press has another installment of “Kilimanjaro” by Mike Resnick. And another little bonus at Subterranean – Scalzi fans who don’t read the Whatever (for, ahem, whatever reason) should schlepp on over and check out “Denise Jones, Super Booker“.

(Those who do read the Whatever doubtless knew that already… and knew that Scalzi sold it within thirteen (13!) minutes of finishing it.)

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Apex Online:

A Jay Lake story, originally published in Interzone – “The American Dead”

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John Klima – who blogs for Tor and edits the rather super print zine Electric Velocipede – has had a story published. I’ll let him explain:

A select few of you know that I do write, despite my protestations that I am just an editor. And even fewer of you know that I sold a story to Diet Soap, the wonderfully eclectic magazine put out by Doug Lain.

My story, which was initially submitted under a pseudonym, was accepted for the online edition of Diet Soap. Doug has created a new feature, “How to Write Stories About Writers” of which I am the first offering.

There are two parts:

I hope you enjoy them both.

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A heads-up from Paul McAuley:

I’ve just discovered that the online magazine Fanzine has published a short story by Scott Bradfield. I’ve been a big fan every since I read some of his early short stories in Interzone, back in the Paleolithic: smartly-written absurdist parables, goofy and sweet, but always with a sting in the tale. Kind of like the films of Preston Sturges.

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Those nice people at Orbit Books have got another excerpt from their roster for you to read; this time it’s from Halting State, the latest sf novel from Charlie Stross.

For what it’s worth, I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and I reckon you’ll get a good sense of whether it’ll be your thing by checking out a sample of its idiosyncracies… put it this way, if you’re into RPGs, virtual worlds or old-school text-adventure dungeon games, I reckon you’ll love it.

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Two slices of Jayme Lynn Blaschke‘s Memory, numbers 22 and 23

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Here are some free samples from John Joseph Adams‘ new zombie fiction anthology, The Living Dead (how does he manage such a prodigious output?):

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The mysterious Minister Faust, who has been blogging over at Jeff VanderMeer’s Ecstatic Days this week, offers an excerpt from his book The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad.

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An email from Shira Lipkin:

Hello! I’m doing a collaboration with Kythryne Aisling of Wyrding Studios, posting short fiction every weekday this month based on reader prompts and Kythryne’s jewelry. The fiction is free; there’s a PayPal button, but no payment is required, so Free Ficton Friday fans might be interested. 🙂

Thanks, Shira – good luck!

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Tor.com has another piece of fresh fiction from a genre notable: “The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder” by Elizabeth Bear.

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Thanks to SF Signal for rounding up a lot of stuff that I’d have doubtless otherwise missed by being away from the RSS coalface:

      • “Larisa Miusov” by Lucius Shepard, parts one, two, and three.
      • An excerpt from The Stepsister Scheme by Jim C. Hines
      • Revolution SF has “Wonder” by J.R. and “Flowers for Melody” by Mikal Trimm
      • SpaceWesterns: “West of the Texas Nebula” by Dan Devine and Lyn Perry.
      • Reflection’s Edge #39 features fiction from Matthew Kressel, Claude Lalumière, Margaret Yang, Chad Bank, and Brian Haycock.
      • Ray Gun Revival #46 has a gorgeous looking new issue featuring fiction by Jonathon Mast, Justin R. Macumber, T.M. Hunter, Jonathan J. Schlosser, and Alice M. Roelke. The issue also features continuing serials by M. Keaton, Keanan Brand, L. S. King, Johne Cook, and Sean T. M. Stiennon, as well as art by Christian Hecker and reviews.
      • SFX has “The Stinker” by Colin Harvey.
      • And finally, Munseys has “The Judas Valley” by Gerald Vance (1956).

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      And a special mention – Futurismic‘s very own hard-working fiction editor Chris East got a story published at COSMOS Magazine – “Frame of Mind“. Yay, Chris! 😀

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      Last week’s Friday Flash pieces:

      And here are the early ones from this week; I’m afraid another sojourn away from the computer this evening may mean I miss a few, but I’ll roll ’em on into next week’s round-up if so.

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      Non-fiction bonus: Sir Cory of Doctorow has a collection of his essays coming out, and naturally you can get an electronic version for nada:

      Tachyon Books and I are launching my latest book, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, my very first collection of essays. In it are 28 essays about everything from copyright and DRM to the layout of phone-keypads, the fallacy of the semantic web, the nature of futurism, the necessity of privacy in a digital world, the reason to love Wikipedia, the miracle of fanfic, and many other subjects.

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      Phew! Amazing how it all piles up in just a couple of weeks, eh? Keep your tip-offs coming in, though, and they’ll make it into next week’s selection – deadline 1800 GMT!

      Blog

      Writers – remix Rosenbaum’s Ant King and win the book

      Benjamin Rosenbaum - The Ant King and Other StoriesVia Kathryn Cramer at Tor comes news that Benjamin Rosenbaum has decided not merely to release his new Small Beer Press collection of short stories, The Ant King and Other Stories, as a free Creative Commons-licensed download, but also to openly invite people to create derivative works for the chance to win a signed copy of the physical book.

      Here are the rules:

      1. Create a derivative work of any story in The Ant King and Other Stories
      2. Place it under the same license (you do this just by including a declaration to that effect on the work in its published form)
      3. Post a link to the work (or some kind of recording or representation of the work, like a youtube video if it’s a live performance, or a picture of it if it’s, like, a vase or something) in the comments to this blog entry.
      4. Derivative works can be translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like.
      5. On March 3, 2009 (that gives you six months), I will send signed (and extensively doodled-upon) hardcover copies of The Ant King and Other Stories to the creators of the three derivative works that I like the best.
      6. Obviously, other than what’s covered in the CC license, you retain all rights to your works, so if you’ve made, you know, House-Beyond-Your-Sky-themed coasters, you get to sell them or put drinks on them to keep rings off your coffee table or whatever. And if you want to actually sell the rights to reproduce the derivative work commercially, I will in all probability tell you that you can, unless you’re, like, a Hollywood studio. 🙂

      Could be quite a fun project, no?

      Blog

      Why near-future science fiction is difficult

      5 Comments

      Here at Futurismic, our fiction guidelines state that we’re looking for near-future science fiction only. There’s no elitism involved – we just like to have a niche to focus on, one that (we hope) fits with our readers as well as it does with the editorial team.

      But there is an argument to the effect that, in some ways, near-future science fiction is more challenging to write well than the out-and-out fabrication of, say, space opera. Few would know that better than Jetse de Vries, who has just finished a four and a half year stint as fiction co-editor for Interzone magazine. De Vries has been doing some thinking-out-loud about the problems of near-future sf from the writer’s perspective:

      It’s what makes writing near-future SF such a daunting task, and a kind of catch-22 exercise: if it looks too believable it (most probably) won’t happen; if it looks too implausible it might very well happen.

      So if you dive into the world of tomorrow, you need to find a balance between not being too conservative in your predicitions, but also not too ‘off-the-wall’, either. For example, back in 1997 the movie “Wag the Dog” satirised the Clinton/Lewinsky affair by fabricating a war to cover up a presidential sex scandal. Nowadays, one would not only wish it was only a sex scandal they were covering up, but — much more importantly — that the war was ‘fabricated’ instead of real.

      [snip]

      So what’s a poor SF writer to do? Well, dare to make mistakes, try to ride the fine line between extrapolating too straightforwardly or too crazily, and face complexity.

      I hear that: the older I get, the more relevant the old aphorism seems to become – the truth really is stranger than fiction.

      How do the writers among you approach plausibility in your near-future science fiction stories?

      Blog

      Tobias Buckell interviewed

      1 Comment

      Tobias Buckell meets Halo's Master ChiefWe like to keep an eye on the progress of members of the Futurismic gang who have moved on to bigger and brighter things, and there’s no one who fits the bill better than Tobias Buckell, the former Futurismic blogger who’s just finished writing his fourth novel at around the same time the third, Sly Mongoose, hits bookstore shelves. [image from Tobias’ blog]

      Tobias is a great writer and a lovely bloke to work with, and also a poster-boy for the “work hard and earnestly and your dreams will come true” approach to life. There’s an interview with Tobias up at the Nebula Awards website that’ll give you an insight into his mindset:

      From 15 to 25 I wrote during the time that everyone else played games or watched TV. The average American watches 20-30 hours of TV a week. That’s almost watching TV like a full time job. By swapping out writing, I worked at writing.

      Of course, one can question the sanity of working a part time or near full time job for 10 years that hardly started paying anything until recently. I could have started a business on the side. But that’s where my hard work comes from, choosing to make a hard choice about how I spent my time. As a result, I never felt like I worked hard, just that I missed a lot of the stuff people around me seemed to be spending *their* time on. Do I regret not seeing 10 year old TV shows (what’s a ‘Buffy?’) and spending a lot of money on alcohol? In the big picture, not a bit.

      Congratulations, Tobias – hope one or more of those awards comes through for you. Hell knows you’ll have deserved it. 🙂

      Blog

      Futurismic readers ate all Tom Doyle’s bandwidth!

      It’s great for us to know that yesterday’s post sent lots of you off to listen to Tom Doyle’s audio readings of his stories… and great for Tom himself, too!

      However, there really can be too much of a good thing – so many people downloaded that the bandwidth limits on the hosting site he was using has been exceeded. Never fear, though; Tom has moved the files to a new location. So if you didn’t manage to get them the first time, try the following links instead:

      Enjoy!