I don’t know about you, but I’m starting to worry about how fast the weeks are flying by – it seems I scarcely finish wrapping up one weekly batch of free fiction before I start compiling another one.

But hey, it’s good to be busy, right? Right – so here’s this week’s batch of free sf online; a little smaller than usual, perhaps, but still plenty to be going on with…

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Just the one at ManyBooks:

• “The Eye of Alloria” by Rae Lori

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Gareth L Powell eschews flash fiction this week to reprint in full a story from his collection The Last Reef: “Hot Rain”

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Jason Stoddard continues to deliver chunks of his now-trunked novel Eternal Franchise; here’s chapter 2.3

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Tor.com is giving away electronic copies of Charles de Lint‘s novel Spiritwalk (if you’re a signed-in member of the site, natch, but that don’t cost nuffink, mistah). But you don’t need to log in or sign up to read “Eros, Philia, Agape” by Rachel Swirsky in the same place. How’s about that, eh?

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Brain Harvest presents “Sky and Sea” by Vylar Kaftan; I’ve also added the site to the sidebar of justice, and as they’ve got a decent RSS feed you can follow I’m going to stop linking to individual stories from now on. Only so many hours in the week, you dig?

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Book View Cafe presents “Something For Everyone” by Jennifer Stevenson

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Subterranean Press presents “Her Voice in a Bottle” by Tim Pratt

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Strange Horizons presents part 2 of “Diana Comet” by Sandra McDonald

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Shadow Unit Season 2 is warming up with DVD Extra #1:  “La Befana”

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Orbit Books are giving away the first chapter of This Is Not a Game, the new metaverse technothriller from Walter Jon Williams (which is currently whispering sweet nothings from my to-be-read shelf as I type…)

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And here are the crumbs that SF Signal‘s ever-hungering web-vacuum caught that we’d missed:

• Mindflights presents “The One with the Waggly Tail” by Marcie Lynn Tentchoff
• There’s a new online genre short fiction webzine by the name of The Hive Mind; they have an RSS feed for your convenience, which is a good move
• Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist has the full text of “Precision Set” by L E Modesitt, Jr., from the forthcoming Viewpoints Critical collection

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And finally here’s some Friday Flash Fiction:

• “Wanderlust” by Shaun C Green… as well as “Heralded by Iron“, and “Punk’s Not Dead” and “Colours Move” (he’s been on a catch-up mission this week, y’see)
• “Three Blue Things” by Sarah Ellender
• “The King’s Pleasure” by Gaie Sebold
• “The Loneliest Whale in the World” by Sumit Dam
• “Navita” by Gareth D Jones (a Latin translation, no less)

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And there you go – turned out to be more stuff than I thought!

Still, the more the merrier, so keep those tipoffs and plugs coming in through the usual channels. In the meantime, have a great weekend!

Is it springtime yet? It keeps trying to act like it here, but then winter comes bounding back in out of nowhere and letting my hopes down. Still, at least I’ve got plenty to read while I’m sat inside with the heating running… and so have you, because it’s Friday free fiction time at Futurismic!

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Just the one from ManyBooks:

• “The Gay Rebellion” by Robert W Chambers

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A couple more pieces of fiction round off the winter issue of Subterranean Online:

• “Three Fancies from the Infernal Garden” by C S E Cooney
• “Her Voice in a Bottle” by Tim Pratt

Tim Pratt fans (and you should all be Tim Pratt fans) should keep a close eye on this here website in the weeks to come! 😉

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New month, new issue of Clarkesworld:

• “Herding Vegetable Sheep” by Ekaterina Sedia
• “The Loyalty of Birds” by Rachel Sobel

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Likewise with Apex Online:

• “The Mind of a Pig” by Ekaterina Sedia (what is it with Ms. Sedia and animal story titles, eh?)
• “The Puma” by Theodora Goss
• “Head Music” by Lon Prater

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Strange Horizons presents “Diana Comet” by Sandra McDonald

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Rudy Rucker curates the seventh issue of his delightfully-named Flurb webzine, which contains all this:

• Madeline Ashby‘s “Off Track Betting“
• Charlie Anders‘ “The History of the Internet“
• Terry Bisson‘s “Billy and the Flying Saucer“
• Brian Garrison presenting 5 SF Poems
• Cody Goodfellow‘s “The Squonk Hunt“
• Robert Guffey‘s “Initiation“
• Alex Hardison‘s “Clouds in the Night“
• Richard Kadrey‘s “Trembling Blue Stars“
• Kek-W‘s “Cobalt Imperium“
• Simon Logan‘s “And They Will Not Be Stopped“
• Adam Rothstein‘s “Growth Industry“
• Rudy Rucker & John Shirley‘s “All Hangy“

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Guess who’s back? Yup, you guessed it – Shadow Unit is ramping up for Season 2 wirh “Lucky Day”

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Courtesy of Chris Roberson, here’s his story “Two Birds”

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Via pretty much everyone, Random House’s Suvudu genre fiction webhubsitecommunitythingy has a bunch of free full-novel PDFs to download. It’d be rude not to, wouldn’t it?

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Via Nick Mamatas comes news of a new super-short fiction outlet; Brain Harvest has kicked off with a super short piece from Mamatas called “Patmos Like Pink Elephants“.

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A message from the intriguingly named Kirk Ultra:

Hi, our website Electric Children has five short stories on it that I thought would be great for Friday Free Fiction. The first and newest is a sci-fi story called “Connector” by Dean Verheyen.

The second two are by Hillary Ferris: “Valentine” and “The Key“. And finally we have two short stories by Barbara Ann Crumm, “The Acid Journal” and “The General Store“. Hope you enjoy!

Cheers, Kirk!

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Via SF Signal we discover that Pyr is now offering The Crooked Letter by Sean Williams available as a free PDF download.

Speaking of SF Signal, it seem’s they are sticking with the bulk-posting of free fiction links, which if nothing else makes things a little easier for little old me…

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Time constraints once again mean that I’ll be unable to catch all the Friday Flash Fiction offerings, but here’s a few carried over from last week. From Sarah Ellender we have “The Torture Orchestra“, while Sumit Dam has been churning ’em out: there’s “Damocles“, plus five microfictions under the title “Running Without Scissors“.

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And there’s your lot! Don’t forget to drop us a line if you have any tip-offs; in the meantime, have a great weekend!

Cheer up – the weekend’s here! Well, near enough, if not quite for US readers… but I digress. It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for your weekly round-up for free science fiction stories on the web. Let’s rock.

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Just the one from FeedBooks:

• “Minor Detail” by John Michael Sharkey

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It’s Nebula nomination season, so expect more announcements like this in coming weeks; Asimov’s Magazine has made all their stories and novelettes that were nominated available online.

• “The Ray-Gun: A Love Story” by James Alan Gardner
• “Dark Rooms” by Lisa Goldstein
• “The Prophet of Flores” by Ted Kosmatka
• “Skull Valley” by Michael Cassutt
• “26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss” by Kij Johnson
• “Don’t Stop” by James Patrick Kelly
• “How Music Begins” by James Van Pelt

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You can download a PDF of the Ken Scholes story “Last Flight of the Goddess” for free… provided you’re a registered member of Tor.com, that is.

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Jason Stoddard has posted chapter 2.1 of his unpublished novel Eternal Franchise.

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Kim Lakin-Smith has released “The Killing Fields” – her story from the recent BSFA anthology, Celebration – on her website. There are downloadable formats for them what don’t like reading on no web page, too.

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More new fiction at Subterranean Online:

“A Four-Sided Triangle” is the latest pulp excursion by Mike Resnick’s singular creation, the Honorable Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones.

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Strange Horizons presents “Sometimes We Arrive Home” by K Bird Lincoln

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Polu Texni presents the concluding part of “Very Truly Yours” by Seth Gordon

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Hub Magazine presents “Montgolfier Winter” by Alasdair Stuart

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SF Signal has a massive list of free stories recently added to the Free Speculative Fiction Online site. A couple of other bits they pointed out:

• the new issue of Australian sf webzine Antipodean features J D Brames, Liam Thorpe, Steve Duffy, Jan Napier, Mick Dawson, Shaun A Saunders, Mark Farrugia, Houston Dunleavy, Houston Dunleavy, and Felicity Dowker
• Author and game designer Greg Costikyan has a bunch of free-to-read stories from the bibliography page of his website..

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Due to events in the reality beyond the interwebs (where I am genuinely known to manifest from time to time, contrary to popular belief) I’m not going to be able to catch all the bits of Friday Flash this week, but rest assured they’ll be carried over into next week’s round-up, just as with “Tongue“, Neil Beynon’s offering from last week

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Non-fiction bonus – via BoingBoing (and a slew of other venues) comes news of the second issue of H+, the transhumanist magazine edited by R U Sirius. As you can see, there’s plenty of stuff for science fiction readers:

… “First Steps Toward Post Scarcity or Why It’s the End of the World as We Know it and You Should Feel Fine” by Jason Stoddard…

… John Shirley on Cyberpunk for the 21st Century…

… Paul McEnery talking to “Bio Gunk” SF writer Peter Watts…

H+ is free to download in PDF form from the magazine’s website. So get to it!

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And that’s your lot! As pointed out above, I’ll raise my hand to any errors and ommissions of lateness, as I’ve compiled this post a good few hours than I would normally, but anything that I’ve missed will be added into next week’s post. Until then, keep your tip-offs coming in and have yourselves a great weekend!