There may be late arrivals that I’ve missed this week, as my writing duties elsewhere mean I’ll probably be at an album launch party at a dingy music-venue bar somewhere in London when this post goes live … I know, it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it! 🙂 Any fiction that appeared too late for me to compile will be rolled into next week’s post.

Any which way, it’s a thin week – so remind writer friends and editors of webzines to send me an email about new material, or just do so on their behalf. So, here we go:

***

Project Gutenberg adds stories from Stanley G. Weinbaum: "The Ideal", "The Point of View", "Pygmalion’s Spectacles" and "The Worlds of If".

***

If you’ve any sense, you’re probably checking back regularly or subscribed via RSS, but for those who aren’t in the know, Subterranean Online has added stories by David Prill and Chris Roberson to its latest ongoing edition.

***

Not quite fiction in the traditional sense, but worth a look anyway – Steampunk Magazine‘s Guide to the Apocalypse is available as a free PDF download.

***

Paul McAuley has posted the first three chapters of his latest novel, Cowboy Angels, for you to try out.

***

An email arrived from Fred Himebaugh:

"I’m writing a series of SF fiction openers as an exercise, and blogging them.  Although the posts are nominally openers, the effect is quite similar to flash fiction, so I think your readers will enjoy them as stand-alone stories.  I’m adding new stories at the rate of two or so per day, and I intend to keep at it for at least a week.

My blog’s topics are science fiction, choral music, choral music in science fiction, and science fiction in choral music.  And zeppelins."

An interesting blend of topics, for certain. Cheers, Fred!

***

Martin McGrath makes the only confirmed appearance from the Friday Flash Fictioneers by having posted "Another Funny Thing Happened in Hyperspace" a few days early. But I’m confident that the usual suspects will provide in their usual reliable manner, so go and check for some fictional nuggets from Gareth L Powell, Gareth D Jones, Neil Beynon, and Shaun C Green. If all has gone according to plan, my piece called "Harvest for the Gods" should be available too.

***

Have a good weekend!

A pretty decent haul this week:

Gareth L. Powell‘s on a roll as far as getting his work published is concerned. In addition to the stuff that’s made it into real dead-tree venues, here’s some of his work you can read for free:

• Pod Dreams of Tuckertown in October’s Byzarium.
• Plus links to older stories by Gareth at Free Speculative Fiction Online

[Disclosure – Gareth’s a good friend, and fellow (founding) member of the Friday Flash Fictioneers]

***

[link expunged]

***

Via Nancy Jane Moore:

Here’s a goody for your free fiction page: Suzette Haden Elgin‘s
novel, The Communipaths, first published as an Ace double back in 1970, is now available free online.

By the way, Elgin is still writing and publishing — she just released (in print) an SF poetry collection “Twenty-One Novel Poems.” She blogs at http://ozarque.livejournal.com/ .

Also, the new issue of Farrago’s Wainscot is out, with stories by Forrest Aguirre, Michael Jasper, Yoon Ha Lee, Timothy S. Miller and Jenn Reese. Plus poetry and other.

***

Clarkesworld Magazine provides us with “Excerpt from a Letter by a Social-realist Aswang” by Kristin Mandigma.

***

Project Gutenburg has some freebies by Alan E. Nourse: “The Link“, “Meeting of the Board” and “My Friend Bobby“.

***

Here’s a new site that I’d not heard of before: Every Day Fiction does what it says on the tin, and delivers you a short story (apparently not always sf) every day. I discovered it after Ken MacLeod noticed he got a name-check in a piece called “Security Question” by Ramon Rozas III.

***

Chris Roberson‘s on a roll with his own Friday Freebies – here’s a big old chunk of his novel Paragaea.

***

The one and only Charlie Stross isn’t able to give away the entirety of his latest novel, Halting State, under a Creative Commons licence, but he is able to provide us with some of the early chapters – start with the prologue.

***

Futurismic’s own Jeremiah Tolbert has a great flash piece up at the Daily Cabal – “My Cell Phone is a Slut”, no less.

And as always, if you’ve a hunger for the bite-sized stuff, the Friday Flash Fictioneers can deliver: the above-mentioned Gareth L. Powell gives us “Driving to the Moon”; Gareth D. Jones has his tongue in his cheek with “The Alliterati”; Martin McGrath has been playing catch-up after a few weeks of silence, and you can see the results; Neil Beynon delivers “A Bit Of A Pickle”; and there’s always “Secrets of the Faith” by yours truly. Looks like some of the gang are running a little late this week, so you may want to keep your eyes peeled for work from Shaun C. Green … and last but not least, welcome to our newest recruit Dan Pawley, whose FFF debut is entitled “Transportation”.

***

And one to watch out for in the weeks to come – Fantasy Magazine is moving entirely away from print and changing to a free weekly online format – and increasing their per-word price for accepted fiction in the process!

Enjoy your weekend!

Authors, editors and anyone else – if you’ve got something free to read or listen to that you want included in next week’s round-up, drop an email to me (Paul Raven) via the address embedded in my name on the Staff page. Cheers!

Compared to last week’s bumper crop, we’ve a fairly small serving of free fiction this Friday … but there’s always something fresh to read on the intarwebs.

Webzines!

• Orion’s Child SF/F webzine returns with Vol. 2, #5.
• Subterranean Online‘s Fall 07 issue is now complete – de Lint, Bear, Lansdale, Stross and more!
• We mentioned it once already, but I’ll give a second crack of the whip to Steampunk Magazine issue #3, available as a free-to-download PDF file.

Only one new item at ManyBooks.net (that I’ve seen linked, at least): "Pagan Passions" by Gordon Randall Garrett.

Mac Tonnies has had his CC-licensed short story "The Reenactment" published at Alterati.

The current edition of Chris Roberson‘s free fiction feature that occurs on a Friday has an entire stand-alone short story for your perusal: "Penumbra".

The Friday Flash gang is a few writers short this week, but there’s still some super-short fiction from Shaun C. Green ("Satisfaction"), Neil Beynon ("When I was bad"), Gareth D. Jones ("The Man Behind The Throne") and yours truly ("The Mud-Crab"), if you want to keep it bite-sized.

If you’re hungry for more, and you’re keen on a bit of heavy-duty lit-crit, you can always go and read a transcript of John Clute‘s talk that he gave to the American Centre in Prague back in September, wherein he discusses ‘Fantastika’ – a bracket term he uses for "that wide range of fictional works whose contents are understood to be fantastic". Like all of Clute’s work, it’s intensely brilliant and very complex, and always worth the read.

Enjoy your weekend!

Writers, editors and anyone else – if you have some material published for people to read toll-free here on the wonderful intarwebs, drop me a line using the email address listed for me (Paul Raven) on the Futurismic staff page, and I’ll add it to the next batch.

Partly, I suspect, due to us getting BoingBoinged last week, we’ve got a mailbox full of free fiction this time round:

From Karl Schroeder:

… I just thought I’d let you know that I’ve released a free ebook version of my first novel, Ventus, under a Creative Commons license.  It’s available in a variety of formats from my website at www.kschroeder.com.

I’m delighted to be able to give something back to the community in this way, and I’m hopeful that people who haven’t been familiar with my work previously will get a good introduction to it with Ventus.

I’ve read quite a few of Karl’s novels now, and I’ll be making sure I get this one too.

From L. Lee Lowe:

You can read my online YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost at  http://mortalghost.blogspot.com ; it’s also going out as a podcast at http://lleelowe.com

More general short stories can be found at  http://lowelands.blogspot.com

Next year I hope to begin serialising Corvus, my F/SF hybrid. It’s set in a slightly alternate future in which the minds of teen offenders are uploaded into computers on the pretext of rehabilitation – a form of virtual wilderness therapy. The novel is part thriller, part love story, part riff on the nature of consciousness. If you’re interested, you can read the first chapter here: http://corvus-lowe.blogspot.com

From Edward Willett (who mailed this in before he heard I’d hired him onto the team here at Futurismic):

I recently posted my 1999 YA SF novel Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star (originally published in paperback by the now-defunct Roussan Publishers of Montreal) online in its entirety; it’s at www.edwardwillett.com/andynebula.htm.

I also have several previously published short stories online, and some sample chapters of books, all accessible at http://www.edwardwillett.com/sfanfantasy.htm. I’ll also be posting some sample chapters from my upcoming DAW book Marseguro in a couple of months

From Nancy Jane Moore:

In case you’d like to provide info on free SF in Spanish, here’s a
link to the latest issue of the Argentinian magazine, Sinergia:
http://www.nuevasinergia.com.ar/

The current issue has one of my stories (in translation) and also a
translation of one by Lewis Shiner, as well as stories from writers from Argentina, Mexico, Peru and the Ukraine. Truly an international
publication.

From Rudy Rucker:

Flurb #4 is live!

It’s another fat and juicy issue, including stories and essays by: Charlie Anders, Kathleen Ann Goonan, John Kessel, Marc Laidlaw, Kim Stanley Robinson; also my meeting with Hieronymus Bosch; also pieces by three newer writers: David Agranoff, Gord Sellar, and Penlope Thomas; and also a group-written jam by “Gustav Flurbert”!

Crikey!

Now the stuff that we spotted elsewhere:

Cory Doctorow wrote a Creative Commons licensed story for Radar about ‘the day Google turned evil: "Scroogled". Read, share, rehash, remix, enjoy!

Strange Horizons publishes original short fiction every single week, as you probably already know … but Futurismic’s own Jeremy Tolbert especially recommends the latest from Eliot Fintushel, "How the Little Rabbi Grew".

The regulation selection from Manybooks.net:

• "Wind" by Charles Louis Fontenay
• "The Vortex Blaster" by E. E. "Doc" Smith

We have audio-books, too. From Darusha Wem:

I thought I ought to draw your attention to the podcasts at podiobooks.com . There are lots of SF novels serialized in audio there for free downloading pleasure, including my own cyberpunk novel Beautiful Red.

Added odd-ball bonuses, both via Metafilter:

• Dostoyevsky’s Crime And Punishment … as a Batman comic. Seriously. And don’t worry, it’s much shorter than the original novel.
• The University of Oxford’s Online Text Corpus Of Sumerian Literature. There’s got to be a few good ideas for modern stories in there.

And finally, more from the Friday Flash Fiction gang (because sometimes small is beautiful): Gareth L. Powell, Gareth D. Jones, Shaun C. Green, Neil Beynon and yours truly.

Enjoy!

**EDIT for late addition! From Beth Wodzinski:

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, we’ve made one of the stories from our upcoming pirate-themed issue (guest-edited by John Joseph Adams, release date Nov. 1) available for free download. The story is "The Sweet Realm," by Jill Snider Lum, and eager readers can grab a copy on our site: www.shimmerzine.com

That’s your lot.

Writers, editors and anyone else – if there’s something you want included in next week’s round-up, drop me (Paul Raven) a line using my email address on the Staff page.