More Free Ice

(OK, free SF isn't ice, but it's pretty cool!). More great free fiction including two fantastic free fiction 'zines, part one of an excerpt that is "designed to be somewhat self-contained," and more.  More to come ASAP.





 [It's kind of obvious where the art is from]



 

Fiction
• At Author's Site:  from "After The Fires Went Out: Coyote Part 1 of 4" by Regan Wolfrom
     "There was a moment right after The Fires went out when I thought Fiona and I were the only people left for a thousand miles around. It looked as though the whole world had burned, the air around us so hot that it felt like even the water of Lillabelle Lake was close to boiling. I had trouble imagining that anyone else could have survived."

• At Silver Blade: "An Honorable Aunt" by Therese Arkenberg.
       "Children grow up with stories of wizards and swordsman. Even my children did — although the glamour of those stories rather died when they saw the real creatures in action. War-wizardry turned cottages and fields to dust, and swords twisted in the guts of fathers and mothers far more often than they cleaved the necks of sinister villains."

• Now Posted: The Lovecraft eZine #24

"Less a Dream Than This We Know" by Christopher M. Cevasco
     "He forced his eyes to open wider, and the woman’s face resolved itself from an obscuring haze. Not his mother. Of course it wasn’t. His mother was dead. She’d died in a room like this"
"The Horror Under the City" by Kevin Crisp
     "The congregation was principally composed of a scant array of ragged homeless, who attended daily mass to escape the chilled, wet air before the soup kitchen opened at six. For the first few weeks I held the group sessions in the basement, I felt personally responsible for the dispersal of the last remnants of this ancient house of worship’s last parishioners"
"How Rare are Light and Life" by J.T. Glover
     "In thirty minutes I’m going to climb into the hypersleep compartment and set it for proximity auto-wake. The escape pod’s only built to sustain a few weeks of activity, and my hysterics used up a lot of oxygen"
"The Basalt Obelisk by Michael Wen  Evolved" by Kenneth W. Cain
     "It was said that if you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. If that maxim works on a psychological level then that cannot happen soon enough for me."
"Evolved" by Kenneth W. Cain.
     "Spring’s hardened earth is cool against my flesh as I flee men I once considered equals. Now we find ourselves separated by differences I cannot explain. As their intent is to kill me, I am left with no other option. And so I make haste to escape them"

• Now Posted: Subterranean Press Magazine - Summer 2013.

"The Shoot-Out at Burnt Corn Ranch Over the Bride of the World" by Catherynne M. Valente   
     "I don’t know much about the beginning, but in the end it was just the Wizard of Los Angeles and the Wizard of New York and the shoot out at the Burnt Corn Ranch. They walked off their paces; the moon seconded New York and the sun backed up Los Angeles and I saw how it all went "
"Don’t Ask" by Bruce McAllister and W. S. Adams   
     "They tell me where she is in the big portamorgue. Corporations need morgues too—big ones——when they’re doing the military’s work where the military can’t afford to be.  Mercs die as easily as mils."
"Illuminated" by .K. J. Parker   
     "The truth, the sad, banal truth, is that they’re nothing but a network of three-hundred-year-old Imperial relay stations, built in a hurry in the last decades of the Occupation to pass warning messages about pirate raids. Of course they built them on hilltops, so they’d be visible at a distance, and of course they had to be towers, for the same reason."
"Stage Blood" by Kat Howard
      "There was blood on the stage. It dripped from a box into which a woman had been locked. An elegant box, clear glass, so that you could see the woman inside of it. The glass was polished to a shine that almost matched that of the sword that had been thrust through it. She was the queen of the knives, was the woman in the box, and the magician was on stage to woo her."
The Sun And I by K. J. Parker
      "We’d pooled our money. It lay on the table in front of us; forty of those sad, ridiculous little copper coins we used back then, the wartime emergency issue—horrible things, punched out of flattened copper pipe and stamped with tiny stick-men purporting to be the Emperor and various legendary heroes; the worse the quality of the die-sinking became, the more grandiose the subject matter"

Audio Fiction
• At AntipodeanSF: "The AntiSF Radio Show 178" Speculative Fiction
       " AntiSF radio show 178, comprising an audio collection of all of the stories that appeared in issue 178 of AntipodeanSF magazine online."

• At LibriVox: "Jataka Tales" by Ellen C. Babbitt. Fairy Tales.
      "Jataka Tales form a part of the collective Indian Fairy tales with the only distinction that most of Jataka Tales have a moral."