The Hitchhiker's Guide to Free Fiction

Good morning!  There's some good text science fiction for you this morning, as well as good audio fiction in a variety of genres.  And there's some  interesting stuff in the "other genres" section, including some pulp fiction from which this post's art comes. More to come today.  Hat tip to the honorable Sir Regan Wolfrom of SF Signal for a couple good of links.





Fiction
• At Escape Pod: "Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard. Science Fiction.
     "You stand in front of the mirror–it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see–eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew."

• At Omni Reboot: "The Landline" by Bruce Sterling. Science Fiction.
     "The teenage kids hanging out at my machine shop didn’t know why I wanted a telephone. A plug-in phone, with wires hanging out of it, was a joke to them. They’d never seen a fax machine in their lives."

• At Omni Reboot: "I Arise Again" by Rudy Rucker. Science Fiction.
     "At night, alone in my burrow, I’d rub my feelers over the emerging good reviews. My quill would stiffen, my ink-sac would fill. I wrote more beatnik SF novels."

• Flash Fiction at 365 Tomorrows: "Boundary’s Edge" by T.P. Keating. Science Fiction.

Audio Fiction
• At Escape Pod: "Immersion" by Aliette de Bodard. Science Fiction.
     "You stand in front of the mirror–it shifts and trembles, reflecting only what you want to see–eyes that feel too wide, skin that feels too pale, an odd, distant smell wafting from the compartment’s ambient system that is neither incense nor garlic, but something else, something elusive that you once knew."

• At Pseudopod: "Prisoner of Peace" by David Tallerman. Horror.
      "For all that, I can see every brick in the wall, and every crack in every brick. I think somehow that if I only looked hard enough I could even see into those cracks, and scrutinize their furthest depths."

• At Radio Drama Revival: "Dreaming Fire" and "The Lighted Bridge" by Kristin Cato. Fantasy.
     "A prehistoric woman falls into ice, then unexpectedly wakes up in a French museum thousands of years later."

• At WMG Publishing: "Time, Expressed as an Entrée" by Robert T. Jeschonek. Science Fiction.
       “to play with the nature of time itself, exploring the perception of time versus the reality of it.”

Other Genres

• Fiction at the New Yorker: "Meet the President!" by Zadie Smith.
• Fiction at Online Pulps: "Klump to the Rescue" by Joe Archibald (1943), "Emperor Blackmail" by Steve Fisher (1937), and "New Year's Decision" by Johnston McCulley (1949). Pulp, Noir, Humor, Western.
• Flash Fiction at Every Day Fiction: "Up the Hill" by Heather Morris.
• Mythology at Project Gutenberg: The Golden Bough (Third Edition, Vol. 11 of 12). by James Frazier.