Fantastic Free Fiction

Some great free fiction today, including new fiction by some very big name writers, as well as classics and more. Many goodies for your eReader - even if your eReader is your computer.

An early heads up. Likely starting Monday or Tuesday, QuasarDragon will be adopting a much more streamlined look for the freebies posts. The amount of time spent on thumbnails and descriptions is causing me to fall behind in categories that deserve more attention.

Illustration from "The Dala Horse" below.








@Tor.com: "The Dala Horse" by Michael Swanwick. Fantasy.

"Long after the wars, there are things abroad in the world—things more than human. And they have scores to settle with one another"

@Tor.com: "Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes" by Michael Bishop.

"Dai had always wanted his own house, perhaps one that he built himself from the ground up—but not necessarily. After all, he’d built many structures in the past, either storage sheds or warehouses, each with its own purposes and symmetries, its own architectural eloquences and enduring specific satisfactions."

@Subterranean Press: "Valley of the Girls" by Kelly Link. Fantasy.

"[Hero], of course, knew something was up. Twins always know. Maybe she saw the way I watched her Face when there was an event and we all had to do the public thing."

@L5R: "Insurgency" by Shawn Carman. Fantasy.

The blindfold covering his eyes was completely saturated with seawater, and his clothes hung heavily on his frame, dripping with the essence of the ocean itself. The wind tore at his hair and threatened to rip his blindfold off, but he had wrapped it far too tightly for that. “Komori!” he roared above the sound of the sea and the thrashing of a huge, violent beast. He could feel its flesh rolling and pitching beneath his feet and hands. “Komori!”

Free Kindle Book @Pixel of Ink: "Right Ascension" by David Derrico. [via SF Signal]

"Set in the year 3040, Right Ascension explores mankind’s place in the Universe, how we ascended to that lofty position, and the horrifying price of that ascension."

Serial Fiction
@More Red Ink: "Kin (part 1 and Part 2)" by Bruce McAllister, from the February 2006 issue of Asimov's Science Fiction. [via SF Signal]

"The alien and the boy, who was twelve, sat in the windowless room high above the city that afternoon. The boy talked and the alien listened."

@More Red Ink: "Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song" by Ernest Hogan (Part 1 of 3)

"Like a miniature Jupiter gone insane, the paint-blob hangs in the middle of the room—a Jupiter whose tides and weather and powerful gravity snapped on the strain of the secret of its monstrous microscopic inhabitants"

Classic Science Fiction & Ghost Stories
@Internet Archive: "The Retreat to Mars" by Cecil B. White, from the August 1927 issue of Amazing Stories.

"An archaeologist discovers documents and artifacts from an advanced but deceased Martian civilization buried in the dark of Africa."

@Gutenberg:The Best Psychic Stories edited by Joseph Lewis French (1920).

Featuring stories by Jack London, Algernon Blackwood, Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce and others.

@Gutenberg: "The Scapegoat" by Richard Maples, from Galaxy Science Fiction June 1956.

"Who would not have pity for a poor, helpless victim? Nobody —except another poor victim!"

@Munseys and Gutenberg: "The Huddlers" by William Campbell Gault, from If Worlds of Science Fiction May 1953.

"He was a reporter from Venus with an assignment on Earth. He got his story but, against orders, he fell in love—and therein lies this story."

@Munseys and Gutenberg: "The Victor" by Bryce Walton, from If Worlds of Science Fiction March 1953.

"Under the new system of the Managerials, the fight was not for life but for death! And great was the ingenuity of—The Victor."

Reviewed Free Fiction
@BestScienceFictionStories.com: "Mouja" by Matt London. Fantasy / Horror.

"From the window of his guard hut, Takashi Shimada watched the trees. Three of the mouja lurked at the edge of the forest on the far side of the rice paddies. Takashi could just make out their shapes through the thick misty rain that made the flooded paddies seem to boil. [. . .] It did not matter if they traveled one mile per day or a hundred. The dead were coming, and they carried with them a hunger for human flesh."