Tag Archives: Fiction

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Friday Free Fiction for 14th September

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As we say here in the UK, “Cor blimey, guv’nor, wotta lotta free stuff!” Actually, there’s probably a grand total of twenty people on the face of the planet who’d even consider saying that, but the point remains – it’s a bumper crop of free fiction this week, and no mistake.

Manybooks.net just keeps on giving with the old-school classics:

Plus the Free Speculative Fiction Online gang have updated once again; lots of fresh meat for genre carnivores right there.

More modern stuff:

There’s a lot of taster excerpts about; Orbit Books has posted the first chapter of The Awakened Mage by Karen Miller, and SciFiChick has a list of thirteen (thirteen!) current genre titles with free excerpts available online in hope of hooking you into lashing out for the full book.

Chris Roberson has obviously been so impressed by our efforts here that he’s cloned the idea (it’s OK, Chris, we won’t sue! ;] ) and is doing his own Free Fiction Friday posts – his first offering is an excerpt from his out-of-print book Cybermancy Incorporated.

[link expunged]

Extra webcomic goodness – an online reworking of War Of The Worlds in comic form … which has the ultimate merit of being completely devoid of Tom Cruise. [via Ectoplasmosis]

And now, for the interminably busy, podcasts!

From Librivox, a 28-part audiobook version of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

If you like genre podcasts, you probably already know and love Escape Pod – but I wish to draw your special attention to Transcendence Express by Jetse de Vries, not just because he’s one of my fellow editors at Interzone, but because he’s a damn fine writer in his own right, and this is one of his best pieces of work.

And finally, if you’d like something bite-sized, there’s a growing clade of people doing a piece of flash fiction every Friday: Gareth L. Powell, Neil Beynon, Gareth D. Jones, Martin McGrath … and even yours truly.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

PS – compiling this list would be impossible without continual cribbing from the diligent chaps at SFSignal. If you like what we do here at Futurismic, you should definitely be subscribed to them, too.

Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.

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Friday Free Fiction for 7th September

First off, stories from within stories – a compendium of Kilgore Trout stories detached from the Vonnegut novels in which they originally appeared.

Now, the old-school:

If you were put off by the vast size of the H. G. Wells collection last week, you might prefer to go one story at a time. Courtesy of manybooks.net, “The Crystal Egg” and “Tales of Space and Time”.

From the same source, “Sense from Thought Divide” by Mark Irvin Clifton and “The Stutterer” by R.R. Merliss.

Meanwhile, Project Gutenberg has Murray Leinster’s Sand Doom, and Irving W. Lande’s Slingshot.

Then the new-school:

Clarkesworld Magazine has a new story this month, as always: “Lost Soul” by M. P. Ericson.

Enjoy!

Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.

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Friday Free Fiction for August 31st

First, the old-school:

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Warlord of Mars is available as a free audiobook, or a free e-book at Manybooks.net, who also have The Players by Everett B. Cole.

I’ve always meant to read The Complete Works of H.G. Wells. I didn’t realise there’s nearly five thousand pages involved, but the PDF linked to there should be a little easier to carry around.

Now the new-school:

The website for John Joseph Adams’ Wastelands anthology has the full text of M. Rickert’s “Bread and Bombs” as well as stories by Cory Doctorow and Richard Kadrey

Some slightly sad news: after ten years, Infinity Plus is calling it a day. But the archives will stay available for some time yet, and there’s masses of good stuff in there – Bruce Sterling recommends Paul Di Filippo’s “What’s Up Tiger Lily?”

Non-fictional extra:

Michael Swanwick wrote an essay to present at a convention; Dinosaurs, Space Flight, and Science Fiction talks about three of the more recent literary movements on the genre fiction landscape, namely Interstitial Arts, The New Weird and Mundane Science Fiction. Infernokrusher appears to have been missed out …

Enjoy!

Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.

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Winning Mars – free science fiction novel from Jason Stoddard

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As already noted at T3Aspace and reported by Gareth L. Powell, Jason Stoddard has decided to release an entire unpublished novel for free under a Creative Commons licence. Winning Mars is an expansion of the novella by the same name that appeared in Interzone #196.

Winning Mars by Jason Stoddard

Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Jason and I are friends, that he helped me out by building my concrete compound of doom in Second Life for me (and made a fine job of it too), and that I may have started this habit by convincing him to release his short story “Fermi Packet” in a similar fashion.

But in case you’re thinking that means you should take my recommendation with a pinch of salt, bear in mind that as well as being published in Interzone (more than once), he’s also sold short stories to us here at Futurismic, as well as Talebones, Darker Matter and Strange Horizons, among others.

What I’m trying to say is that this guy writes great science fiction, and that Winning Mars will be well worth your time. At this price (you know, like, free), how could it not be? All he asks is that you let him know what you though of it after you’ve read it, positive or negative.

So, what are you waiting for? Download the PDF of Winning Mars now, while stocks last!

[Cross-posted to VCTB]

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Career advice for writers, by writers

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My feed reader is full of useful advice for writers once again, so I thought I’d share the wealth:

Jeff Vandermeer’s Evil Monkey delivers the second short sharp installment of his Guide to Creative Writing:

“Alas, market predictions aren’t like assholes, because everyone has two or three, and they usually serve little purpose.”

Luc Reid tries to nail down what it is that makes certain stories rise from “good, but not quite what we’re looking for” to “sold”:

“So what makes a story rise above its fellows, inspire love, stand out? The intuitive response would be that it does the things we talked about better. The characters are stronger, the plot is more compelling, the description is more vivid. But usually standing out is going to mean something else, and it’s going to differ from writer to writer and sometimes from story to story. The stories that rise above are not just more competent than the stories that don’t, although more competent is always better.”

Moving beyond the writing itself and into the territory of promotional work, Charlie Stross explains the dos and don’ts of public readings with his usual dry humour:

“The water jug isn’t an optional extra. I usually take the precaution of bringing along a drink of some sort, simply because my throat dries out after ten or fifteen minutes of speaking and if I’m scheduled late in a day of readings, the folks providing supporting facilities such as jugs of water tend to be getting a bit erratic themselves.”

And finally, David Louis Edelman has some advice on how to self-promote with ethical integrity:

“3. Avoid glaring sins of omission. This is a difficult guideline to follow, because it’s very subjective. Don’t use ellipses to claim that your book is “an absolutely terrific… thriller” when the actual review states that your book is “an absolutely terrific example of what not to do when writing a thriller.” Don’t try to sell to a group of Vietnam vets by claiming that your book has a Vietnam vet in it, while conveniently forgetting to mention that said character gets run over by a truck on page 4.”

Ah! The intarwebs: helping aspiring writers (to avoid writing by supplying them enough advice from genuine writers that they can convince themselves reading it is a more valuable way to spend their time than actually writing) since 1997!

[Cross-posted to VCTB]