Tag Archives: science fiction

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Friday Free Fiction for 26th June – the end of an era

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It’s Friday afternoon here in the UK, which can only mean one thing – it’s free fiction round-up time here at Futurismic!

But it should be noted that nothing is permanent in this universe – indeed, this is going to be the last ever Friday Free Fiction at Futurismic. Not because there’s any less good science fictional stuff to read on the internet – quite the opposite, in fact, as regular readers are doubtless well aware – but because it’s becoming increasingly hard for me to keep up with it all and paste it all together.

And when I can see someone else doing a far more complete job elsewhere (namely the doubtless pseudonymical Quasar Dragon over at SF Signal), I think it’s only fair to send them the kudos and the traffic they deserve. Getting back three or four hours of my working week is an added bonus, of course… 😉

So, in short: if you’ve been a loyal follower of Friday Free Fiction here at Futurismic, you should immediately subscribe to SF Signal‘s RSS feed, assuming you’re not subscribed already. Their daily free fiction posts cover fantasy and horror as well as science fiction, so you can pick and choose from the best of the genre writing available on the intertubes. You’ll also get all the other SF Signal posts, which are great stuff for genre heads of every stripe, and it’ll cost you nothing at all. Makes sense, doesn’t it? So make with the clicky.

(I also recommend our regular tipsters to send future notifications to SF Signal for inclusion in their round-ups; I’m sure they’ll be just as grateful for your input as I’ve always been!)

But let’s just tie up this week’s batch before we sign off for the last time, eh?

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A big bunch from ManyBooks:

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And a load more from FeedBooks:

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Issue #90 of HUB Magazine features an extract from nerw Angry Robot-published novel Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

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Strange Horizons presents “Another End of the Empire” by Futurismic fictioneer Tim Pratt.

Tim’s also starting a free-to-read donation-supported serial novella:

Bone Shop is a serialized, donation-funded urban fantasy novella, available for anyone to read for free. New chapters will go up every Monday. The Bone Shop website is here, though there’s not a lot there at the moment. I’ll post the first chapter on June 29.

Times are tough in the Pratt household, so if you can part with a few dollars a week to help out a very talented writer in exchange for him giving away some of his work, please do so.

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Tor.com presents “The House That George Built” by Harry Turtledove

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The ongoing serialisation of Jason Stoddard‘s Eternal Franchise continues with chapter 9.2

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Some dreamscape weirdness from Captain VanderMeer: “Three Dreams and a Fabrication”

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Angry Robot Books has a sample extract from Chris Roberson‘s Book Of Secrets (as well as from some UrbFant zombie/detective mash-up which didn’t much appeal to me, but which might flick your switches).

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Sumit Dam chips in with “The Heroism of Colonel Pussy“

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And as mentioned above, here are those incomparably complete free fiction round-ups from SF Signal over the last week: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and today. That’s the way the professionals do it. 🙂

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And that’s that, ladies and gentlemen; thank you all for reading along and sending in your tip-offs. I’ve discovered a lot of new writers and webzines through doing these round-ups, and I’m sure there’ll be more to come yet – so keeping watching your feeds! Meanwhile, it’s fiction and futurism business as usual at Futurismic from here on in.

Have a great weekend. 🙂

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Friday Free Fiction for 19th June

Heads up, Friday people – time for your weekly wheelbarrow of free science fiction stories from the far-flung bends and spirals of the intertubes!

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A big batch from ManyBooks this time out:

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But just the one from FeedBooks:

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HUB Magazine presents “Storm CHASER” by Craig Pirrell

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There’s only the one DVD extra from Shadow Unit, but that should be “Sufficient“. Arf!

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Chris Roberson is back in the free-fic saddle with “Annus Mirabilis”

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Still coming steady from Fort Stoddard, Eternal Franchise is up to chapter 9.1

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A R Yngve sez:

My homepage has been updated with chapter 6 of my unsold novel The Time Idiot (the ongoing serial). This is a short, funny novel about a dumb man who has gained power far beyond his ability to handle it responsibly — in this case, the power to alter history. (You can call it a metaphor, if you’re into metaphors.)

Cheers, A R!

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Via BoingBoing (and pretty much the rest of the genre sub-web) comes the word that Catherynne M Valente is posting one chapter a week from her superbly-titled YA fantasy novel, The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Also mentioned at BoingBoing is a similar effort by a chap called Jonathan, who says “I’ve set myself the target of putting a free short story online every week, and to keep doing just that for a year. […] more than that, I am making these stories available under a Creative Commons Share-alike Licence, hoping that others will take the stories to places that even I can’t imagine.” Well, good on him; go take a look, why don’tcha?

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Once again, SF Signal have a hugely comprehensive post of free fiction for each day of the past week, so go follow those. They also pointed out that Hachette – the people behind SF publisher Orbit Books – have made The Digital Plague by Jeff Somers available to read online, albeit from a rather fiddly Flash interface that crashes my browser (64-bit Kubuntu doesn’t handle these things well, sadly).

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And last but not least, a few short pieces from the ever-reliable Sumit Dam: “The Queen Is Dead” and “Manna“.

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That should keep you out of trouble while the boss finishes off his extended Friday lunch meeting, right? Right – and don’t forget you can drop us a note with any suggestions for next week’s collection. In the mean time, have a great weekend!

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Pessimistic science fiction is a cop-out

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opportunity center signIt’s nearing the submission deadline for the Shine Anthology, and editor Jetse de Vries has heard every excuse under the sun from science fiction writers who cannot or will not write optimistic near-future science fiction stories. Indeed, he’s heard enough of them to taxonomise them into seven distinct categories, to which he has posted a lengthy rebuttal on the anthology blog. [image by streamishmc]

The excuses – and he really does see them as excuses – are as follows:

  1. (Deliberately) misinterpreting the meaning of ‘optimistic SF’.
  2. Optimism is not realistic.
  3. You cannot predict the near future exactly, so you might as well not try.
  4. There is no possibility for conflict in a full-on optimistic future.
  5. I can’t do it because we live in dire times.
  6. My downbeat SF story is meant as a cautionary tale.
  7. I will not confirm to your positivist agenda: nobody tells me what to write.

If you’re at all interested in short form science fiction, you should read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts from the post:

This is a defence mechanism: most SF writers don’t want to write something that is too difficult, too risk-taking, and – dog forbid – relevant. They just want to write about something they find cool, and will throw up a barrage of excuses just to keep doing that. Those excuses are often dressed up as reasonable arguments, but more often than not what they really imply is: “Hey, I don’t want to this near future, optimistic stuff: I just want to stay in my comfort zone.” And indeed, that’s what most dystopias are: a comfort zone for unambitious writers.

[…]

There is a myth in writing circles that writers really like a challenge: tell a group of writers that they can’t do something and by golly, they will show you they can. Well, that myth is only true for simple challenges, like when Gordon Van Gelder said he didn’t like elves: immediately half the writing community brainstormed brilliant elf stories that would leave Gordon breathless.

However, now that I’m throwing out a real challenge – near future, optimistic SF – the utmost majority of the SF writing community is enormously reluctant at best, and downright dismissive at worst. Obviously, this is a challenge that doesn’t count. Well, I’ve got a message to all those writers who think they can ignore this challenge: get real, that is: look around in the real world.

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There is a huge imbalance between pessimism and optimism in written SF today: the genre is overwhelmingly bleak. With Shine I’m trying to redress that lopsidedness somewhat. It’s a challenge: try your hand at this for just one short story only. But the general impression I’m getting from the SF ghetto is that ‘you’ll have to pry the pessimism from my cold, dead hands’ (exceptions acknowledged, of course). And indeed, if SF stops trying out new avenues, if it stops renewing itself, if it will not take risks, if it does not try to be relevant, then it will die.

At which point it can keep its bleakness.

The genre’s antipathy to change and new ideas is an observable phenomenon – one only need look to the backlash that Mundane SF produced for the proof – and Jetse’s dismantling of the seven excuses is lucid, logical and provocative. Essentially, all the defences boil down to one: I don’t wanna. And that’s fair enough, I guess – though it does somewhat put the lie to science fiction’s claim to be the foremost literature of the imagination.

There is one other excuse that Jetse misses off his list, though, possibly because it’s more honest than the others. As James “Big Dumb Object” Bloomer puts it:

I’ve been trying and it’s really bloody hard! […] the three months I’ve been trying to write optimistic stories are not enough, I have a feeling that it’s a life time’s work. I’m not going to give up though.

Kudos to him for that – any sort of change takes effort and will, after all.

So, all you writers among Futurismic‘s audience: do you have an excuse that’s not on Jetse’s list?

The Adam Roberts Project

Book review: Thomas Hodgkin – Denis Bayle: a Life

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The Adam Roberts Project

Thomas Hodgkin, Denis Bayle: a Life (Badger Books 2009)

[pp.321. £20.00. ISBN: 724381129524]

This is a novel with an interesting conceit, written by a newcomer to SF (although according to Hodgkin’s own author bio, he has published a number of mainstream novels). The book takes the form of a biography, complete with preface, scholarly apparatus, timeline and everything else. The subject of the story is a fictional Science Fiction author, the Denis Bayle of the title, but the point of the book is less to tell a life story (Hodgkin doesn’t give Bayle that interesting a life).

Continue reading Book review: Thomas Hodgkin – Denis Bayle: a Life →

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Friday Free Fiction for 12th June

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It’s Friday once again, which can only mean one thing – a big bunch of free science fiction stories to read on the intertubes!

Thanks to the wonders of Fusion-Modulated Temporal Blogging Technology (better known as “pre-scheduled posting”), I’ll actually be half-way up the country from my home by the time you read this, having compiled it beforehand… so if there’s anything I’ve missed, please accept my apologies, and my assurances that it’ll be rounded up for next week’s collection. That said, there’s plenty here to keep your eyeballs busy as it is…

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Here’s a whole shed-load from FeedBooks:

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Strange Horizons presents what is surely a candidate for Longest Titled Short Story Ever: “A Journal of Certain Events of Scientific Interest from the First Survey Voyage of the Southern Waters by HMS Ocelot, As Observed by Professor Thaddeus Boswell, DPhil, MSc; or, A Lullaby” by Helen Keeble, part the first and part the second

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Subterranean Online presents a new excursion into Jack Vance’s Dying Earth: “Sylgarmo’s Proclamation” by Lucius Shepard

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Here’s the latest instalment of Jason Stoddard‘s Eternal Franchise; we’re up to chapter 8.4

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Shadow Unit Season 2 continues with Episode 2.04: “Getaway“

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News from the courageous Jay Lake:

My short story “People of Leaf and Branch” is live at Fantasy magazine.

There’s also a sample from Jay’s new novel Green at Tor.com.

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Speaking of Tor.com, their latest full-sized piece of original fiction is “The City Quiet as Death” by Steven Utley and Michael Bishop

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Here’s fragment 38 of Jayme Lynn Blaschke‘s Memory

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The ever-prolific Lee Gimenez writes to inform us that his story “September 12th” is up at Aphelion.

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Last but certainly not least, over at SF Signal they’re continuing their nefarious and underhand quest to make me look like the lazy mountebank I surely am by collating daily (daily!) free fiction round–ups. So go and wreak revenge on my behalf by clicking through and hopefully overloading their servers or something. That’ll show ’em. 😉

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Oh, you want more? OK, so here’s a non-fiction bonus for you: in case you’ve not seen it already, the new edition of H+ Magazine is available to buy, read online in a fancy Flash interface or download as a free PDF. Can’t say they don’t give you options, them transhumanist types…

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And that’s your lot. Don’t forget to send smoke signals if you want to head us off at the pass with something you think we might otherwise miss in next week’s selection! But otherwise, have yourselves as good a weekend as you can.