Greetings, free fiction aficionados! We’ve got a pretty hefty batch here in compensation for my absence last week, so let’s get straight to it …

***

Just a few from Manybooks.net:

“The Chamber Of Life” by Green Peyton Wertenbaker

“Nine Hard Questions About The Nature Of the Universe” by Lewis Shiner

***

By comparison, the folk at Feedbooks have been busy beavers, and there’s enough here to keep you going for weeks, from proto-sf classics to pulp-era shorts. There are not only short stories …

• “The Cosmic Expense Account” by Cyril Michael Kornbluth
• “Creatures of Vibration” by Harl Vincent
• “Criminal Negligence” by J Francis McComas
• “A Crystal Age” by William Henry Hudson
• “Cubs Of The Wolf” by Raymond Fisher Jones
• “The Circuit Riders” by R C Fitzpatrick
• “The Heads Of Cerberus” by Francis Stevens
• “The Case of Summerfield” by William Henry Rhodes
• “Cat and Mouse” by Ralph Williams
• “Breaking Point” by James Edwin Gunn
• “Breakaway” by Stanley Gimble
• “The Blue Tower” by Evelyn E Smith
• “Blessed Are The Meek” by G C Edmonson
• “Beyond Pandora” by Robert J Martin
• “The Bell Tone” by Edmund H Leftwich
• “The Beast Of Space” by F E Hardart
• “Attrition” by Jim Wannamaker
• “Accidental Death” by Peter Baily
• “Star-begotten” by H G Wells

… but full novels, too:

• VRIL – The Power of the Coming Race by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
• Born Again by Alfred William Lawson
• Almuric by Robert E Howard
• The Blind Spot by Austin Hall
• Planetoid 127 by Edgar Wallace
• The Missing Angel by Erle Cox
• Out Of The Silence by Erle Cox

Crikey!

***

Via SF Signal, there’s a veritable festival of Edgar Rice Burroughs at Project Gutenberg:

• A Princess of Mars
• Warlord of Mars
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars
• Return of Tarzan
• Son of Tarzan
• Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar
• Tarzan of the Apes

***

A message hit the inbox from dj lotu5:

I think that this story I wrote – “Tissue Banking” – is about what Futurismic is about: the uncanny similarity between the future and the present. I’m a transgender artist, blogger and trouble maker, and I blog about the interplay of technology, transgender, sex and resistance.

Thanks, dj!

***

Via Gareth D Jones, a new addition the the sidebar o’ justice: Concept SciFi webzine

***

Warren Ellis makes a proclamation:

With the aid of the Colleen Doran Creator’s Grant, Kieron Gillen and Charity Larrison have completed their darkly magical graphic novel Busted Wonder, which you can read in its entirely online for free at bustedwonder.com.

You must go and read it now.

Obey the Ellis!

***

From the High Lord of Free, Cory Doctorow:

For the 150th anniversary issue of The Bookseller […] the editors commissioned me to write a short-short story about the next 150 years of book sales. The result is called The Right Book, and it’s out in the current edition and online [first two pages, third page] as well.

***

The increasingly ubiquitous Fantasy Book Spot is hosting a teaser chapter of Ken MacLeod‘s forthcoming novel The Night Sessions:

He slowed and dismounted fifty metres from the obstruction. A slope of rubble sprawled halfway across the road. The lower half of the front of a tenement block had been blasted out. Two floors had collapsed. No vehicles had been crushed, but the wreckage of several collisions remained slewed in the road. Ferguson hadn’t seen anything like this in real life for a long time, and now seldom even on television. He took off his cycle clips, pushed the bike one-handed and stared ahead. After a step or two he remembered the weight on his back.

Looking forward to that one – MacLeod novels rarely disappoint me.

***

Jayme Lynn Blaschke is up to instalment sixteen of Memory:

Bolts of green flame spewed from the cuayabs.

Quite!

***

Here are the Friday Flash Fictioneer pieces from last week which were delayed by my gallivanting out of town:

• “Lefty Turquoise” by Sarah Ellender
• “Cat” by Ian Hocking
• “Energia City” by Phred Serenissima
• “Skyflowers” by Shaun C Green

And just to make everyone feel like total amateurs, Gareth D Jones offers his now-published-in-Nature piece – you can see “Travel By Numbers” in all its native (or should that be Natural?) glory.

And here’s this week‘s Friday Flash material:

• Gareth L Powell‘s off to the “Carnival“
• Dan Pawley returns after a lengthy hiatus; turns out he was “Tidying Up The Garden“
• Neil Beynon is experiencing a short swift “Descent“
• Gareth D Jones has been eating “Redcurrants“
• Shaun C Green has been “Releasing Moments“
• Gaie Sebold shares some “Works of Art“
• Phred Serenissima salutes “The Blue Eagle“

***

And that’s your lot – if that huge stack from Feedbooks can’t keep you occupied for a while, you must be some sort of reading machine. Don’t forget to make time to drop us in your tips and plugs for next week, though – deadline is 1730 hours GMT.

Have a great weekend!

Greetings! Apologies in advance may be in order; I’m out of town at the moment (on a course about sf literary criticism, as it happens), and so I’ve had to collate as much of this week’s Friday Free Fiction as possible on Thursday afternoon, so there may be some blinding omissions if I haven’t had the time and resources to sit down with an internet connection since then.

Anything I’ve missed will end up in next week’s collection, but feel free to share any exciting discoveries in the comments. Now, let’s see what we’ve got …

***

Here’s a bunch from ManyBooks.net:

• This Crowded Earth by Robert Bloch
• The Fire People by Raymond King Cummings
• With Airship and Submarine by Harry Collingwood
• The Gods Of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs

***

A fist-full from FeedBooks:

• “The Diamond Lens” by Fitz James O’Brien
• “The Lost Room” by Fitz James O’Brien
• “Control Group” by Roger D Aycock
• “Traders Risk” by Roger D Aycock

***

I think this has been available for some time, but I don’t remember linking it before, so here’s a short story from Gwyneth Jones‘ Bold As Love universe – “Big Cat”

***

Just because Shadow Unit‘s first season is over doesn’t mean everything has gone silent over there. On the contrary – summertime is “DVD extras” season, one piece every second Sunday. First up is “Vigil“, penned by Elizabeth Bear.

***

Scalzi had a tip-off to part of this haul, but it was Gary Gibson who pointed out that Lewis Shiner is cheerfully uploading every piece of fiction he’s ever written to be read for free at his website.

There’s a lot there already … and but you can subscribe via RSS if you want to keep on top of new material. And you can find out why he’s doing it in his Fiction Liberation Front manifesto – right on, Comrade Shiner!

***

Via io9 we discover that:

“In The Garden Of Iden, Kage Baker‘s fantastic novel about time-traveling cyborgs who work for the 24th century Company, is available as a free download. Five-year-old Mendoza is about to be tortured to death as a Jew in the Spanish Inquisition, when she’s rescued by the Company and turned into a time-traveling operative — but her first assignment is to the 16th century, uncomfortably close to her own time. It’s available in PDF, HTML, or Mobi formats.”

***

If you’re reading this, it means I didn’t have time (or net access) enough to pick up this week’s contributions from the Friday Flash Fictioneers, but I’m sure they’ll provide links to their pieces in the comments. If not, I’ll mash them in with next week’s round-up.

***

Well, that’s all from me this time. Keep your plugs and tip-offs coming, and I hope you all have as stimulating a weekend as I’ll to be having!

The intarwebs are my dumpster, and you are my fiction-freegan cohorts – come round for a Friday fiction feast!

***

Here’s a handful from Manybooks.net:

• “The Judas Valley” by Gerald Vance
• “Dawn of Flame” by Stanley Grauman Weinbaum
• Out of the Silence by Erle Cox
• The Missing Angel by Erle Cox
• The Alembic Plot by Ann Wilson (A Terran Empire novel from 1992)

***

FeedBooks is proving to be quite a rich vein (though I’m seeing titles there that ManyBooks had first):

• “Disturbing Sun” by Richard (don’t call me) Shirley Richardson
• “Droozle” by Frank Banta
• “Egocentric Orbit” by John Cory
• “The Devil’s Asteroid” by Manly Wade Wellman
• “The Deadly Daughters” by Winston K Marks
• “The Day Of the Boomer Dukes” by Frederick Pohl
• “The Daughters Of Doom” by Herbert B Livingston

***

Free stuff from the High Lord of Free Stuff, Cory Doctorow:

IDW adapted six of my short stories for a comic book, publishing them as singles in 2007. In 2008, they published the full collection in a single set of covers, and I released them as a Creative Commons download under the Attribution-ShareAlike-Noncommercial license. Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories “Craphound,” “Anda’s Game,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “After the Siege,” “I, Robot” and “Nimby and the D-Hoppers.”

***

A message from Fred Himebaugh:

In case Tony C. Smith hasn’t let you know, the Starship Sofa Podcast features the following free fiction this week:

Main Fiction: Secret Life by Jeff VanderMeer

A vision of the building from on high: five glittering floors surrounded by a dull concrete parking lot. To the west lay a forest. To the east, the glint of a shopping mall, substantial as a mirage. To the north, highways and fast food restaurants. To the south, a perpetual gloom through which could be seen only more shadow.

Article – Fouque by Amy Sturgis; Flash Fiction – “Toujours Voir” by David Brin; Poetry – “Confessions Of A Body Thief” by Bruce Boston

Cheers, Fred!

***

Here’s instalment 15 of Memory from Jayme Lynn Blaschke:

Beneath the palace, running the length of the perimeter was a colossal Ketza’qua. The yellow-bronze specimen was old and reeked of power. The trusses and cables holding it in place groaned and cackled every time the serpentine body flexed, but showed no signs of breaking.

***

Michael Roberts just missed the boat last week, but his mention on BoingBoing probably more than made up for that. He says:

This week I wrote two more Tales of the Singularity: “Paul Bunyan and the Spambot“, and “Bruce Schneier and the King of the Crabs“. If and when I write more, they’ll be found in the relevant category of my website.

Thanks, Michael – sorry I missed your email last week!

***

The Friday Flash Fictioneers are a trifle thin on the ground this week, but there’s still a skeleton crew:

• Gareth D Jones fell a-foul of Blogger’s scheduled posting system, so “Never Talk To Strangers” missed the boat last week.
• Phred Serenissima also slipped through last week’s net, when he was developing a character called “Polly Pengelly Pendragon“; this week he’s making an “Initial Entry“
• Justin Pickard would like to say “Welcome to the Umweltzone“
• Gaie Sebold is all about the “Show and Tell“

***

Non-fiction bonus, via BoingBoing:

“Jonathan Zittrain gets so many things right in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, his book about what he calls ‘generative technology’ and why it’s so important. It’s chock-full of all sorts of issues that make Boingers salivate – freedom of speech, copyright, open source software, digital rights activism, privacy, censorship – put together into a very convincing argument in favor of unbridled innovation. This is definitely a book that you don’t want to pass up. It’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike 3.0 license and freely downloadable from the book’s website.”

Looks like it’ll be worth your time; I scanned through a few pages after downloading it, and there’s plenty of food for thought in there.

***

Webcomic collection bonus! If you’re a fan of Diesel Sweeties, you probably already know that R Stevens has collected the first 2000(!) strips into ten Creative Commons licensed PDF books that you’re free to download, trade and share.

If you’re not a fan yet, here’s an ideal opportunity to become one – Stevens’ wit is like Distilled Essence of Intarwebs, and his pixellated characters are surprisingly sympathetic. Or maybe it’s just me that identifies strongly with Indie Rock Pete …

***

Anyway, that’s about your lot for this week. Don’t forget to hit us up with plugs and suggestions* – in the meantime, have a good weekend and happy reading!

[ * For future reference, the deadline for submissions to Friday Free Fiction is 1800 hours GMT; adjust for your local timezone, please! 🙂 ]

It’s that time of week again, when thoughts turn to leaving the office, not working for a few days … and reading some stories. Here’s a whole bunch of good stuff to get your eyeballs tucked into.

***

The weekly selection from Manybooks.net, including a couple of early pieces from sf legend Robert Silverberg:

• “Impact” by Irving Cox – “They were languorous, anarchic, shameless in their pleasures . . . were they lower than man . . . or higher?”
• “The Nothing Equation” by Tom Godwin – “The space ships were miracles of power and precision; the men who manned them, rich in endurance and courage. Every detail had been checked and double checked; every detail except …”
• “Postmark Ganymede” by Robert Silverberg – “Consider the poor mailman of the future. To “sleet and snow and dead of night”–things that must not keep him from his appointed rounds–will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and planets that won’t stay put. Maybe he’ll decide that for six cents an ounce it just ain’t worth it.”
• “The Hunted Heroes” by Robert Silverberg – “The planet itself was tough enough–barren, desolate, forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad genius who had a motto: Death to all Terrans!” NOOOOO!
• “The Man Who Hated Mars” by Gordon Randall Garrett – “To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of a crack-proof exile camp–get onto a ship that couldn’t be boarded–smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only–THE MAN WHO HATED MARS.” NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!1

***

Via SF Signal we discover another what seems to be some sort of alternative or addition to services like Manybooks.net that has a much slicker front-end, plus charts and all that web2.0 stuff.

The titles all look pretty familiar (lots of Doctorow and Stross) but you might want to go poke around the science fiction section of Feedbooks anyway. Just in case. 😉

***

Via a number of places, but I think I spotted it at Scalzi‘s first (so that’s who I’m quoting):

“Australian science fiction writer Simon Hayes and Freemantle Publishing have posted the first of Hayes’s satirical Hal Spacejock novels online for you to download and try. Simon sends me copies of the series from time to time […] and they’re definitely fun, and (intentionally) humorous science fiction is hard enough to find as it is. Give it a look and if you like it, they’ll arrange to send you some actual books, at a discount of both the cover price and […] international postage.”

***

Via Friday Flash Fictioneer Gareth D Jones:

“… a ‘Fiction Special’ issue of Wales-based ezine Estronomicon is now online for you to download, featuring ten short stories.”

***

Missed this one last week: Captain Bruce Sterling recommends heading over to HarperCollins, where you can currently read the entirety of Invisible Armies by Jon Evans:

(((That’s a pretty good book, actually. It’s kind of a tough-as-nails technothriller from a leftie Seattle 99er perspective. People who aren’t morons and like thriller novels ought to read this.)))

***

Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull have released the “season finale” novel Refining Fire over at Shadow Unit this week in daily instalments; I think the whole thing should be there by the weekend. If you’ve not checked it out yet, there’s quarter of a million words of free fiction there now – and that’s just the first season.

***

Via Lou Anders, there’s a neatly collated selection of free-to-read sample chapters over at Pyr Books.

***

Michael Roberts slips in just behind the cut-off deadline with another Tale of the Singularity: “Lord Cthulhu Walks the Desert“.

***

And finally, your selection from the Friday Flash Fictioneers:

• Phred Serenissima‘s story from last week is “Garden Variety“; this week’s is called “Choices“.
• Gareth D Jones decries the ravages of war (and drugs) in “The Hastening of Battle“.
• Neil Beynon proves that you can get inspiration from blog posts here at Futurismic in “Touched“
• Don’t worry; Shaun C Green‘s “Spaceman” isn’t a cover version of the old 4 Non Blondes track.
• Gaie Sebold gets all po-mo with “Little Red Hoodie“

***

That’s your dose for the week, folks – should be enough to keep you going. Don’t forget to feed us your tips, plugs and suggestions as always. Have a great weekend!