The Free Fiction Maneuver

There's some great free fiction this morning, including an audio reading of the SF classic "The Cold Equations," new fiction at Lightspeed, e-books, and much more.  And be sure to check out SF Signal for more free fiction posts by my honorable peer, Sir Regan Wolfrom.







Fiction
•  At The Colored Lens: "Primordial" by Jamie Killen. Speculative Fiction.
     "For a moment, he feared that Magda would stand up and slap him. After a few seconds of staring at him in icy rage, she looked away and bit a thumbnail. “Don’t know where people get these stupid ideas, like I’m a witch or something."

•  At Daily Science Fiction: "Tell Them of the Sky" by A. T. Greenblatt. Magic Realism.
        "She is too small, Kitkun thinks, the first time she enters his tiny workshop tucked between the market's stalls. Too young to have left the nest alone. Yet, despite the years of waiting, he still feels a prick of hope as she steps out of the city's unrelenting smog and over the threshold, thinking, perhaps she will be the one. Perhaps she will ask."

•  At Lightspeed: "Cancer" by Ryan North. Science Fiction.
      "Not everyone got tested at birth, and Tina hadn’t. Not getting tested had been her parents’ choice, but in university it had become her choice. She and Helen were hanging out in Helen’s dorm room, alone, lying side by side on her bed. It was the only comfortable place in the room."

•  At Lightspeed: "Ushakiran" by Laura Friis. Fantasy.
      "The earliest movements she knows are not her mother’s movements but the sea rocking her mother, who lies unconscious on the ship’s deck, rescued. In that way, the sea can be said to be her mother. She is born under the morning star, and so is named Ushakiran. The surgeon delivers her into a world of storms and blood, of darkness and creaking wood, of a blanket wrapped close around her, cold arms that cannot hold her."

•  At The Night Land: "Lute" by Don Webb. Dark Fantasy.  [via SF Signal]
     "The People gave me an ugly human name Lute. I am very ugly, for I am the product of twelve generations of breeding made to pass for human. I have their hateful symmetry. I have been surgically altered to have only two eyes, and unlike the People I cannot see what is behind me. When I was newly harvested, the other young ones took great pleasure in sneaking up on me. My Teacher Alvan would punish them and tell them that I was the one who would be the Trojan Horse."

•  At Weird Fiction Review: "Wunderkindergarten" by Marc Laidlaw.
     "I used to start talking right after an injection, when everyone else was sitting around addled and drowsily sipping warm milk from cartons and the aides were unfolding our luxurious padded mats for nap-time. The words would start pouring out of me in a froth, quite beyond my control, as significant to me as they were meaningless to the others"

Flash Fiction

• At Every Day Fiction: "The Dark" by Yancy Caruthers. Surreal.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "Inferiority Complex" by Bob Newbell. Science Fiction.

E-Books
At Free eBooks:

• The Exile's Violin by R.S. Hunter. Fantasy.
• Mortality by Kellie Sheridan. YA Zombies. 
• The 13th by Shadow Stephens. Fantasy.

At Smashwords:

• "Stumped: A Tale of Taloria" Samuel J. Plum. Fantasy.
• "Carpe Diem" by Michael Loring. Fantasy.
• "Divine Blood: Smoke over Grimsvotn" by Luke Green. Urban Fantasy.
• "Divine Blood: Serious Matter" by Luke Green. Urban Fantasy.
• "Divine Blood: High School Hel" by Luke Green.Urban Fantasy.
• "Return to Bryn Mairwyn" by Daniel Huber. Fantasy.
• "The Horror From The Blizzard" by Morris Kenyon. Horror.
• "The Svinnvif" by David Hunter. Fantasy. Horror.
• "The World Was Too Small" by E.S. Wesley. Horror. Weird.

Audio Fiction
•  At 19 Nocturne Boulevard: "No Moving Parts" by Murray F. Yaco. Science Fiction.
      "Hansen was sitting at the control board in the single building on Communications Relay Station 43.4SC, when the emergency light flashed on for the first time in two hundred years. With textbook-recommended swiftness, he located the position of the ship sending the call, identified the ship and the name of its captain, and made contact."

•  At Drabblecast: "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin. Science Fiction.
      "There was nothing to indicate the fact but the white hand of the tiny gauge on the board before him. The control room was empty but for himself; there was no sound other than the murmur of the drives — but the white hand had moved"

•  At Lightspeed: "Cancer" by Ryan North. Science Fiction.
      "Not everyone got tested at birth, and Tina hadn’t. Not getting tested had been her parents’ choice, but in university it had become her choice. She and Helen were hanging out in Helen’s dorm room, alone, lying side by side on her bed. It was the only comfortable place in the room."

Other Genres

•  Audio at Protecting Project Pulp: "The Hand of the Mandarin Quong" by Sax Rohmer. Noir.