Wednesday, April 17, 2013

Tons of Free Fiction

Some of the great free fiction that's come out since the last time I posted.


[Art for "Sing" by Karin Tidbeck - linked below.]








Fiction
• At Baen: "Skyspark A Short Story of the Boundary Series" by Ryk E. Spoor.
     "Blushspark clung tightly to Bluntspear's broad, rough back; the big, stolid haulfin gripped even more tightly onto the mass of wild spearweed, as the world roiled around her. Spearweed. Good choice, Bluntspear, good choice. That won't break off in your arms."

• At Black Gate: "Truck Stop Luck" By Nina Kiriki Hoffman. Fantasy.
     "He pushed wet hair out of his eyes and glanced back at the trailer, where all his immediate family were roped in states of rock-hard immobility, most of them covered with a silver tarp. From under a flipped-up corner of the tarp, his sister Sadie glared at him. She always glared at him, even when she could actually change her face at will."

• At The Colored Lens: "A Fairy Tale" by Emily C. Skaftun.
     "The chorus of  'Happily ever after' roused me from my stupor. Even from the living room I could hear the bored edge in Elise’s voice; it was as predictable as Kari’s enthusiasm or Allan’s singsongy tone, and as strained."

• At Kasma SF: "Memory File #006" by Alexis A. Hunter,
     "Vicker isn’t the first to find immortality. There’s a waiting list a billion names long. These are days of fear. Every second is a chance death will swoop you away before VitaTech can get you secured in your new body."

• At Legend of the Five Rings: "There Will Be Blood, Part 1A" by Daniel Briscoe and Shawn Carman. Fantasy.
    "During a lull in the conversation, an elder monk of the Spider Clan stepped forward and took the common dais. It was not uncommon for members of the Second City Court to take the dais and offer impromptu performances; that was the reason that the Imperial Governor had placed it within the chamber in the first place."

• At Lightspeed: "A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain" by Karin Tidbeck. Fantasy.
     "On a beach by the sea stands a gutted stone tower. A man is climbing up the remains of a staircase that spirals up the tower’s interior. Vivi sits on the roof, oblivious, counting coins that have spilled from her breast pocket: one fiver, three ones, one golden ten. She’s only wearing a worn pair of pajamas, and the damp breeze from the sea is making her shiver. She has no memory of how she arrived, but is vaguely aware of the sound of footsteps."

• At Lightspeed: "Schwartz Between the Galaxies" by Robert Silverberg. Science Fiction.
      "This much is reality: Schwartz sits comfortably cocooned—passive, suspended—in a first-class passenger rack aboard a Japan Air Lines rocket, nine kilometers above the Coral Sea. And this much is fantasy: the same Schwartz has passage on a shining starship gliding silkily through the interstellar depths, en route at nine times the velocity of light from Betelgeuse IX to Rigel XXI, or maybe from Andromeda to the Lesser Magellanic."

• At Nightmare: "The Bacchae" by Elizabeth Hand. Horror.
     "She got into the elevator with him, the young woman from down the hall, the one he’d last seen at the annual Coop Meeting a week before. Around her shoulders hung something soft that brushed his cheek as Gordon moved aside to let her in: a fur cape, or pelt, or no, something else. The flayed skin of an animal, an animal that when she shouldered past him to the corner of the elevator proved to be her Rottweiler, Leopold."

• At Tor.com: "Sing" by Karin Tidbeck. Science Fiction.
      "In a village on the distant colony of Kiruna, the outcast Aino has worked hard to created a life for herself. The fragile status quo is upset when the offworlder Petr arrives and insists on becoming a part of her life. But he has no idea what it will cost him, and has cost Aino, to belong to the people who sing with inhuman voices."

• At The World SF Blog: "Looking the Lopai in the Eyes" by Indrapramit Das.
      "Earth almost looks like home, from here. Brilliant blue, cloud-clothed. More visible land-masses, but otherwise strikingly similar. But Alwaea knows it will be very different. She touches the cold window, tracing with her finger the sun-brightened curve of the planet her genes were forged in. The planet that decided, so long ago, what she would look like, right down to the pattern of spirals on her fingertip, delicately imprinted on the glass."

• Now Posted: Expanded Horizons #39,
Arsenia (ahr-SEN-yÉ™): the feminine derivative of ‘arsenio’, meaning ‘virile’, in Greek
It is true that her skin is prematurely gray, and that she is unable to break into sweat or produce a personal scent. But they love her because she is quiet and unambitious, and therefore naturally able to transform into what the other girls want her to be, simply by taking her place beside them, pretending to listen.
"Waiting for Agua de Mayo" by Mia Tijam
There are no dragons here, that’s what they say in this bustling, polluted and overcrowded city.
The “dragon” was a word brought by the Spaniards, Americans and British, and their books and movies, although some would argue that our neighbors, the Thai, Indonesians, and Chinese brought it first. The dragon was a creature made real by stories spun by these strange men and women, who may have even believed that they were real at one time.
"Calling Oshun" by Shannon Barber,
       "Voices bring me up towards wakefulness and the Earth; my body is moving before I’m entirely awake. The voices are beautiful, full of gravel dredged from the Deep South, saturated in whiskey and sorrow, then poured from the mouths of the men in a living room somewhere."
 Flash Fiction
 Audio Fiction
 • At Beam Me Up: Episode #360. Science Fiction.
    "Know How – Can Do" by Michael Blumlein and "Tratth – Intervention" by David Scholes.

• At Beam Me Up: Episode #361. Science Fiction.
     Episode 19 of Jason Kahn’s series In Plain Sight and "Having Survived an Apocalypse" by Mini Khaw.

• At Clarkesworld: "Melt With You" by Emily C. Skaftun.
     "And then I’d shake my long plastic neck and sigh. It was useless trying to explain to her that Jesus and reincarnation were from mutually exclusive religions. And anyway she was right about the second part: we were definitely doomed."
 
• At The Classic Tales PodCast: "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" part 2 of 5 from The Arabian Night
      "Aladdin grows in the knowledge of the ways of the world, and soon becomes enamored of the Princess Badroulboudour. And though he is the son a poor tailor, with no fortune or title, Aladdin comes to an irrevocable resolution to marry the bewitching Princess."

• At Escape Pod: "Making My Entrance Again With My Usual Flair" by Ken Scholes.
      "No one ever asks a clown at the end of his life what he really wanted to be when he grew up. It’s fairly obvious. No one gets hijacked into the circus. We race to it, the smell of hotdogs leading us in, our fingers aching for the sticky pull of taffy, the electric shock of pink cotton on our tongue. Ask a lawyer and he’ll say when he was a kid he wanted to be an astronaut. Ask an accountant; he’ll say he wanted to be fireman."

• At Dunesteef: "Saying Goodbye" by Christopher Munroe.
     "After a fatal heart attack, a man’s ghost tries desperately to let his wife know that he is well, and that she should move on and try to be happy. But without a body, he can do nothing but watch. There must be a way…"

• At Every Photo Tells: "The Lab (Part 1)" by Katharina Bordet
     "Space travel, a run-down house in Milan, far too much laundry and a hot cup of coffee. What do these things have to do with the discovery of time-travel? Join the crew of The Robin to find out…" 

• At LibriVox: "Armageddon—2419 A.D." by Philip Francis Nowlan. Science Fiction,
      "Armageddon—2419 A.D. is the first appearance of the character that would become Buck Rogers. First published in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories"

• At LibriVox: "The Moon Master" by Charles W. Diffin. Science Fiction. 1930.
      "Through Infinite Deeps of Space Jerry Foster Hurtles to the Moon—Only to be Trapped by a Barbaric Race and Offered as a Living Sacrifice to Oong, their Loathsome, Hypnotic God." 

• At LibriVox: "Conan and Shadows in the Moonlight" by Robert E. Howard. Fantasy. 1934.
     " Conan was raiding with the Free Companions when they were trapped and slaughtered by the merciless Shah Amurath the great Lord of Akif. Conan is one of the very few who escape by hiding in the mud of the marshes like a beast living on raw snake and muskrat."

• At Lightspeed: "A Fine Show on the Abyssal Plain" by Karin Tidbeck. Fantasy.
     Described above.

• At PodCastle: "The Red Priest’s Vigil" by Dirk Flinthart. Fantasy.
     "I allowed the passage of a month, in order to allay suspicion, before I began to administer the draft. Once again, I congratulate you on the accuracy of your information. Administered in wine, in precisely the proportions ordered, the poison produced in the man every symptom of a most terrible, wasting illness."

• At Protecting Project Pulp: "The Golden Barrier" by G.T. Fleming-Roberts. Science Fiction.
      "Between the Hemispheres Rises a Wall of Doom, and Hyatt of International Police Tries to Break Earth’s Solitary Confinement!"

• At Pseudopod: "Red Rubber Gloves" by Christine Brooke-Rose.
     "In the morning the sunlight slants on all the windows, reflecting gold in some of the black squares but not in others, making each rectangular window, with its eight squares across and four squares down, look like half a chessboard gone berserk in order to confuse the queen and both her knights."

• At StarShipSofa:  "The Exchange Officers" by Brad Torgersen.
    No Description.

• At Tales to Terrify: "Blood Roses" by John Everson. Horror.
     No Description

No comments: