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Friday Free Fiction for 11th July

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Good grief, would you believe it’s Friday already? Well, it surely is – and Friday means free fiction at Futurismic, as is customary. Eyeballs at the ready? Let’s go!

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Here’s another couple of titles from ManyBooks.net:

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Everything went a bit loopy with the Feedbooks RSS feed over the weekend, and I ended up with about 400 titles in my feed-reader, most of which seemed to be boxing-themed, for some odd reason. I think I only cleared out the duffers, and the sf titles I’ve already linked, but you may want to go browse around and check just in case.

Otherwise, there’s another huge wodge of Richard Kadrey‘s stuff:

Plus another novel by Matthew Phipps Shiel:

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Another free fiction site via SF Signal; Munseys, which has the following for your reading pleasure:

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Also via SF Signal are a few freebies from Solaris Books: a short story called “Tornado of Sparks” by James Maxey, originally published in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, and the ongoing serialisation of Chris Roberson’s Three Unbroken.

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EOS Books are giving away a free electronic version of Karen Traviss‘ novel City of Pearl.

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At Subterranean Online this week, there’s an appreciation of Mike Resnick by Nancy Kress as well as a novella from Resnick, “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge“.

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And last but not least, your weekly helping of Friday Flash:

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And there it is; that should keep you busy for a while. Weekend web warriors should keep an eye on their feed readers over the next few days, as Futurismic begins syndicating its new resident webcomic – watch this space!

In the meantime, your tip-offs and shameless self-plugs are always welcome – FFF submission deadline is 1800 GMT.

Have a great weekend!

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Friday Free Fiction for 4th July

Happy Independence Day, America! With that long weekend ahead of you, you’ll be needing some fiction to while away the spare hours, right?

OK, so maybe not – it’ll keep until you’re all partied out, anyway. Everyone else – get stuck in!

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We’ll start off sedately with ManyBooks.net:

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Feedbooks continues to demonstrate the productivity power of crowdsourcing. I don’t know if they can keep up this pace forever, but there’s another random sackful of stories old and new:

And a big wodge of Richard Kadrey‘s stuff:

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Another chunk of Shadow Unit‘s “summertime DVD extras” have appeared – read the whole of “Vigil” so far.

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It’s new ‘zine season at Subterranean Press:

“Oddly (and delightfully) enough, we’ve chosen to kick off the special Mike Resnick issue of Subterranean Online with a brand new story by Jay Lake, as well as an insightful interview with same. His new novel, Escapement, has just hit the stands. “Chain of Fools” shares that novel’s setting, though it doesn’t depend on the novel to be enjoyed fully.

Next week, look for us to start serializing Mike Resnick’s classic novella, “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge.”

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There’s a new issue (#22) of Clarkesworld also:

There’s non-fiction, too:

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Not to mention issue 3 of Oddlands Magazine:

Plus poetry and a review.

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[links expunged]

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And another – Jake Freivald sez:

The latest issue of Flash Fiction Online is up!

Cheers, Jake!

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Via BoingBoing:

To celebrate the release of Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams, Night Shade Books has posted a self-contained excerpt from the book [and] the complete text of Williams’s Nebula Award-winning novella “The Green Leopard Plague” to their downloads page. They’ve also got a short interview with him here.

Implied Spaces comes highly recommended by a number of people, arguably the least influential of whom is myself – check out my review of the book, if you like.

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A seventeenth slice of Memory from Jayme Lynn Blaschke:

Flavius’ footsteps echoed eerily in the deathly silence of the hall. Barely a dozen liveried staff milled in confusion along the perimeter of the oblong chamber, with a like number of guards spaced at even intervals, cuayabs held unobtrusively. The balcony boxes, halfway up the vaulted ceiling, remained empty.

At the far end of the audience hall, seated upon ornate thrones on a raised marble dias polished so brightly it hurt the eyes to look at, were the Tricentennial Emperor and Empress.

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Gareth L Powell‘s been too busy to write anything for us this week, but he has by way of compensation, offered us the chance to download an excerpt from his forthcoming short story collection, The Last Reef.

Indeed, it looks like most of the Friday Flash Fictioneers are taking a sabbatical this week, but the die-hards are still on the case:

  • Phred Serenissima is hanging with “Van and Marla“
  • Neil Beynon‘s on the “Blink“

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And there’s your weekly dose of free fiction – I hope there’s something in there to keep your literary stomach from churning. Don’t forget to send us your tips and plugs for next week – deadline is 1800 GMT Friday afternoon. Have a great weekend!

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Friday Free Fiction for 27th June

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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 …

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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

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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 …

… but full novels, too:

Crikey!

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

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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!

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

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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!

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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.

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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.

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke is up to instalment sixteen of Memory:

Bolts of green flame spewed from the cuayabs.

Quite!

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

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:

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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!

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Friday Free Fiction for 20th June

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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 …

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Here’s a bunch from ManyBooks.net:

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A fist-full from FeedBooks:

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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”

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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.

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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!

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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.”

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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.

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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!

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Friday Free Fiction for 13th June

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

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Here’s a handful from Manybooks.net:

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

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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.”

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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!

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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.

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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!

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

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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.

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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 …

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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! 🙂 ]