Paul McAuley has posted his short story "Rocket Boy" (from the anthology Future Weapons of War) on his website.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cory Doctorow is podcasting his story in progress, "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now Is the Best Time of Your Life" in chunks; he's just posted the first piece.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those of you looking for Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretches, on this most auspicious of days, feast your browsers on:

Infinity Plus has an excerpt from Kay Kenyon’s new novel Bright of the Sky and the story “In Transit” by Keith Brooke and Eric Brown.

Alex Irvine's story "Europe" is available as a PDF.

The entire text of Charles Stross's novella "Missile Gap" (currently a Locus Award nominee, and originally from the Locus-nominated anthology One Million A.D., edited by Gardner Dozois) has been put online for free by Subterranean Press.

Keith R.A. DeCandido posted his short story "Wild Bill Got Shot" for IP-STD.

I think I've forgotten to mention this before, but Eric Flint regularly posts snippets of his books (he's currently posting from 1634: The Baltic War, 1634: The Bavarian Crisis, and Pyramid Power) on his webpage. (And by "regularly," I mean "what looks like the whole damn novel, in big chunks, with some every day.")

Jeffrey Ford has posted a story, "Weiroot," for IP-STD.

David Moles contributes his story "On the Night."

Chris Roberson gives us "The Famous Ape."

John Scalzi offers us the first half of an unfinished YA novel he wrote a decade ago, The Durant Chronicles.

Ryk E. Spoor's contribution is the story "Shadow of Fear," in two parts.

Sean Williams tosses his story "The Seventh Letter" into the pot.

Gwenda Bond points to her story "Unflappable," available for free for quite some time now.

Farah Mendelsohn posts part of her upcoming book, The Child Reader and the Reading Child.

Jess Nevins posts five pages of entries from his upcoming The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heroes.

And, to wrap it all up, the mother of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, Jo Walton, has a long list of stories available for free for IP-STD. (From a cursory glance, it looks like she's listed a bunch that I haven't, but I think I also have some that she doesn't, yet.)

Update, 4/25: Dusk Peterson is attempting to collect links to all of the IP-STD posts (and ancilliary items, such as banners and T-shirts); there's a whole bunch at this page, and more will be added as they are discovered.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Infinity Plus has posted an extract from Conrad Williams's novella "The Scalding Rooms."

Chapter Feeds has the beginning of Michael Cunningham's three-novellas-disguised-as-a-literary-novel Specimen Days.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 01:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A SFBC member wrote in -- actually hand-wrote, on a piece of paper and everything -- to ask a question. He didn't give permission to run that letter in our Interface letters column, so I won't quote him or use his name. (But I hope he's out there, since I doubt I'll have time to send him a reply through the post.)

Our friend, who hails from the great state of Alabama, is a big fan of the 1982 John Carpenter movie The Thing, and asked if there was a novelization of that movie, or a story similar to it. And I have some good news for him. First, the movie was based loosely on the John W. Campbell story "Who Goes There?" (and also on the previous filmed version of that story, 1951's The Thing From Another World). Also, Alan Dean Foster wrote a novelization, published in paperback in 1982 as The Thing.

Foster's The Thing is out of print now, but trivially findable used (ABEbooks.com lists 26 copies, as cheap as $1.75).

"Who Goes There?" is one of the great and famous stories of the SF genre (originally published under Campbell's pen name Don A. Stuart), and has been reprinted many times -- here's a list from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database.

This has been the SFBC's free "What the Heck Was That Old Thing?" service; requests for service can be left as comments here or e-mailed to sfbceditors@sfbc.com.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Matthew Cheney has posted the list of stories that will be included in the first annual edition of Best American Fantasy; the series is edited by Cheney, and this volume was guest-edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer.

The stories are:

• "A Hard Truth About Waste Management" by Sumanth Prabhaker
• "The Stolen Father" by Eric Roe
• "The Saffron Gatherer" by Elizabeth Hand
• "The Whipping" by Julia Elliott
• "A Better Angel" by Chris Adrian
• "Draco Campestris" by Sarah Monette
• "Geese" by Daniel Coudriet
• "The Chinese Boy" by Ann Stapleton
• "The Flying Woman" by Meghan McCarron
• "First Kisses from Beyond the Grave" by Nik Houser
• "Song of the Selkie" by Gina Ochsner
• "A Troop [sic] of Baboons" by Tyler Smith
• "Pieces of Scheherazade" by Nicole Kornher-Stace
• "Origin Story" by Kelly Link
• "An Experiment in Governance" by E.M. Schorb
• "The Next Corpse Collector" by Ramola D
• "The Village of Ardakmoktan" by Nicole Derr
• "The Man Who Married a Tree" by Tony D'Souza
• "A Fable with Slips of White Paper Spilling from the Pockets" by Kevin Brockmeier
• "Pregnant" by Catherine Zeidler
• "The Warehouse of Saints" by Robin Hemley
• "The Ledge" by Austin Bunn
• "Lazy Taekos" by Geoffrey A. Landis
• "For the Love of Paul Bunyan" by Fritz Swanson
• "An Accounting" by Brian Evenson
• "Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot" by Daniel Alarcón
• "Bit Forgive" by Maile Chapman
• "The End Of Narrative (1-29; Or 29-1)" by Peter LaSalle
• "Kiss" by Melora Wolff

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

David Marusek has a new short story, "Osama Phone Home," up on Technology Review's website.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

New on Futurismic: "A Life in Pictures" by Mark Ward. [via Locus Online]

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Concatenation has updated, with links to the "Futures" stories from Nature and to a one-page story by David Eagleman. [via Locus Online]

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new story by Susanna Clark, "The Dweller in High Places," is now available as an audio file (I don't know who is reading it) as the first installment in a new BBC series called Blood Lines, which will showcase new short story writers.

"Blood Lines?" The idea is great, but why are they calling it Blood Lines?

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jim Baen's Universe magazine and the National Space Society have announced a contest to honor the late James Patrick Baen, founder of Baen Books and one of the most important SF editors of his generation.

The contest is for works of short fiction (under 8,000 words) that depicts a near future in which manned space exploration is important, exciting, and positive.

The winning story will be published in Jim Baen's Universe, and the winning author will also receive other prizes.

[via Locus Online]

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 10:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The newest edition of The Time Traveler Show features del Rey’s story “Spawning Ground” read by Paul S. Jenkins.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 02:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Time Traveler Show has a new issue, #11, featuring the classic Philip K. Dick story "Beyond Lies the Wub."

Paul Levinson read the first chapter of his new novel The Plot Against Socrates for The Sound Palette. (Levinson also has a regular podcast, Light on Light Through.)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I know "jubilee" is not usually a word you associate with Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr., but, hey!, it rhymes. It's all about the jaunty attitude and snappy wordplay here at The SFBC Blog (Real Name Coming Soon!)

Niall Harrison of Torque Control has posted some thoughts on Tiptree late story "The Color of Neanderthal Eyes," as well as a long, long list of links to other Tiptree resources.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 03:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Robert J. Sawyer announces that his story "The Shoulders of Giants" is now available in a sleek, 21st century podcast form.

Similarly up-to-date and modern is Kelly Link's story "The Hortlak," now also available as a podcast.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Douglas Cohen (assistant editor of Realms of Fantasy) has had enough. This happens to everyone who reads slush; at some point you just have to scream something. In his case, it's a call for fantasy stories to actually have some, y'know, fantasy in them.

Gosh, I wonder if he's onto something? 

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 03:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jay Lake wrote a long post over the weekend about the various kinds of rejection, and then followed that up with a chart (!) of his rejections and acceptances, over the past decade.

I would make a sarcastic comment here, except...if I was a writer, I'd probably track things exactly the same way.

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 02:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Andrew Wheeler at 09:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Irish genre magazine Albedo One has just announced its Aeon Prize 2006 contest, which has a top prize of a thousand euros. The winner of their previous contest has also just been published in issue #31.

For those interested in joining, full details are on that website; the entry fee is five euros per story and onlyy works up to 8,000 words are accepted. 

Posted by Andy Wheeler at 07:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Andy Wheeler at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If Jim Baen gets his way, you'll be able to read his new online magazine, Jim Baen's Universe, just about anywhere: on a computer, on a cellphone, on a PDA, and (dare we dream?) perhaps on your next-generation direct mental interface.

Here's a press release about the mobile functionality, and here's the main page for the magazine. If you think most modern short SF is too focused on fancy language and downbeat endings, then you'll want to check it out.

Posted by Andy Wheeler at 10:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)