Friday, December 9, 2011

Freebies and an Unpleasant Announcement

There's a eTon of good free fiction today from several great sites. Be sure to bookmark all these great sites because this will be the last month for QD, except for rare announcements.








@AE: "Billy O'Bannon's Time Travel Dating Service" by Joseph L. Kellogg .
"With a crackle of electricity, a dark hole opened up in the sky in front of him, rimmed with sizzling blue energy. A human figure toppled through it, its scream cut short by the thud and rustle of a rough landing in a nearby bush."
@Anotherealm: "Ah, Spring" by Keith Kennedy
A little ways further along he came across a man and a woman, back to back, each chewing their lower lips. They turned to him as he came upon them.
@Daily Science Fiction: "The Girl in the Next Room is Crying Again" by Peter M Ball.
"I used to think it was no big deal, the sensing. After all, everyone smells stuff. Everyone tastes things and gets those nervous feelings in their gut, or that twinge across the back of their neck that tells them something's up, the vague foresight of intuition. It was Morley who taught me otherwise, who told me I was special and taught me what else I could do."
@Daily Science Fiction: "A Puddle of Dead" by Grayson Bray Morris.
"Henry came back to me in 2048, fifteen years after he'd left.I was married by then, with two kids. I was happy. But when I opened the door and saw Henry standing there, my heart sang."
@GigaNotaSaurus: "The House of Aunts" by Zen Cho.
"To the women of my family. The house stood back from the road in an orchard. In the orchard, monitor lizards the length of a man’s arm stalked the branches of rambutan trees like tigers on the hunt. Behind the house was an abandoned rubber tree plantation, so proliferant with monkeys and leeches and spirits that it might as well have been a forest"
@Kasma: "Life Plus Seventy" by Ken Liu.
She pretended to have heard of it and nodded. For all she knew, The Daily Troll was a big deal here, and since her publicist had cleared me, I must be important, right? She really ought to have paid her publicist better though, if she didn't want her to be so easily bribed.
Now Posted: Expanded Horizons Issue 33 (Dec 2011)
Yes, they are cute, very cute. And you better believe they know it, too. Who’s in charge? Yes, that’s Corgis for you. Aren’t we lucky Seattle lets dogs ride the bus? I don’t think they’d understand if someone were to tell them they couldn’t. Probably they would blame me.

"There once was a prince whose dearest friend was a river. Now rivers are sometimes girls,‭ ‬quick as lightning‭; ‬and they are boys sometimes,‭ ‬speeding like arrows.‭ ‬And they are gravidwomen sometimes,‭ ‬and sometimes they are men,‭ ‬full of poetry and slow as scripture.‭ ‬Most of the time you simply cannot tell,‭ ‬though storytellers will try."

Owen said, “It’s only a grass snake!” and shoved the wriggling length of the dark thing in Greg’s face. Greg recoiled in disgust.

  • "Memory" by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

It‭’‬s half theatrics and half misplaced nostalgia.‭ ‬After all,‭ ‬she doesn‭’‬t need the sword to kill him.‭ ‬She could drown him inthe vast expanse of water that is slowly eroding all the coasts,‭ ‬eating the land bit by bit.‭ ‬But it seems to have become tradition and there are few things to cling on to these days.‭ ‬As a result,‭ ‬she carries the sword and waits by the sea.

Now Posted: The Fifth Di...Edition 13...issue 4 December 2011
"Upon entering the minister’s private office that morning, Neil Kinsella had noted the severe frown on his master’s face, and said the words mockingly. George Willard, M.P.,O.B.E. and Home Office Minister in Her Majesty’s Government was surveying the morning papers, his jowly features contorted into a scowl as he surveyed the front pages. "
No, not again. I sighed: commissions were down twelve percent. People were too secure in their belief that nothing would happen to them and their ships would traverse space without incident. It was true, too – I knew it to be. The problem was, with space being as safe as, say, sitting alone in a dark room, what good were we? There were no fears for the Washishisha Wizards to banish.
Rising up on his knees, his shoulder appearing above the cactus spines, Tadpole drew back on the bowstring, releasing the arrow from somewhere deep inside his chest, sending it sailing. He shot too high. The twang of the bowstring caused a bighorn ram to look up with alarm while the rest of the herd continued to graze.
  • "Black" by Robert Collins
En route I heard the story. It played on the news-nets as another violent shocker from a colony world. Four men tried to rob a small-town bank; one employee killed, another fatally wounded; robbers flee, but get caught; two robbers revealed as lawmen from nearby town; locals so enraged by crime and criminals that they shoot one, then actually hang the other three.

Now Posted: Redstone Science Fiction #19 - December 2011
"It wasn’t illegal – just wrong. The courts hadn’t caught up with technology yet. They were slow – bogged down by the heavy weight of the money monster politicians call bureaucracy."

That morning I had met a classmate of mine, one I hadn’t seen for better than a decade. Harold Hemard. I was coming out of my bank; he was going in. We stopped. My brain grabbed up the name, dragging along with it the kind of favorable impression that told me this wasn’t someone I needed to automatically avoid.
Serial Fiction
@Kat and Mouse: "Into The Woods - Part Eleven" by Abner Senires.
My breathing was a little ragged, my heart was jackhammering in my chest, and my shirt was soaked with sweat and plastered to my back when we finally rounded the bend and the dirt road gave way to pavement.
@Paizo: "Faithful Servants - Chapter Two: A Walk in the Park" by James L. Sutter.
"The two men—for Salim had returned the eidolon's amulet, and the snake-man once more looked like an axiomite—walked shoulder to shoulder through one of Axis's many parks. To either side of the cobblestone path, trees and bushes of a hundred different varieties stood in a riot of color, each with a neat little placard giving its name and world of origin."
@World SF Blog: "The City of Silence (Part Two)" by Ma Boyong, translated by Ken Liu.
“You can speak as freely as you like in here. This damned device won’t work here.” The woman pointed to his Listener. There was no warning beep. It didn’t seem to hear the two sensitive words in her speech: “freely” and “damned.”
Audio
@Drabblecast: "Trifecta XIX" featuring "David Is Six" by Amanda C. Davis, "The Best Boy, The Brightest Boy" by Megan R. Engelhard, and "Feature Broken" by Steven Saus.
"Another of the Drabblecast Trifecta series, this time with the theme of Fairy Tale child abduction"
@Escape Pod: "Chicken Noodle Gravity" by J. Daniel Sawyer, read by Paul Haring.
"I hate to start out this way, but before we get to the reason I’m standing on this stool with a fez on my head, in the middle of the night, in front of a double-cal-king bed in a furniture store—which, yes, Officer, I swear I’ll confess I broke into illegally—before we get to any of that, there’s something I have to tell you. "
@Pseudopod: "To My Wondering Eyes Did Appear" by Larry C. Kay, read by Stephanie Morris.
"A figure obscured the flames of the fireplace: a man. Bettia sat up quickly, blinking away sleep, thinking it was her father. But this man was shorter, rounder, and part of her groggy mind considered Santa Claus, and that she must have slept for days."
Serial Audio
@Author's Site: "The All-Pro Episode #6" by Scott Sigler.
Quentin and the Krakens report to the locker room for the first practice of the season, where Quentin has an early run-in with Rick Warburg. Danny Lundy and Gredok square off in contract negotiations, while Choto the Bright embraces his role as Quentin's private bodyguard.
@Classic Tales Podcast: "The Snow Queen 1of3" by Hans Christian Andersen, read by B.J. Harrison.
"Grandmother tells Kay and Gerda the legend of the Snow Queen who lives in the
great black cloud in the heavens. But once the Snow Queen visits their town in disguise and carries off Kay, Gerda begins a timeless quest. Alone and barefoot, she embarks into the wild world to find her lost friend."

3 comments:

Beam Me Up said...

and no one has commented!!!!???? WTF!!! Dave this bumms me out big time my friend. Every day is a look to what you have dug up and often a note to my authors saying Dave at QD mentioned you story on the podcast... I don't even pretend to know the why but I will tell you that I thank you for the hard work you have put into QD to give podcasters and fans a great resource.

Thanks.

Paul WRFR lpfm radio in Rockland Maine

John Matthew Stater said...

Sorry to hear it dude - but you do yeoman's work for no pay, so I can't blame you.

Dave Tackett said...

Thanks guys! QD has always been about promoting great sites/blogs (like both of yours!) and I've done about all I can in that regard - I will however leave a final, occasionally updated, listing most of the cool sites in all the categories to which QD has linked. But doing a decent job on QD takes several hours a day, time which I really can't afford.