Friday Free Fiction - Part Two

More great free fiction. Even more to come

 [Art from Drabblecast, linked below)






Fiction
•  At Buzzy Mag: "Waterless" by Rose Blackthorn.
      "First of all, welcome to the Preserve. Here are your room keys and a map of our little settlement. You can see there’s an all-night café right next door, and we have an enclosed walkway between here and there, so you don’t even have to go outside."

• At Daily Science Fiction: "Chasing Unicorns" by Terra LeMay.
      "The unicorn hunters looked like addicts. Like Shay's brother Eddie and Eddie's friends. Not the way Eddie and his friends looked when they were high, but sketchy and haggard, the way they looked when Eddie's hook-up fell through or when nobody had any cash or when cops were watching the house."

Flash Fiction

• At Beware the Hairy Mango: "Down on His Chuck" by Matthew Sanborn Smith.  Audio. Weird.
• At Flashes in the Dark: "Letter to the Editor" by Yusef Admiration. Horror.
• At Nature: "Bee Futures" by Vaughan Stanger. Science Fiction.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "Colloquy" by Bob Newbell. Science Fiction.
• At AntipodeanSF: 

• "Botany Lesson #1" by Michael Schaper.
• "The Lodger" by David Scholes.
• "Don't Look Now" by Paulette Smythe.
• "Cosmo's Cosmos" by Tonia Marlowe.
• "The Courtyard" by Giorgio Montanari.
• "Genome" by Gaines Post.

Audio Fiction
• At Classic Tales Podcast: "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, 5 of 5" from The Arabian Nights,
     "His palace and princess gone, and the threat of imminent death over him, Aladdin struggles to keep his senses. How will he ever recover the life he’s lost?"

• At Drabblecast: "The Breadcrumbs Man" and "Pabstus Tack" by  Frank Key.
     "Pabstus Tack, Pabstus Sludge, Pabstus! Pabstus! Of him we sing. We sing his praises, it seems to me, for want of anything better to do. Pabstus Tack sits on his great golden throne, belching out light, a blinding light as gorgeous as it is uncanny. And yet it is an impure light, that is certain, for with Pabstus Tack comes Pabstus Sludge…"

• At LibriVox: "Short Poetry Collection 119"
    Includes a few fantasy/horror poems including Poe's "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven"

• At Pseudopod: "Willow Tests Well" by Nick Mamatas. Horror.
     "Tenth birthday: greeting cards from the CIA and NSA. Willow had scored ridiculously well on the Race to the Top tests, and even discovered the instructions for and answered the questions in the secret test integrated into the exam."

Other Genres

• Flash Fiction at Every Day Fiction: "Clear Title" by Brian J. Hunt

Fantasy Fiction and Audio Fiction, SF Flash Fiction.

It's just a strange coincidence that all the longer works are fantasy, while all the SF stories are flash fiction this morning.  All sound quite good so check them out.  Some bad news, the BCS audio stories "are on hiatus for a few issues." Let us hope that it's a very few issues; their audio is usually extremely good.  More later, barring disaster.


[Art from "Heads Will Roll" linked below]







Fiction
At Beneath Ceaseless Skies:

"The Telling" by Gregory Norman Bossert. Fantasy.

      "The bees' solemn procession across pillow and cheek had been silent, their wings folded and still; when they crept back out over the sash they had disappeared as if not flying but falling into the darkness.  Their feet had pricked, Mel remembered, and their fur had tickled as they worked their way through lips, teeth, and tongue.  They had smelled of barley and clover and a dark musk that made Mel think of Travelers’ wagons on market day."
"The Scorn of the Peregrinator" by John E.O. Stevens. Fantasy.

      "The next noise I knew quite well; a sword drawn through a belt-ring. And there stood a small man, lost in a vast feathered cloak-and-cowl with a great ash-roc plume curling up from a thick combed headband, pointing a long needle of steel at me, his arm shod in small quills like an ant-hunter. I swear I heard a tinny, whistling call as my eyes took him in."

At Paizo: "Killing Time" [Now Complete] by Dave Gross. Fantasy.
       She looked me over again, her eyes lingering on my arms, the spurs on my elbows, my fists, and all the fights carved into my red leather jacket. "I thought you might be the sort of man who had killed before."

At The Silver Blade: "The Guild of Swordsmen" by Kristin Janz. Fantasy.
      "She woke, lying on her left side, the hilt of her naked sword under her right hand.  There was someone in her room.  Not Alzadin.  Not Saulius.  Definitely not Merolliay.  The door was closed, the window open.  Moonlight flooded the room."

At Tor.com: "Heads Will Roll" by Lish McBride. Fantasy.
     "Lena’s not your typical animal trainer. And when she and her unicorn partner, Steve, decide to enter a fight, it’s definitely not your typical fight…."

Flash Fiction

• At Daily Science Fiction: "Homo Homaru" by Ellen Denham.
• At Nature: "Transmission received" by Peter J. Enyeart. Science Fiction.
• At 365 Tomorrows: "The Art of the Deal" by Bob Newbell. Science Fiction.

Audio
At PodCastle: "Architectural Constants" by Yoon Ha Lee. Fantasy.
     "Eskevan Three of Thorns had dropped his lensgear in the gutter. Twice he had been splashed by murky water while determining the best way to retrieve the lens. He had another hour before the water started circulating. Having sullied the yellow-trimmed coat that declared him a licensed librarian, Eskevan felt doubly reluctant either to remove his gauntlets or to plunge them into the water."

Other Genres
At Every Day Fiction: "How the Day Was" by Jennifer Delisle.

Classic SF and More.

Some very good stuff today, including a classic era SF story from Orbit, illustrated to the left.  Be sure to check them all out, or at least save the one you think sound good.  More tomorrow.










Magazines
Now Posted  the Oct - Dec '12 Issue of The Lorelei Signal featuring
      "Bingham's Deep Woods Fairies" by  J.C. Conway. Fantasy.
      "Flesh and Bone" by Danielle Gronwold. Fantasy.
      "Imaginary Enemies" by C.J. Paget. Fantasy.
      "Believing in Luck" by Josie Gowler. Fantasy.
      "Madame Melodia and the Love Machines" by Karen Maric. Fantasy.
      "Before Midnight When Ten Billion Sleep" by Gary Girod. Fantasy.
      "Star Rats" by Darrell Albert. Fantasy.
      "Stow Away" by R. Scott Russell. Fantasy.
      "The Uncle Returns" by John Hayes.  Fantasy. Poetry
      "Children of the Unicorn Clan" by Anna Sykora. Fantasy.

Fiction
At Cosmos: "Automation of a Salesman" by Gregg Jansen. Science Fiction.
      "Normby, second in sales ranking only to Trochus24, was desperate for the Robo-Salesman of the Year Award and the memory upgrade that went with it."
 At Daily Science Fiction:  "Mama's Science" by Shane D. Rhinewald. Science Fiction.
     "At ten, Darcy considered her father the center of the universe, a constant like one of Newton's laws. She had just learned about basic physics in science class the day she returned home to find out that he had gone into the stars to seek other fortunes."
At Project Gutenberg:  "The Mating of the Moons" by Kenneth O'Hara.
     "She came to Mars in search of  something, she knew not what, to give her life meaning. She found it ... in a way...." From Orbit volume 1 number 2, 1953
At Ray Gun Revival:  "Barbeque" by Michael S. Roberts. Science Fiction.
     “Retiring early, all four of us. And guess what else!” He took a swig from the frosty bottle, wiped his chin. “I bought a spaceship!”
At Strange Horizons: "In the Library of Souls" (part 2 of 2), by Jennifer Mason-Black.
      "You didn't cry," she said. "Ten years old and your mother had died, and you cared more for the books."

Audio Fiction
At Beam Me Up:  "In the Service of the Public" by Mark Webb.  "This story an Earth diplomat in service to an inter-galactic government." And  the conclusion of Edward McKeown’s “The Dive.”
At Fantastic Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs: "Episode 20 - Tarzan of the Apes"
      "Tarzan has pursued Terkoz, now a rogue ape who has abducted Jane Porter to make her his wife."

At PRI: Selected Shorts "A Touch of Magic" Fantasy.
      "A boy magician fantasizes about a glorious career, and then learns about real life the hard way, in Haley Tanner’s “Vaclav the Magnificent,” read by Sarah Steele, and the lovers in T.C. Boyle’s “Swept Away” are blown together by a raging wind."
At SFFAudio:  "The Beckoning Fair One" by Oliver Onions. Horror.
      "sometimes called the greatest ghost story in the English language"
At Toasted Cake: "The Tailor and the Fairy" by Samantha Henderson. Fairy Tale.
     "Once upon a time in a faraway kingdom there lived a hard-working tailor named Albert."

Other Genres
Audio at Crime City Central: "Mirror, Mirror" by Beverle Graves Myers.
Audio at Tales of Old: "Touch and Go" by Russell James.
     "A young, struggling pilot in World War I's Lafayette Escadrille leaves with his patrol for enemy lines. In the midst of a dogfight, he becomes separated from his squadron. He is forced to land at a strange airfield, and his role in the Allied war effort changes forever."
Fiction at Online Pulps Site: "Murder Done Twice" by Robert Leslie Bellem Noir [1946] and "Caught Out" by Fred C. Smale [Detective]

Thursday Online Freebies

A few gems today, including the latest issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies (awesome 'zine), ongoing serial fiction (both quite good), another episode of StarShipSofa (always worth a listen), a complete audio story at Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences (part one was incomplete? so the released the whole story in one file), two versions of Robert E. Howard's weird tale "The Fire Of Asshurbanipal," some ongoing fan audio, and many cool comics including the source for today's illustration.








Now Posted: Beneath Ceaseless Skies #73.
"And Her Eyes Sewn Shut with Unicorn Hair" by Rosamund Hodge.

"Why should she hope to see a unicorn now, when she never had in all her life?"

"Walls of Paper, Soft as Skin" by Adam Callaway.

"Tomai awoke to whispers. Hundreds of whispers. All whispering at once. A whirlwind of soft sound. Whispers in a dozen different languages."

Serial Fiction
@Paizo.com: "Plow and Sword (part 3 of 4)" by Robert E. Vardeman.

"Rorr used the shovel to turn dirt amid the tree roots until he struck the buried packages. He dropped to his knees and used his hands to brush away the remaining dirt, revealing several small packets and one larger one. That last one he ignored, instead pulling the oilcloth wrappings free from one of the smaller bundles."

@More Red Ink:"Guerrilla Mural of a Siren's Song (Part 2 of 3)" by Ernest Hogan.

"But I did need her to bring me out of it. Willa Shembe, the pride of the scientific community of Zululand. A girl used to experiencing the universe through other peoples' minds."

@StarShipSofa: "The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath The Queen’s Window (Part 2 of 3)" by Rachel Swirsky, read by Amy H. Sturgis.

@MoPO: "The Shadows of Calcutta" by Phil Rossi. Steampunk.

@SFFaudio: Two versions of "The Fire Of Asshurbanipal" by Robert E. Howard. Weird Tales.








Fan Audio
@Pendant Productions: Issue 35 of the Catwoman: Queen of Thieves podcast.
@Pendant Productions: Issue 66 of the Batman: The Ace of Detectives podcast







@The Bloody Pulp: "Lighthouse Of Horror" & "The Hungry Slime" B&W. Horror.
@The Horrors of It All: "The Moon Was Red" Horror. (1953)
@The Horrors of It All: "Graveyard of Ghost Ships" Horror. Pirates. (1953).
@Pappy's Golden Age Comics Blogzine: Flying Saucer Comics Sci-Fi. (1954 & 1967).
@Comic Book Catacombs: Cave Girl in "Prey of the Headhunters" Adventure (1953)
@Comic Book Catacombs: Ty-Gor "Trap For Ty-Gor's Uncle" Adventure (1940).
@Grantbridge Street: "Rainmaker" Horror / Weird Tale.
@Diversions of the Groovy Kind: "Gran'ma Died Last Year" B&W. Horror.
@Secret Sanctum of Captain Video: Captain Video in "Creatures of Doom" Sci-Fi.
@Atomic Kommie Comics: "Thing on Sputnik 4" Sci-Fi.
@War: Past, Present and Future: "Counter Attack" from Atomic War. Sci-Fi.
@Western Comics Adventures: "Sun Masters" Sci-Fi from Space Western

China Miéville and other Monday Freebies

It's Monday, which means the weekend is just a few days away. There's some good fiction today, including China Miéville, as well as other well known and up-and-coming writers. Some audio fiction, including the latest chapter of Scott Sigler's rather cool SF/football story The Starter. [Off topic note. If there are any pro-football fans out there, and the walkout continues, I hope you remember that the UFL and CFL play some pretty good football.] And there are flash fiction stories and gaming extras. [Today's illustration is for "A Hunter’s Ode to His Bait" in the fiction section]







@The Guardian: "Covehithe" by China Miéville.
"A trip to the Suffolk coast takes on a new urgency when Dughan decides the time is right for a night-time adventure in this exclusive story from China Miéville" [via Triplanetary]



@Fantasy Magazine: "A Hunter’s Ode to His Bait" by Carrie Vaughn.
"'I’ll take her.' He tossed the pouch of silver at the woman. It landed at her feet, and she hurried to pick it up. Her husband was dead, and she had eight other children to feed." [author spotlight here]

@Supterranean Press: "Younger Women" by Karen Joy Fowler.
"Vampire. Plain as the nose on your face."

@Anotherealm: "The Ediad" by Tim McDaniel.
"They stood on the windy plain before the walled city: Odysseus, the shrewd captain; Agamemnon, tamer of horses, and Menelaos his brother, the wargod's friend; god-reared Aias Telamonias; and Ed. They looked upon the great doors of fitted planking, bolted tight to keep the town of Troy secure."

@AE Science Fiction: "Resolution" by Adam Callaway.
"Pixelpeople passed me on both sides as I neared my home. I felt my frame of reference drag and looked back to see blocks of diffuse color exchange between them. The pixelpeople were migrating black holes with blurry event horizons."

@Hub: Issue #138 featuring "A Nose For Such Things" by Ian Watson.
"'You mean,' said Max, 'this ghost business might be a stunt to take people’s minds off politics?'"

Serial Fiction
@Kat and Mouse: "Payback" - Part Six" by Abner Senires.
"Duster lay on his side, looking at us, wide-eyed. Mouse's wakizashi stuck out from his throat, Duster's hands hanging limply off the blade. Blood pooled around his head and shoulders"

Classic SF
@Google Books: Yezad: A Romance of the Unknown by George H. Babcock (1922).
"A long-winded tale about a deceased aviator who is to be reincarnated after his spiritual instruction on the Red Planet by a ten-foot tall Martian named Marcomet" [via Marooned - Science Fiction & Fantasy books on Mars]




@Munseys and Project Gutenberg: "Mr. Spaceship" by Phillip K. Dick, from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy (Jan. 1953).
"A human brain-controlled spacecraft would mean mechanical perfection. This was accomplished, and something unforeseen: a strange entity called—"

SF Review
@BestScienceFictionStories.com: "Flower, Mercy, Needle, Chain" by Yoon Ha Lee (2010).
Reviewed with a link to a free online copy.






Serial Audio
@The Author's Site: "The Starter" Episode #11, by Scott Sigler.
"Quentin's growing fame brings offers for endorsement deals, including one from yacht maker Manny Sayed (remember him from The Rookie?). The Krakens' offensive line troubles continue, with no solution in sight."

Fan audio @BrokenSea Audio Productions: Episode Six of Beneath the Planet of the Apes [earlier episodes here]

Classic Audio
@SFFaudio:"Warrior Race" by Robert Sheckley, read by Gregg Margarite.
"Destroying the spirit of the enemy is the goal of war and the aliens had the best way!"

@Lovecraft eZine: Three Lovecraft Audio Stories: "The Colour Out of Space," "The Dumwich Horror," and "Pickman’s Model."

@Triplanetary: Classic Superman Audio The Atom Man Parts 17-20.






@Flashes in the Dark: "Blur" by Neil Leckman.
@365 tomorrows: "Good Man" by Jordan Whicker.
@Weirdyear: "The Zeek Files - Escape from Exkerbjann" by Mandi M. Lynch.
@Brain Harvest: "Fool" by by Steven R. Stewart.
@Strange Horizons: [Poem] "Tonight I Know" by Shweta Narayan.
@Daily Science Fiction: "The School Counselor" by Mark Sarney.
@Feedbooks: "Quick Gasps of Breath - 5 MicroHorrors" by Lyn Perry.
@Triplanetary: [Poem] "The Sorrow of the Winds" by Clark Ashton Smith.






@Netherwerks: [New Item] "Bacchune's Prototypes: The Drunkard's Gonne"





@The Land of Nod: "Two New Villains for Mystery Men!"
@Ancient Vaults & Eldritch Secrets: [New Spells] "Oath of the Acorn" and "Riddle of Perplexion"
@Ancient Vaults & Eldritch Secrets: [New Magic Item] "Dwarf Rings of Goldkeep"
@Sea of Stars: "Seirios’ Bow" and "Tempestes’ Girdle"
@Big Ball of No Fun: "Tatzlwurm" and "Uwan"
@Zalchis: [New Monsters] "Rattong" and "Triloo"