Better Late Than Never

More great freebies- enjoy the weekend! May or may not post tomorrow.






Fiction
• At Baen: "To Spec" by Charles E. Gannon. Science Fiction.
       "Mendez, the newest guy in the squad, had been jumpy ever since the worsening solar weather updates started coming in. The most recent message—that Priestley’s replacement wouldn’t show up for at least another three hours—just made him more anxious. As Eureka command post signed off, Grim saw Mendez hold his new rifle—a flimsy piece of experimental junk called the Cochrane XM 1—a bit too tightly."

• At Buzzy Mag: "The Clean War" by Shelly Li and Ken Liu.
     "I’m not a soldier. I’m just a woman who programs computers. I don’t know what I’m doing. This was a mistake!"

• At Daily Science Fiction: "Spirit Gum" by Mike Resnick & Jordan Ellinger. 
      "Before he was The Great Bellini he was just plain old Malcolm Bell. He had a knack for magic tricks--illusions, he called them--and what had been a hobby became a profession."

• At Silver Blade: "The Guild of Swordsmen: Part 8" by Kristin Janz. Fantasy.
     "Lida suspected that her fourth match was not going to be won as easily as her first three.  She had the bad luck to have been paired against the big man she had hidden behind out on the plaza, the tallest and heaviest swordsman in the entire competition."

Flash Fiction

• At Every Day Fiction: "Abasteron House" by Paula Cappa. Horror.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "Relativity" by Patricia Stewart. Science Fiction.
• At Every Day Fiction: "The Place I Once Called Home" by Holly Jennings. Science Fiction.

E-Books
At Amazon: Essential Reading in Science Fiction by  David Scholes.

At Free eBooks Daily.

• Prison Nation by Jenni Merritt. Science Fiction.
• Fire & Ice by Patty Jansen. Fantasy.
• Alaskan Fire by Sara King. Paranormal Romance, Urban Fantasy.
• The Dress by Sophie Nicholls. Fantasy Romance.
• Gadgets by Kimberly Richardson. Fantasy.
• Dark Genesis by A D Koboah. Paranormal Romance.
• Forever Young by Sawyer Bennett. YA Paranormal.
• Trail of Bones by Chris Salisbury. Fantasy.
• On the Edge of Humanity by S.B. Alexander. YA Fantasy, Vampires.

At Smashwords:

• "Tooth & Claw" by Melody Hewson. 2k words.  Fantasy.
• A Spell Cast Volumes One, Two, and Three by Tessa Stokes. YA Fantasy Romance.
• "Given to Glass" by Brian Wheeler. 4k words. Fantasy.
• "Fatal Vision" by Mark Masters. 2k words. Horror.
• "The Gold Watch" by Rik Hunik. 5k words. Horror. Ghost.
• "For Joyce" by J T Pearson. 2k words. Horror. Weird.
• "My Brother's Keeper" by J T Pearson. 6k words. Science Fiction.
• "The Gravity of the Situation" by Tina Shelton. 8k words. Science Fiction.
• C-Shapes by Matthew Fish. 71 k words.Science Fiction.

Audio Fiction
• At Beware the Hairy Mango:  "The Piñata Club" by Matthew Sanborn Smith. Weird.
     No Description

• At Desert Gems Audio: "Porter of Baghdad Part I" from Sir Richard Burton's 1001 Arabian Nights.Adventure. Fantasy.
     "a handsome young  porter who is accosted by a beautiful young lady who needs his services at the market while shopping. As he is invited into her home, he haplessly stumbles into an drunken bacchanal at the house of her two sisters, on the condition he asks no questions of any goings on in the house."

• At Clarkesworld: "The Last Survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution" by A.C. Wise.
     "She’s not what you expected, Alma May Anderson, the last survivor of the Great Sexbot Revolution. For one thing, her eyes are bluer. She must be a hundred if she’s a day, but her eyes are the blue of puddle-broken neon, and a postcard ocean, and the sky at noon."

• At Journey Into: "Fire Watch" by Connie Willis. Science Fiction. 
     "Young Bartholomew is a graduate student in history from a future Oxford who is assigned to travel back in time to join and study the famous Fire Watch Brigade-the volunteer corps whose brave members kept St. Paulâs Cathedral from being burned to the ground by Nazi incendiaries."

• At LibriVox: The Jewels of Aptor by Samuel R. Delany. Science Fiction.
      " Set several centuries after the Great Fire -- a nuclear holocaust -- a young woman seeks her destiny with the help of a four-armed youth."

• At PodCastle: "Throwing Stones" by Mishell Baker. Fantasy.
     "In the city of Jiun-Shi the third shift was known as the goblin watch, but some of us were not very watchful. I, for one, was so absorbed in the daily details of living a lie that it took me three months to learn that one of the regulars at the Silver Fish Teahouse was a goblin. By the time our paths collided three years later, I had been promoted to third-shift manager, and my lie had been promoted to widely established fact."

• At Pseudopod: "Entrance And Exit / The Terror Of The Twins" by Algernon Blackwood. Horror.
      "“Entrance And Exit” was originally published February 13, 1909 in The Westminster Gazette and republished in TEN MINUTE STORIES in 1914. “The Terror Of The Twins” was originally published November 6, 1909 in the same newspaper and republished in 1910 in THE LOST VALLEY AND OTHER STORIES."

• At Tales to Terrify: "Episode #62" Horror.
     “Cemetery Water” by Frances Snowder and “Ghost in the Graveyard” by Tim Waggoner.

Other Genres

• Audio at The Classic Tales Podcast: "The Man Who Knew Too Much" Part 6 of 8 by G.K. Chesterton. 
• Audio at Craftlit: "Jane Eyre, Chapters 25" by Charlotte Brontë.
• Fiction at Online Pulps: "Traitor Patrol" by Peter Barrett (1937) and "Wake Up and Die!" by Robert Turner (1947). Pulp/Noir.
• Flash Fiction at Every Day Fiction: "Kid Gloves" by Justin N Davies. Suspense.
• At Flash Fiction Friday: "Cycle 119 – The Good Guy Stories"