Friday means free fiction as always here at Futurismic, and coming up is your weekly selection of genre wonders that won’t cost you anything to read.

But before you dig in, make sure you go and read our latest published piece of fiction, David Reagan’s “Solitude Ripples From The Past“.

OK, on with the list!

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Some innuendo-laden titles from Manybooks.net:

• “What The Left Hand Was Doing” by Gordon Randall Garrett – (“There is no lie so totally convincing as something the other fellow already knows-for-sure is the truth. And no cover-story so convincing …”)
• “Cum Grano Salis” by Gordon Randall Garrett – (“Just because a man can do something others can’t does not, unfortunately, mean he knows how to do it. One man could eat the native fruit and live … but how?”)
• “Hunters Out Of Space” by Joseph Everidge Kelleam

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Solaris Books are sharing a complete Stephen Baxter story. Originally published in the Solaris Book of New Science Fiction Vol 1, “Last Contact” will show you why Baxter is rated as one of hard sf’s best sensawunda guys:

Caitlin walked into the garden through the little gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn.

Just at that moment Maureen’s phone pinged. She took off her gardening gloves, dug the phone out of the deep pocket of her old quilted coat and looked at the screen. “Another contact,” she called to her daughter.

Caitlin looked cold in her thin jacket; she wrapped her arms around her body. “Another super-civilization discovered, off in space. We live in strange times, Mum.”

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Gwyneth Jones has pretty much finished sprucing up her online archive. Another story has been added called “In The Forest Of the Queen”

Furthermore there’s also a pair of critical essays which, despite Ms Jones’ self-effacement, are doubtless well worth a read if you like to analyse your literature as well as read it. They are:

• String of Pearls – “Sex and horror, perfect playmates or evil twins? Is this a genuine m/f divide? An examination of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel.”
• Wild Hearts In Uniform – “Secrets of the Pause: What did military sf do, in that brief hiatus when the USA was scratching around for a new external enemy? The answer may surprise you.”

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Apex Science Fiction and Horror Magazine provides “Light Like Knives Dragged Across the Skin” by Paul Jessup.

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke delivers installment 11 of Memory:

The strangling darkness vanished in an instant. His claustrophobic prison burst apart and Flavius found himself soaring a thousand feet above the ground.

He screamed against the rushing wind, flinging forward his cramped arms to shield his head. His sword spun away. The ground weaved wildly, see-sawing back and forth with the shockingly close clouds.

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Freebies via F&SF by Lucius Shepard:

Lucius Shepard is the award-winning author of innumerable classics, many of which have appeared in the pages of F&SF such as “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule” and “The Jaguar Hunter” (which you can read online at Infinity Plus). And, of course, he’s currently up for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and Locus Award for best novella, for his F&SF story, “Stars Seen Through Stone.”

“Stars …” is a super story, and comes with my recommendation, if that’s worth anything to you.

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Jason Sanford likes to share:

My short story “Maps of the Bible” has just been published over on Monsters and Critics. Set in Alabama during the early 1960s, the tale is in some ways a ghost story (although it would be more correct to place the story within the Southern Gothic genre of literature). “Maps of the Bible” also functions as a prologue to my short novel Jeremiah, which consists of the story sequence “Cold Pelts,” “One Side, Two Weeks, One Bathroom,” and “Water Hearts.”

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Thanks to the tireless Cole Kitchen, I have news of Escape Velocity, a hard science fiction magazine whose e-book versions are free-to-download PDFs. Escape Velocity:

“… publishes sci-fi stories from authors around the globe, future and historical science articles, Special Photo Features, and much more.”

Result! Thanks, Cole – added to the Sidebar of Free Fiction Justice.

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Another couple of additions to the Sidebar:

• Pantechnicon – a multi-genre webzine with both stories and non-fiction
• Serendipity – this UK-based webzine specialises in magic realist fiction

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Via Nick Mamatas:

It’s nerdy hobby theme month at Clarkesworld!

Cat Valente brings you “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antarctica“.

My pick was “Birdwatcher” by Garth Upshaw.

And the non-fiction feature is “Of Dice and Men: Modern Fantasists and the Influence of Role Playing Games” by Jay Ridler and Justin Howe.

So get to clickin’ and enjoy your afternoon of twitching, giggling, hand-flapping self-stim glee!

Does that last sentence sound a little suspect to anyone else? Thanks, Nick!

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Subterranean Online has a new Mike Resnick story – the Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones once again encounters his nemesis in “Connoisseurs”.

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Are you ready for episode 6 of Shadow Unit? “Endgames” was penned (or more likely typed) by Emma Bull:

As he walked the hall between Shadow Unit and the more public spaces of the BAU, Stephen Reyes pinched the bridge of his nose and slid his fingers hard down the ridge of each eyebrow, trying to push away his headache. He’d use both hands, but he had the case jacket in his right. The cause of the headache, those documents.

Bureaucracies would kill and eat you like any other monster. Just not quite so literally.

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Jake Frievald of Flash Fiction Online dropped us a note about this month’s edition:

“It’s that time of the month again – we just went live on Flash Fiction Online with new free stories. The highlight for sci fi fans is Bruce McAllister‘s “Game”. I like the other stuff, too, though. :)”

Cheers, Jake!

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And speaking of Flash Fiction … is that the march of the Fictioneers I hear?

There are a number of troops on leave – yours truly is focussing on longer stories for a while, Justin Pickard is in dissertation hell, Jay Lake is convalescing (get well soon, Jay!) and Gareth D Jones is excused for having sold a piece of fiction to Nature magazine – but there’s still the steady stomp of boots on the parade-ground asphalt:

• Clive Birnie is reiterating in “The Identity Thief 2.0“
• Don’t worry, Gareth L Powell; it’s not “The End Of The World“
• Greg O’Byrne is looking good in “The Red Dress“
• Neil Beynon is giving you the “Devil Eyes“

Plus we have new recruits. Sarah Ellender and Gaie Sebold will be posting on alternate Fridays over at their PlotMedics site; Gaie goes first with “Folie a Deux“.

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And that’s about everything from the immense sprawl of the interwebs, as far as free fiction is concerned. Don’t forget to send us your plugs and tip-offs – and have a great weekend!

Greetings, fiction fans – Friday means freebies!

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Before we get going with the linkage, it’s worth pointing out that Wednesday was the first anniversary of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. What that means in real terms is that there’s bucket-loads of extra free fiction from all manner of writers spattered all over the intarwebs, and it’s all collected in one convenient LiveJournal Community.

I’ve not checked it out yet (I kinda phear t3h LiveJournal, as I imagine it has the power to erode the last few precious hours of free time I have), but I think we can safely assume that’ll be a real rabbit-hole for fiction fans. Please report back if you find anything particularly good in there that deserves a link of its own!

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OK, so back to the usual suspects. It’s just the one from Manybooks.net this week:

• “Daughters of Doom” by Herbert B. Livingston (“Deep in space lay a weird and threatening world. And it was there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . . .” Mwuah-hah-hah-haaaah!)

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Nathan Lilly dropped me a note to remind us all that part 2 of A R Yngve‘s “A Man Called Mister Brown” is online at SpaceWesterns.com this week, along with some non-fictional stuff about BSG.

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Another new piece goes up over at Subterranean Online – “Your Collar” by Elizabeth Bear.

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I have stumbled upon (and added to the sidebar) another online fiction outlet called Lone Star Stories, which I discovered thanks to the effusive praise Jeremiah Tolbert had for “The Wreck of the Grampus” by Jeremy Adam Smith.

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There’s another teaser/deleted scene piece (which all seem to get filed under the excellent ‘WTF BBQ’ category) over at Shadow Unit:

“Lau was a Valley Girl, dammit. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill.

And that was half the problem. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill, and that was not what this was. This looked like the navigation panel on the Starship Enterprise, and not the Sulu-era one with the slider and a couple of nonfunctional push buttons in primary colors, either.”

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Small Beer Press have evidently developed a taste for this free Creative Commons downloads business. This week they’ve set free Maureen F McHugh‘s short story collection Mothers & Other Monsters:

“… in her luminous, long-awaited début collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.”

Sounds good to me! That said, so does a small beer … it is Friday, after all!

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I got an email from a chap called Michael Roberts, who says:

“Back in January I wrote a little novelette which is probably not too publishable (or so I read; at 8743 words it’s really too long to put in a magazine). So I figured, why not put it online? And so I finally got off my figurative butt and did so. Now if I could only think of a good title …”

For future reference, Michael, there’s plenty of venues for fiction that length – so you’ll know for next time. If you go and read it, be sure to drop Michael a suggestion for his title!

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Which brings us round to the march of the Friday Flash Fictioneers!

• Martin McGrath just missed the post last week with “King Rook“
• Mind you don’t cut yourself on Jay Lake’s “Shard“.
• Greg O’Byrne has an “Interstellar” fragment.
• Neil Beynon‘s forty-second piece (he’s only ever missed roll-call once, IIRC) is called “Precious“.
• Shaun C Green has reached a “Turning Point“.
• Gareth D Jones gets all nostalgic in “Gone With The Window“.
• And finally yours truly humbly offers you “Magic Eyes“.

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And that’s about your lot – I reckon the IPSTPD community should provide more than enough material to be going on with. So until next week, keep your eyes and ears peeled for more free fiction on the web, and drop us a line with your tips!

Have a great weekend, too.

Here we go again with your weekly round-up of free fiction on the web …

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From Manybooks.net:

• “Space Platform” by Murray Leinster (“When young Joe Kenmore came to Bootstrap to install pilot gyros in the Platform he hadn’t bargained for sabotage or murder or love. But Joe learned that ruthless agents were determined to wreck the project. He found that the beautiful girl he loved, and men like The Chief, a rugged Indian steelworker, and Mike, a midget who made up for his size by brains, would have to fight with their bare hands to make man’s age old dream of space travel come true!” Can you fight political disinterest with your bare hands, then?)
• “The Penal Cluster” by Gordon Randall Garrett (“Tomorrow’s technocracy will produce more and more things for better living. It will produce other things, also; among them, criminals too despicable to live on this earth. Too abominable to breathe our free air.” O NOES!)
• “The Planet Strappers” by Raymond Z Gallun (“The Planet Strappers started out as The Bunch, a group of student-astronauts in the back room of a store in Jarviston, Minnesota. They wanted off Earth, and they begged, borrowed and built what they needed to make it. They got what they wanted – a start on the road to the stars – but no one brought up on Earth could have imagined what was waiting for them Out There!” No kidding, they have Starbucks here too?)
• “Trouble on Titan” by Arthur K Barnes (“When the Queen of the Spaceways meets the King of the Interplanetary Wilds, there’s a checkmate in the stalking of Saturn’s most dangerous game!”)
• “The Delegate From Venus” by Henry Slesar (“Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath.”)
• “No Moving Parts” by Murray F Yaco

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News from Small Beer Press:

“To celebrate the publication of his first new collection of short stories in ten years, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, John Kessel and Small Beer Press have made it available as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. An astonishing, long-awaited collection of stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O’Connor. Includes John Kessel’s modern classic “Lunar Quartet” sequence about life on the moon.”

Sounds good to me.

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Two updates from John Joseph Adams from beneath his F&SF hat. Firstly there’s news about Daryl Gregory:

“Daryl’s website features a number of pieces of free fiction, including several F&SF stories – such as his first pro sale, “In the Wheels,” “The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy,” and “Free, and Clear.””

And then some news about Peter Beagle:

“Peter S. Beagle is the author of many novels and stories, including the beloved classic The Last Unicorn. In 2005, F&SF published Beagle’s Nebula Award-winning sequel to The Last Unicorn, the novelette “Two Hearts”.”

I adored the movie of The Last Unicorn as a child (I can still get surprisingly emotional over it now), and I was gutted when I found out how badly shafted Beagle was on the deal. Go read his story.

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The gang at Subterranean Press are churning out the Spring 2008 issue of Subterranean Online. Available so far:

• “Air and Angels” by Beth Bernobich
• “By the Liter” by Ekaterina Sedia
• “Stone Eggs” by Adriana Campoy and James P. Blaylock
• An interview with Sherrilyn Kenyon by Alethea Kontis.)

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An email arrived from Nathan Lilly:

“Just a brief note to announce SpaceWesterns.com‘s first full year of publication. The new year brings:

• a creative refresh of the home page
• the launch of our blog, The Sideshow
• the creation of a (nearly) complete Space Western list.

All that in addition to the publication of Space Western stories and articles. This week we’ve [re-]published “Craphound” by Cory Doctorow, and part 1 of an eight-part serial titled “A Man Called Mister Brown” by A.R. Yngve. Next week we have an interview with David Weddle, screenwriter for Battlestar Galactica.”

Sounds like it’s all go over there – good luck, Nathan!

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The still-websiteless-but-eternally-diligent-and-superbly-monickered Cole Kitchen continues to keep us abreast of webzine developments:

• [link expunged]
  
• Abyss & Apex has done the same with their twenty-fifth issue.

Also a couple of new titles (now added to the Sidebar Of Justice)

• RevolutionSF (tag-lined “Tough Love for Sci-Fi” … there’s no tougher love than that horrible contraction, surely? 😉 )
• Bewildering Stories (which, once you get past the bewildering pre-millennial web-design, appears to have a great deal of content stored away)

Cheers, Cole!

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Shadow Unit is up to episode 5 with “Ballistic“, a team effort from Sarah Monette, Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear & Amanda Downum.

“You aren’t supposed to be in Grandma’s room when she isn’t there. It’s dark inside, the heavy curtains drawn tight, and the air smells of camphor and lavender potpourri and furniture polish. Your stomach feels too small as you peer through the cracked-open door, like it did when Tommy Wilson dared you to crawl into that abandoned woodshed all full of spiders. Making Grandma mad scares you more than spiders, but this morning she went to the store and left you alone watching cartoons and eating Cocoa Puffs.”

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke has the tenth instalment of the irregular yet intriguing “Memory”.

“Chaos erupted among the moironteau. The predatory discipline organizing the creatures broke down in the face of thirty quarry. Moironteau lunged and slashed, footheads choming wildly at the darting green Parrics flying to and fro. Those hanging above dropped into the fray, the lure of the chase too tempting to resist. The carefully-constructed trap collapsed into itself.

“Stupiding otherwhereians,” muttered Parric from his coiled position in the middle of it all. “All muscle, no finessing.””

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Sir John of Scalzi is getting all DOS-prompt-retro on us by going the shareware route with a piece of fiction:

“Starting right this very second, a (zipped) pdf version of “How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story” is available for you to read and enjoy. I’m offering it as shareware – that is, it’s free to read, but if you like it, you’re encouraged to send a little money my way. How much? Up to you (but, you know. Not too much. It’s a short story, not a novel).”

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Via SFCanada, we hear that Nina Munteanu has posted her short story “A Butterfly in Peking” online.

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Jay Lake dips into his seemingly bottomless pit of previously published short fiction once again:

“The current installment in this series is my short story “Small Magic“. At 5,600 words, this originally appeared in Weird Tales #340 (May/June 2006). It has never been reprinted elsewhere. If you like the story, please consider supporting Weird Tales. Trivium: the initial inspiration for this story was the Sting song “All This Time”.)”

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The Friday Flash Fictioneers are back in action once again – though yours truly is using double shifts at the day-job as his cop-out excuse once again.

• Neil Beynon explores some new “Territory“.
• Dan Pawley may have to pay the “Piper“.
• Gareth D Jones has decided that “A Change Is As Good As A Rest“.
• Greg O’Byrne has been working as “The Delivery Boy“
• Phred Serenissima has been working “In Service To The Empire“

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A final non-fiction bonus – and if Futurismic has any creationist readers, they may wish to skip ahead right over this one. Via Cosmos Magazine, we hear that the complete collection of Charles Darwin’s papers are online. SRSLY – all of them:

“”This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,” said John van Wyhe, the director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online project.”

Blimey.

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Well, that’s your lot for this week – there should be more than enough there to keep you busy over the weekend, I figure. Don’t forget that we’re always looking for tip-offs and plugs from you, our readers, so just drop us a line via the contact page.

In the meantime – have a great weekend, folks!

It’s a thin week for free fiction, which probably shouldn’t be entirely surprising after last week’s mammoth batch. There’s still a little for you to get your teeth into, though:

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Only the one from Manybooks.net, but it’s by a classic author: “The Happy Unfortunate” by Robert Silverberg. (“Dekker, back from space, found great physical changes in the people of Earth; changes that would have horrified him five years before. But now, he wanted to be like the rest–even if he had to lose an eye and both ears to do it.” Sheesh – the price of conformity, eh?)

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Lesley Smith dropped us a line to let us know about ElectricSpec, an three-times-yearly online speculative fiction webzine that has now been added to the Futurismic Sidebar Of Justice. Cheers, Lesley!

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Via the Iain (M) Banks website comes news that UK newspaper The Independent has teamed up with Audible.co.uk to provide a free-to-download audiobook version of Iain Banks‘s first published novel, The Wasp Factory.

I will point out that it’s not a science fiction novel, but go on to say that it’s an excellent story anyway and well worth your time. It also has one of the best twist endings EVER. Go get it!

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The irrepressible Hal Duncan has, in addition to some audio content, a long short story for you to download. In the man’s own words:

“Well, what we have is a previously unpublished novella, “Die! Vampire! Die!”. It’s 15,000 words (cause I don’t do anything by halves) of black humour, featuring some characters ye might well recognise from [Duncan’s novels] VELLUM and INK, my gay Orpheus punk rock musical NOWHERE TOWN, and every other f*cking story they refuse to let me write without them worming their way into it.”

Roughly translated, that means it should be a riot to read.

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Warren Ellis‘s free Freakangels comic is up to episode 9, and is starting to get some good character complexity developing.

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The ranks of the Friday Flash Fictioneers are filling out again. I’m pleading external obligations this week, but Dan Pawley is back (from the deepest internet-devoid reaches of, er, Bournemouth) with an extra-length piece called “Doing The Islands“.

Elsewhere, Gareth D Jones says “Now You See Me“, while Gareth L Powell lurks in the “Victoria Rooms“; Neil Beynon is watching “Pixies“, and Greg O’Byrne‘s in the mood for “Tekepathic Love“; Jay Lake muses on “The Inertia of Corpses” while Clive Birnie has developed a serious fear of the UK healthcare system – “The NHS Was Trying To Kill Him“.

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And that’s all for this week, boys and girls … but for me to remind you to keep sending us your tip-offs and plugs, of course. We’d rather people told us about things we already knew than miss out on something we didn’t, so drop us a line even if you think we’re already on the case!

In the meantime, have a good weekend.