Great Free Reads and Listens

Another roundup of great freebies. Everyone sounds good so get them all!  I will try to have a second post today, but things are going to be a bit erratic here until early next week.



[Art from "The Queens Army" linked below.]


Fiction
At Cosmos: "Stumpy" by Sheila Adamson. Science Fiction.
     "The robot was an ungainly three-legged object, about four feet high and bristling with mysterious attachments. No attempt had been made to give it a face, other than a couple of lights winking like eyes."

At Daily Science Fiction: "The Dying Season" by Gwendolyn Clare.
     "The difference wasn't visible from the outside, but inside the hollow it was so unmistakable she found it hard to believe Nicolai doubted her. A thin, sickly scent of fungal decay had replaced the proper smells of musk and damp earth. The inner bark--usually a shaggy coating of soft protective tissue on the inside wall of the hollow--had become dry and friable. And then there was the rapid drop in temperature."

At Tor.com: "The Queen’s Army" by Marissa Meyer. Fantasy.
    "They came at the end of the long night, when the manufacturing dome had not seen sunlight for almost two weeks. Z had crossed his twelfth birthday some months ago, and just enough time had passed that he’d stopped imagining glimpses of gold embroidery on black coats. He’d just stopped questioning every thought that flickered through his brain. He had just begun to hope that he would not be chosen."

At Wily Writers: “The Lords of Zero” by Tony Richards.
     "The gang’s leader only ever showed up after evening fell … but where exactly was he coming from?"

Audio Fiction
At DrabbleCast: "The Belonging Kind" by John Shirley and William Gibson.  Mystery. Strange,
      "It might have been in Club Justine, or Jimbo’s, or Sad Jack’s, or the Rafters; Coretti could never be sure where he’d first seen her. At any time, she might have been in any one of those bars. She swam through the submarine half-life of bottles and glassware and the slow swirl of cigarette smoke… she moved through her natural element, one bar after another."

At PodCastle: "Recognizing Gabe: un cuento de hadas" by Alberto Yáñez. Fantasy.
      “You do that better than your sisters, Gabe,” Mom says to me as I spread the corn masa on the soaked husk and spoon the right amount of shredded spiced beef onto it. The aroma of meat braised in a sauce of chiles, garlic, bay, pepper, and cloves makes every breath feel like Christmas"

 At Pseudopod: "The Strange Machinery Of Desire" by Justin A. Williams. Horror.
      "Beside them, a young man—a boy really—was having disks of black metal implanted in the skin of his forearms. Zeljko looked on, his mind spinning with a strange mixture of fear, revulsion and excitement. The excitement moved toward arousal, and he was suddenly self-conscious. He turned away, and walked back into the main area of the club."

At Tales to Terrify: "The Muse of Copenhagen" by Nina Allan. Horror.
    "A man inherits his late uncle's seaside home but finds more inside than he expected."

At Wily Writers: “The Lords of Zero” by Tony Richards.
     "The gang’s leader only ever showed up after evening fell … but where exactly was he coming from?"