Tag Archives: Fiction

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Friday Free Fiction for 26th June – the end of an era

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It’s Friday afternoon here in the UK, which can only mean one thing – it’s free fiction round-up time here at Futurismic!

But it should be noted that nothing is permanent in this universe – indeed, this is going to be the last ever Friday Free Fiction at Futurismic. Not because there’s any less good science fictional stuff to read on the internet – quite the opposite, in fact, as regular readers are doubtless well aware – but because it’s becoming increasingly hard for me to keep up with it all and paste it all together.

And when I can see someone else doing a far more complete job elsewhere (namely the doubtless pseudonymical Quasar Dragon over at SF Signal), I think it’s only fair to send them the kudos and the traffic they deserve. Getting back three or four hours of my working week is an added bonus, of course… 😉

So, in short: if you’ve been a loyal follower of Friday Free Fiction here at Futurismic, you should immediately subscribe to SF Signal‘s RSS feed, assuming you’re not subscribed already. Their daily free fiction posts cover fantasy and horror as well as science fiction, so you can pick and choose from the best of the genre writing available on the intertubes. You’ll also get all the other SF Signal posts, which are great stuff for genre heads of every stripe, and it’ll cost you nothing at all. Makes sense, doesn’t it? So make with the clicky.

(I also recommend our regular tipsters to send future notifications to SF Signal for inclusion in their round-ups; I’m sure they’ll be just as grateful for your input as I’ve always been!)

But let’s just tie up this week’s batch before we sign off for the last time, eh?

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A big bunch from ManyBooks:

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And a load more from FeedBooks:

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Issue #90 of HUB Magazine features an extract from nerw Angry Robot-published novel Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

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Strange Horizons presents “Another End of the Empire” by Futurismic fictioneer Tim Pratt.

Tim’s also starting a free-to-read donation-supported serial novella:

Bone Shop is a serialized, donation-funded urban fantasy novella, available for anyone to read for free. New chapters will go up every Monday. The Bone Shop website is here, though there’s not a lot there at the moment. I’ll post the first chapter on June 29.

Times are tough in the Pratt household, so if you can part with a few dollars a week to help out a very talented writer in exchange for him giving away some of his work, please do so.

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Tor.com presents “The House That George Built” by Harry Turtledove

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The ongoing serialisation of Jason Stoddard‘s Eternal Franchise continues with chapter 9.2

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Some dreamscape weirdness from Captain VanderMeer: “Three Dreams and a Fabrication”

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Angry Robot Books has a sample extract from Chris Roberson‘s Book Of Secrets (as well as from some UrbFant zombie/detective mash-up which didn’t much appeal to me, but which might flick your switches).

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Sumit Dam chips in with “The Heroism of Colonel Pussy“

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And as mentioned above, here are those incomparably complete free fiction round-ups from SF Signal over the last week: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and today. That’s the way the professionals do it. 🙂

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And that’s that, ladies and gentlemen; thank you all for reading along and sending in your tip-offs. I’ve discovered a lot of new writers and webzines through doing these round-ups, and I’m sure there’ll be more to come yet – so keeping watching your feeds! Meanwhile, it’s fiction and futurism business as usual at Futurismic from here on in.

Have a great weekend. 🙂

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Publishing 101

The would-be writers among you might find the following two items of interest, dealing as they do with the less glamorous aspects of fiction publishing. First up, John Scalzi explains why writers in their thirties are still described as being “new”, even though they’re kind of old by comparison to musicians and actors at similar career points:

1. Writing an entire novel is something most people have to work up to. Because you know what? Writing sixty to one hundred thousand words of fiction is not something most people cannonball through, even if they assure you, with the appropriate amount of false modesty, that they’re really better at long-form fiction. Maybe they are, but they still had a long walk to get there.  I’m better at long-form and it took me until I was 28 before I could do it. Meanwhile I’d been writing short for years up to that point, in the form of reviews and columns and humor pieces and (yes) occasional attempts at short fiction that I mostly abandoned after a page or two. Lots of people in their teens and early 20s start novels; rather fewer finish them.

Elsewhere, Andrew Wheeler takes a more business-orientated look at things as he runs through the essentials of book marketing, starting with something called “channel mix”:

It’s deeply wonky, I know, but at the core of the business of selling books is knowing where and to whom you’re going to sell. A “channel” is a way to sell books, and there are more of them than you think.

It’s easy to get blindered in the book world, and to assume that the big chain stores are the only way books get to readers. It’s more true for fiction than for non-fiction, but there are still more options than you think.

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If you’re an author, your publisher will have a marketer thinking about these channels (or the subset of them that publisher has an effective salesforce to reach), and — if you’re lucky — your editor will also think about this as well. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore it; the author is always the best expert on her book, so you can help by suggesting possibilities.

(Authors often have unrealistic hopes, which you should keep in mind. It’s not always the author’s fault — some authors are monomaniacs who think their book on cheesemaking in Scandinavia will be a major Oprah pick, but most are just optimistic people who think that the Society for Shadetree Management would really, really like a new middle-grade novel about Becky Balsam, Forest Ranger if they only took a look at it. So be careful about pushing your suggestions too forcefully. Make suggestions, but also listen closely to what the people at your publisher tell you.)

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Young Adult fiction: are we confusing marketing with markets?

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teenage readersJoanne McNeil of Tomorrow Museum has a post hailing teenagers as being the most enthusiastic readers of all, contrary to media handwringing over declining youth literacy. Her central point is very valid: that teenagers who get into books discover a channel through which they can learn a lot about the world (and the people in it) without having to refer to the usual authority figures. [image by jonfeinstein]

Young people, who learned T9 before long division, have no problem curling up with a good book. Sales of young adult lit remain high even in this economy. Why is it other than teenagers are the most passionate readers?

There are several reasons why so many teenagers are passionate readers. A book is a pathway inside another person’s head. When you are young, you have few deep relationships, maybe no real emotional connections with others at all. You connect in the text. At that age, it is a revelation to see an author has the same dreams and insecurities as you do. Plus, there is a confidence and conviction to a fiction narrative’s voice. You are eager for someone to look up to, but certainly not your parents, not your teachers. A novel is an opportunity to really listen to another human being.

The solitude, the sense of emotional connection, and the guidance of a novel are all appealing to teenagers who might otherwise busy themselves exclusively with videogames and the Internet. And it shows. For the most part, young adult sales continue to rise even while book publishing is experiencing a significant decline.

That certainly aligns with my teenaged experiences of reading, the utterly immersive thrill of which I’m increasingly unable to recapture (though it has been replaced with a different set of appreciations as time has passed).

But the other reason I’ve brought this up is that assumption in the last line of the quote from McNeil. Again:

… young adult sales continue to rise even while book publishing is experiencing a significant decline.

This is a mantra we heard over and over again during the massive YA genre fiction circle-jerk last year, and it’s always backed with the unvoiced assumption that only Young Adults read YA. I’ve worked in a library, and I can assure you that’s an observable falsehood; most genuinely popular YA is successful precisely because so many adult readers with an expendable income enjoy the same titles.

As much as I would love to believe otherwise, I don’t see the rising popularity of YA fiction as an indicator of increased interest in books specifically among the teen demographics (though neither do I think that things are as bad as the doom-sayers would have us believe); what it does indicate is that certain sorts of stories have a wider appeal than others.

How much of this is to do with ‘adult’ genre literature just not flicking the switches for those adult readers? I’m pretty sure that’s a large part of the explosive success of  the urban fantasy subgenre, in that it repackaged classic and familiar horror and fantasy tropes in a way that placed fun and entertainment above more ‘literary’ values. Maybe Jetse really is right; maybe in our hardnosed love for the genres we’re actually keeping them from becoming more accessible, and hence more popular?

But I digress. To be absolutely clear: I have no beef with YA fiction, or with those who choose to write it, or those who choose to read it. What I do have an issue with is the assumption that by marketing certain books as being for young adults we can treat their success as indicators of health in young adult reading specifically. The pedestal-mounting of YA as the saviour of modern fiction is dangerously misguided.

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Friday Free Fiction for 19th June

Heads up, Friday people – time for your weekly wheelbarrow of free science fiction stories from the far-flung bends and spirals of the intertubes!

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A big batch from ManyBooks this time out:

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But just the one from FeedBooks:

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HUB Magazine presents “Storm CHASER” by Craig Pirrell

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There’s only the one DVD extra from Shadow Unit, but that should be “Sufficient“. Arf!

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Chris Roberson is back in the free-fic saddle with “Annus Mirabilis”

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Still coming steady from Fort Stoddard, Eternal Franchise is up to chapter 9.1

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A R Yngve sez:

My homepage has been updated with chapter 6 of my unsold novel The Time Idiot (the ongoing serial). This is a short, funny novel about a dumb man who has gained power far beyond his ability to handle it responsibly — in this case, the power to alter history. (You can call it a metaphor, if you’re into metaphors.)

Cheers, A R!

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Via BoingBoing (and pretty much the rest of the genre sub-web) comes the word that Catherynne M Valente is posting one chapter a week from her superbly-titled YA fantasy novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Also mentioned at BoingBoing is a similar effort by a chap called Jonathan, who says “I’ve set myself the target of putting a free short story online every week, and to keep doing just that for a year. […] more than that, I am making these stories available under a Creative Commons Share-alike Licence, hoping that others will take the stories to places that even I can’t imagine.” Well, good on him; go take a look, why don’tcha?

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Once again, SF Signal have a hugely comprehensive post of free fiction for each day of the past week, so go follow those. They also pointed out that Hachette – the people behind SF publisher Orbit Books – have made The Digital Plague by Jeff Somers available to read online, albeit from a rather fiddly Flash interface that crashes my browser (64-bit Kubuntu doesn’t handle these things well, sadly).

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And last but not least, a few short pieces from the ever-reliable Sumit Dam: “The Queen Is Dead” and “Manna“.

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That should keep you out of trouble while the boss finishes off his extended Friday lunch meeting, right? Right – and don’t forget you can drop us a note with any suggestions for next week’s collection. In the mean time, have a great weekend!

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What next, steampunk fiction on the iPhone?

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Steampunk Tales ezine coverWhy, yes, as it happens. Via Weird Tales comes news of the descriptively named Steampunk Tales e-zine, which is only available to you alpha-geeks who are rockin’ the Cupertino Jesusphone:

Emulating the style of the pulp adventure magazines of the 1920s and ’30s, Steampunk Tales contains first-run, original fiction written by an A+ list of award-winning authors. Issue #1 contains 10 stories, each running between 4,300 to 11,000 words, for the unbelievable price of only $1.99. Authors contributing to issue #1 include Jay Lake, Catherynne M. Valente, SatyrPhil Brucato and G.D. Falksen. The cover art was painted by popular artist Melita “missmonster” Curphy.

$1.99 for ten pieces of fiction by pro writers seems like a pretty good deal; it’s a shame you can’t get it any other way than on an iPhone, though.

What about you Futurismic readers with iPhones – is this the sort of zine format you’d pay for? And how does that price-point look to you?