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.

There's Free Fiction Waiting on the Net, It'd Like for Us to Read It, But It Thinks It'd Blow Our Minds

We have a couple good free fiction stories and a couple good audio fiction stories. There are also a few good flash fiction stories and e-books.  Back tonight with a review and maybe more.


[Art for "Fishwife" in fiction and audio fiction]


Fiction
• At Institute for the Future: "Apricot Lane" by Rudy Rucker. Science Fiction. [Via SF Signal]
      "Julie went to yoga with Dan Joiner this afternoon,” said the girlish voice of Julie’s shoe. The shoe was a high-fashion item, a skintight flicker-cladding foot glove with a polka-dot finish, the shoe lying on the floor of our tiny apartment. Thanks to the Quarpet interface, the shoe’s voice was in my head, along with a flexible little icon that postured like a cartoon character."

• At Nightmare Magazine: "Fishwife" by Carrie Vaughn. Horror.
     "The men went out in boats to fish the cold waters of the bay because their fathers had, because men in this village always had. The women waited to gather in the catch, gut and clean and carry the fish to market because they always had, mothers and grandmothers and so on, back and back."

Flash Fiction

• At Daily Science Fiction: "Big Bad's Hot Date" by Melissa Mead. Fairy Tale.
• At Every Day Fiction: "The Baseball Gods" by James Aquilone. Horror.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "The God Complex" by Clint Wilson. Science Fiction.

E-Books
At Smashwords:

• "The Moon Temple" by Mark Hare. Fantasy
• "This Old House" by A. Jarrell Hayes. Horror. Ghost.
• Last Sunrise & Other Stories by Simon Goodson. Science Fiction. 82k words.
• "First Contact" by Matthew Barrett. Science Fiction
•  The Vanguard by SJ Griffin. Science Fiction.
• "Ringlands" by Korban Blake. Science Fiction.

Audio Fiction
• At Nightmare Magazine: "Fishwife" by Carrie Vaughn. Horror.
     Described Above

• At PodCastle: "The House of Aunts" by Zen Cho. Fantasy. Vampires.
     "The house stood back from the road in an orchard. In the orchard, monitor lizards the length of a man’s arm stalked the branches of rambutan trees like tigers on the hunt. Behind the house was an abandoned rubber tree plantation, so proliferant with monkeys and leeches and spirits that it might as well have been a forest. Inside the house lived the dead."

Four eZines, The Black Star Passes, and More.

More great free eZines today as well as a few more single stories. There are a few big-name writers as well as several promising newcomers. And for fans of classic SF, libriVox has a free audiobook of "The Black Star Passes" by John Wood Campbell Jr.. I'm still catching up, so it will probably be at least a week before some categories make more than a token appearance.

Today's illustration is from the serial linked below, "The Seventh Execution" by Amber E. Scott.








Now Posted: Flurb #12

• "Fjaerland" by Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo.
• "The Onset of a Paranormal Romance" by Bruce Sterling.
• "The Curse of the Were-Penis" by Emily C. Skaftun.
• "Everything Is Broken" by John Shirley.
• "Pulped And Bound Monsters" by Adam Callaway
• "The Oyster and Alice O." by Anna Tambour.
• "The Robert Armstrong Syndicated Newspaper Strip" by A. S. Salinas.
• "Gertrude and Ludwig Spin A Web" by Justin Patrick Moore.
• "I Can’t Escape From You" by Brendan Byrne.
• "Xuanito" by Ernest Hogan.
• "Big Ripples Without a Splash" by Don Webb.
• "Concerning Tavia" by Martin Hayes.
• "Walls Between Worlds" by Will Ellwood.
• "After the Thaw" by Eileen Gunn.

Now Posted The Fifth Dimension Ed. 13, #3 Sept. 2011

• "God Felt Regret" by D.N. Calkins.
• "Ghost in Rock" by Ross Gresham.
• "A Return to Paradise" by Tony Peak.
• "Cold Comfort" by Jennifer Rachel Baumer.

Now Posted: New Myths #16. Speculative Fiction.

• "At the Center of the World" by Kenneth Mark Hoover.
• "Bread Crumbs and Thigh Bones" by Amy Sundberg.
• "Out of Frozen Shadow" by Sylvia Hiven.
• "Expiration Date" by Yeoryios Pantazis.

Now Posted: Electric Spec V. 6, #3 August 31, 2011. Speculative Fiction.

• "Monkey Talk" by T. Lucas Earle.
• "Justice Like a Mighty River" by Alter S. Reiss.
• "The Coincidence Factory" by Fredrick Obermeyer.
• "Tooth and Claw" by Rina Gonzales.
• "Stranded (with Porkchop)" by Rich Matrunick.

@Wiley Writers: "The Fortress of Solicitude" by Laura Givens. Superhero.

"Extra! Extra! Sex-crazed girls killing local lads in the streets of Newark! Read all about it! It’s 1938 and Kong the Avenger is out to solve the most bizarre case of his short career as a mystery man. He may need a little help from his friends."

@Ray Gun Revival: "Galactic Wonders" by Matthew Wuertz. Science Fiction.

"The unpretentious headquarters of Galactic Wonders is a suite of rooms in a one-story building in Naperville, just outside of Chicago. I think the space was designed for a dentist or doctor because there’s a lobby just inside the front door with a sliding glass window on the far wall."

@Aoife's Kiss: "The Suicide Inspector" by J. J. Steinfeld. Science Fiction.

"Though I wasn't a Rebel or a Weasel from the Underground, I once despaired totally of having a sensible place in society. My hopelessness was so thorough that thoughts of death occupied me night and day. My current work now bathes all my previous dark thoughts in the deepest irony. Just a year ago I wished to extinguish myself. I was simultaneously drifting and dangling, questioning the wisdom of the State, a breath away from curses and irrevocable acts."

Serial Fiction
@Paizo: "The Seventh Execution -Chapter Two: The Faithful False" by Amber E. Scott. Fantasy.

"We retreated into a network of side streets where we could escape if necessary and where we'd easily hear anyone approaching. The night was cool enough to frost our breath. The smell of refuse lingered beneath the familiar city smells of dirt, sweat, horse dung, and boiled potatoes."

@LibriVox: "The Black Star Passes" by John Wood Campbell Jr., read by "KirksVoice"

"A sky pirate armed with superior weapons of his own invention… First contact with an alien race dangerous enough to threaten the safety of two planets… The arrival of an unseen dark sun whose attendant marauders aimed at the very end of civilization in this Solar System."

@Wiley Writers: "The Fortress of Solicitude" by Laura Givens. Superhero. [See above]

SF Double Feature, Free Fiction, and Free Comics

Lt. Bob here. Today, as usual for a Sunday, we have some very entertaining comics (Some humans die, and that's always entertaining) and Mooooooviiiesss. Two classic Sci-fi films. Also some free fiction, much of it via SF Signal (A good site! That John DeNardo is one human who has his act together, unlike lazy, sleep-all-weekend Space Captain.)





Mooooooviiiesss.
Purple Death From Outer Space.Feature Length complication movie of the 1940 "Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe" Cliffhanger Serial.




Night of the Blood Beast (1958). Classic low budget sci-fi complete with a reanimated dead astronaut impregnated with alien embryos and a blood-sucking space monster produced by Gene Corman


Fiction
The Spring-Summer 2011 issue of FLURB is out with
Kek-W - Big Store Baoding
Leslie What - My Big Night Out With Thing
Alberto Chimal - Hotels Hoteles
Chris N. Brown - Medusa
Minister Faust - The Ghosts of Carnivores
Charlie Jane Anders - Fairy Werewolf vs. Vampire Zombie
Robert Guffey - Bring Me the Head of André Breton!
Bef, or, Bernardo Fernández - The Last Hours of the Last Days
Las Últimas Horas De Los Últimos Días
Pepe Rojo - Stuff Cosas
Michael Swanwick - Cold Reading
Rudy Rucker - Dispatches From Interzone
Doug Lain - The Last Apollo Mission
[Via SF Signal]


@The Author's Website: "Heroes are Forever" by Heather Massey.
"Two lovers find their lives forever changed as technology and Fate collide in this near-future science fiction romance short." [Via SF Signal]

@The Author's Website: "When I Kissed the Learned Astronomer" by Jamie Todd Rubin.
"When I kissed the learned astronomer, I never expected to fall in love, discover intelligent alien life in the universe, and end up in jail." [Via SF Signal]


Classic SF
"The Holes Around Mars" by Jerome Bixby, from Galaxy Science Fiction (January 1954).
"Science said it could not be, but there it was. And whoosh—look out—here it is again!" At Munseys and Project Gutenberg.



"Sinister Paradise" by Robert Moore Williams, from If: Worlds of Science Fiction (September 1952).
"It was like a mirage in reverse, this strange island off the California coast—it couldn't always be seen, but it was there—in Time." At Munseys and Project Gutenberg.

Comics
@Digital Comic Museum: The spirit of Tarzan lives with, Wambi the Jungle Boy #5, and partial issues of Jungle Comics #134 and Jungle Comics #141. In CBR downloads [Free membership required].







@Diversions of the Groovy Kind: "Who Is Haunting the Haunted Chateau?" by Sheldon Mayer and Alex Toth.





@Golden Age Comic Book Stories: Adventures Into Weird Worlds #25 (January 1954). featuring "The Men From Mars," "A Million Light-Years Away," and other sci-fi stories.

And Basically Strange #1 an odd collection of horror/fantasy comics.




@Savage Tales: Hawkmoon, The Jewel in the Skull #1: Part One of Four.
"Dorian Hawkmoon, Duke of Köln is one of the fictional characters created by Michael Moorcock in his series of the Eternal Champion books. Hawkmoon is one of the less "problematic" characters Moorcock ever created a series around."



@The Horrors of It All: "She Wouldn't Stay Dead!" from Mystic #6 (January 1952).

And "The Eyes!" / "The Hidden Graveyard" from Adventures into Weird Worlds #2 (Feb 1952) and Uncanny Tales #23 (Aug 1954) respectively. Very cool.


@Crosseyed Cyclops: Several issues of the rather strange Venus series. This comic started out as a humor/fantasy about the love goddess on Earth but slowly evolved into a horror/fantasy with some SF elements. In CBR downloads.