Tag Archives: Fiction

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 8th May

1 Comment

The days are getting longer and brighter; it’ll be summer before we know what’s hit us. But at least the weekly rituals of life are there to keep us in some cyclic tradition of normalcy – rituals like rounding up big batches of free science fiction stories every Friday!

And as it’s a new month, there’s lots of new stuff from our fellow webzines, so get clicking…

***

A triptych at Manybooks:

***

And a bunch from Feedbooks:

***

New for May at Clarkesworld:

***

New stuff from Apex Online:

And as an added bonus, Open Your Eyes by Paul Jessup is being made available as a free PDF download for the remainder of May.

***

Subterranean Online presents:

***

Here’s episode 2.03 of Shadow Unit: “Sin Eater”

***

Jason Stoddard presents chapter 6.2 of Eternal Franchise

***

Tor.com presents “Last Son of Tomorrow” by Greg Van Eekhout

***

Strange Horizons presents “The Rising Waters” by Benjamin Crowell

***

COSMOS Magazine presents “Delivering Tomorrow, Today” by Robert Friedman

***

HUB Magazine #85 includes “Old Clothes” by Chris Cyr

***

A message from Chris Odhner:

My brother is publishing a new free short story *every day* for the next year.

Thanks, Chris!

***

A message from from Jake Freivald:

The latest edition of Flash Fiction Online is up. Two of our three new flashes are SF: “Jack Rabbit” by Isaac Espriu and “Billions of Stars” by KJ Kabza.

Cheers, Jake!

***

And thanks as always to SF Signal, without whose ubiquitous free-fictional panopticon we would have missed the following:

  • There’s a bunch of new additions to the Suvudu free library:
  • Fusion Fragment presents “For the Love of Ceelie” by Matthew Sanborn Smith
  • The New Yorker presents “The Slows” by Gail Hareven
  • The New Yorker has also published the JG Ballard story “The Autobiography of J.G.B.“
  • The Nautilus Engine‘s May 2009 issue includes fiction from Fabio Fernandes, LL Wise, Daniel Stiles, KM Rockwood, Violet Hilton, Jason L Corner, JD Riso, Mimi Vaquer, and Heath Lowrance
  • Episode #22 of Contagious by Scott Sigler is available for download in PDF and MP3 formats.
  • The latest issue of Aphelion includes fiction by T Richard Williams, Jon Wesick, Joel Realubit, Roderick D Turner, Terry Larson, E S Strout, Ed Barol, Joseph T Christopher, Mary Kiorden Hayden, Tyler Hardin, Philip Roberts, Ken Kraus, and Dan Edelman

***

And finally Sumit Dam steps in with some Friday Flash: “The Reunion”

***

And that’s your lot! Don’t forget to drop us a line about anything you think warrants inclusion in a future Friday Free Fiction; in the meantime, have a great weekend!

Blog

The city considered as a very large organism

7 Comments

Roads - the veins of the living city?A few days ago Cosmic Variance was plugging a talk by a chap called Geoffrey West, a complex-systems boffin, which sounded like it had some very interesting angles. Here’s an extract from his abstract:

… to what extent are cities or corporations an extension of biology? Are they “just” very large organisms? Analogous scaling laws reflecting underlying social network structure point to general principles of organization common to all cities, but, counter to biological systems, the pace of social life systematically increases with size. This has dramatic implications for growth, development and particularly for sustainability: innovation and wealth creation that fuel social systems, if left unchecked, potentially sow the seeds for their inevitable collapse.

Man, I love this sort of stuff; that’s the sort of question that pushes the same buttons as good science fiction, at least for me. So much so, in fact, that I’ve spent much of the holiday weekend here in the UK expounding similar ideas to inebriated friends, accompanied by brisk hand-waving. There’s a certain innate logic to the analogy that I feel anyone who’s lived a long time in one city – or maybe many – would instantly glom onto. Of course the city is alive, of course it is a system, an organism – how could it be anything else? [image by Nrbelex]

Once that assumption is agreed, though, the challenge is to work out what that actually means in human terms – which is more of a book-sized challenge than one suitable for a blog post, I suspect[1]. But I’m leaping ahead here, assuming that everyone feels the same way; maybe it sounds daft to you.

So, tell me: do you think cities can be considered to have a kind of life of their own, an organismic existence of emergent phenomena? Or is this a case of anthropomorphic projection? Or maybe both at once?

[ 1 – I’m imagining some sort of hybrid authorial chimera of Jeff VanderMeer, Geoff Manaugh and Mervyn Peake, with a sprinkling of Bicycle Repairman-era Chairman Bruce for the techno-weirdness element… ]

Blog

Futurismic closing to fiction submissions until 1st June

1 Comment

You’d probably be amazed just how many fiction submissions we get here at Futurismic – it’s more than I ever imagined we’d get, and the number grows by the month.

And that means our fearless fiction editor Chris East has a lot of work to do, none of which makes him a red cent, and it’s high time the poor guy had a holiday. So as of today, Futurismic is closed to fiction submissions until June 1st 2009; we’re in the fortunate position of having a decent inventory of contracted pieces for the next few months, so we want to give Chris a chance to hit Inbox Zero on the submissions and take a week or so off.

So, if you’ve got a piece you’re almost ready to send in, put it in a drawer for a few weeks, and then whip it out for a final polish (ahem) before sending it in when we reopen at the beginning of June. Sound like a plan? Lovely!

Enjoy your weekend, folks. 🙂

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 1st May

Happy May Day! Even if your religious or political leanings don’t care for the date, it’s not only a Friday but the first weekday of the month – which means we’ve just published our regular fictional offering, and you should go read Stephen Gaskell’s “Under an Arctic Sky” right away.

And when you’re all done with that, you can get started on this little list of free science fiction on the web as a way of filling up your weekend…

***

Here’s a bunch from ManyBooks:

***

And a couple from FeedBooks:

***

HUB Magazine #84 features “My Dad’s Idea” by Llinos Cathryn

***

I’ve lost track of what I’ve linked to at Shadow Unit and what I haven’t, as the DVD Extras don’t come with numbers to sort the order out. So here’s the latest two pieces, just in case: “Dragons” and “Disintegration“.

***

Jason Stoddard delivers chapter 6.1 of Eternal Franchise

***

Tor.com presents “TVA Baby” by Terry Bisson

***

Via Ken MacLeod:

My colleague and fellow Genomics Forum Writer in Residence Pippa Goldschmidt‘s short story “The Competition for Immortality” is now online at LabLit.

***

From good friend o’ the site Nancy Jane Moore:

I ripped my free Book View Cafe flash fiction for this week straight from the headlines: “How to Deal With the Coming Crisis” is about swine flu. By the way, I post a free flash fiction every Thursday on Book View Cafe, and we generally have new free fiction on the site every day.

***

Via BoingBoing and loads of other places:

“[To make Thoughtcrime Experiments,] Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson selected nine mind-squibbling SF and fantasy stories from the slush pile, commissioned five works of art, paid the authors and artists, and packaged the whole thing as a high-quality anthology that you’re free to copy and remix. Artists include E-Sheep’s Patrick Farley and fanfic darling Erin Ptah; authors include Mary Anne Mohanraj, Carole Lanham, and Ken Liu. We also wrote an essay describing the process, which you can read if you’re interested in how we did it or what the SF/fantasy market looks like from the editor’s perspective.”

Looks like you can get Thoughtcrime Experiments in multiple formats from ManyBooks already, too.

***

The SF Signal team obviously sensed how busy I’ve been this week, and did a couple of round-up posts of free fiction links in additio to scraping up the following little tidbits from the far crevices of the intertubes:

  • Aberrant Dreams presents “Children of the Fire” by Melissa Mead, “Dione” by Jess Kaan, and “Gilding the Dandelion” by Futurismic veteran Marissa K Lingen
  • Chapters 1 and 2 of The Time Idiot by A R Yngve can be found on his website
  • The latest issue of Abyss & Apex includes fiction by Lisa A Koosis, Bud Sparhawk, Aliette de Bodard, Ruth Nestvold, and William Highsmith
  • The latest issue of Ideomancer presents fiction by J(ae)D Brames, Michaela Kahn, Steven Mohan, Jr., J C Runolfson, Mike Allen, and Amal El-Mohtar
  • Issue #5 of Concept Sci-Fi has appeared, including fiction by Dylan Fox, Lawrence Buentello, and Jonathan Lowe

      ***

      And to cap it off, there’s one bit of Friday Flash Fiction this week, courtesy of “R-zero” by Sumit Dam.

      ***

      And we’re done – so get out of here and enjoy your weekend! But don’t forget to let us know about cool stuff we should be mentioning here, OK?

      Blog

      Ballard’s ‘last’ story actually published in Interzone in nineties

      1 Comment

      You’ve probably seen countless links already to “The Dying Fall“, J G Ballard’s last short story, as published in The Guardian over the weekend.

      What you might not have seen (and for which we can thank Warren Ellis for spreading) is that, while “The Dying Fall” is indeed Ballard’s last known piece of short fiction, The Guardian haven’t plucked it from the papers left on his desk in his last days; it was in fact originally published in long-running UK sf magazine Interzone in 1996.