Steemit's Free Online Sci Fi Compendium - Vol #1

This is the first edition of a collection where I recommend free, legal, high quality Science Fiction online. Enjoy!

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Clive Barker - Lost Souls

Everything the blind woman had told Harry she’d seen was undeniably real. Whatever inner eye Norma Paine possessed—that extraordinary skill that allowed her to scan the island of Manhattan from the Broadway Bridge to Battery Park and yet not move an inch from her tiny room on Seventy-fifth—that eye was as sharp as any knife juggler’s. Here was the derelict house on Ridge Street, with the smoke stains besmirching the brick. Here was the dead dog that she’d described, lying on the sidewalk as though asleep, but that it lacked half its head. Here too, if Norma was to be believed, was the demon that Harry had come in search of: the shy and sublimely malignant Cha’Chat.

Clive Barker is a fantasy and horror fiction author that rised to popularity in the eighties with a series of horror stories called Books of Blood. You may know his work as writer and director of the Hellraiser saga, which was based from his novella The Hellbound Heart. Lost Souls is a short story that was first published in the Cutting Edge anthology in 1986, and then in 2013 got republished in the issue 11 of the digital Nightmare Magazine, and also posted freely online on their website.

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Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross - Rapture of the Nerds

Huw awakens, dazed and confused.
This is by no means unusual, but for once Huw’s head hurts more than his bladder. He’s lying head down, on his back, in a bathtub. He scrabbles for a handhold and pulls himself upright. A tub is a terrible place to spend a night. Or a morning, come to think of it—as he blinks, he sees that it’s midafternoon, and the light slanting in through a high window limns the strange bathroom’s treacly Victorian fixtures with a roseate glow.
That was quite a party. He vaguely remembers the gathering dawn, its red light staining the wall outside the kitchen window as he discussed environmental politics with a tall shaven-headed woman with a blue forelock and a black leather minidress straight out of the twentieth century. (He has an equally vague memory of her defending a hard-core transhumanist line: Score nil-nil to both sides.) This room wasn’t a bathroom when he went to sleep in it: Bits of the bidet are still crawling into position, and there’s a strong smell of VOCs in the air.
His head hurts.
Leaning over the sink, Huw twiddles the taps until they begin to dribble cold water. He splashes his face and runs his hand through his thinning hair, glances up at the mirror, and yells, “Shit!”
There’s a spindly black biohazard trefoil tattooed on his forehead. It wasn’t there when he went to sleep, either.
Behind him, the door opens. “Having a good morning?” asks Sandra Lal, whose mutable attic this must therefore be. She’s playing with a small sledgehammer, tossing it into the air and catching it like a baton-twirler. Her grotesquely muscled forearm has veins that bulge with hyperpressured blood and hormones.
“I wish,” he says. Sandra’s parties tend to be wild. “Am I too late for the dead dog?”
“You’re never too late.” Sandra smiles. “Coffee’s in the kitchen, which is on the ground floor today. Bonnie gave me a subscription to House of the Week and today’s my new edition—don’t worry if you can’t remember where everything is, just remember the entrance is at ground level, okay?”
“Coffee,” Huw says. His head is pounding, but so is his bladder. “Um. Can I have a minute?”
“Yes, but I’d like my spare restroom back afterwards. It’s going to be en suite, but first I’ve got to knock out the wall through into the bedroom.” She hefts her sledgehammer suggestively.

Rapture of the Nerds is a full length, Creative Commons-licensed post-singularity novel from two veteran, award-winning writers. Booklist reviews it:

Doctorow and Stross, two of the SF genre’s more exciting voices, team up to produce a story that is mindbendingly entertaining but almost impossible to explain….Peppered with references to pop-culture staples (The Matrix, Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), and drawing on concepts from hard SF, cyberpunk, and videogames, the novel is a surefire hit for genre fans, especially those familiar with the works of its coauthors. Fans of Adam Roberts’ elegant, intellectually challenging SF will also be on firm ground here.”

As the Creative Commons license allows, it is available in a variety of formats: eBooks, PDFs, text, you name it.

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Greg Egan - Oceanic

The swell was gently lifting and lowering the boat. My breathing grew slower, falling into step with the creaking of the hull, until I could no longer tell the difference between the faint rhythmic motion of the cabin and the sensation of filling and emptying my lungs. It was like floating in darkness: every inhalation buoyed me up, slightly; every exhalation made me sink back down again.
In the bunk above me, my brother Daniel said distinctly, “Do you believe in God?”
My head was cleared of sleep in an instant, but I didn’t reply straight away. I’d never closed my eyes, but the darkness of the unlit cabin seemed to shift in front of me, grains of phantom light moving like a cloud of disturbed insects.
“Martin?”
“I’m awake.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Of course.” Everyone I knew believed in God. Everyone talked about Her, everyone prayed to Her. Daniel most of all. Since he’d joined the Deep Church the previous summer, he prayed every morning for a kilotau before dawn. I’d often wake to find myself aware of him kneeling by the far wall of the cabin, muttering and pounding his chest, before I drifted gratefully back to sleep.

Egan does not attend science fiction conventions, does not sign books, and has stated that he appears in no photographs on the web. Still, he writes great stories: Oceanic was the winner of 1999 Hugo Award for Best Novella, the Locus Award best novella, and Asimov's Reader Poll for best novella.

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Neil Gaiman - A Study in Emerald

Fresh From Their Stupendous European Tour, where they performed before several CROWNED HEADS OF EUROPE, garnering their plaudits and praise with magnificent dramatic performances, combining both COMEDY and TRAGEDY, the Strand Players wish to make it known that they shall be appearing at the Royal Court Theatre, Drury Lane, for a LIMITED ENGAGEMENT in April, at which they will present "My Look-Alike Brother Tom!", "The Littlest Violet-Seller" and "The Great Old Ones Come" (this last an Historical Epic of Pageantry and Delight); each an entire play in one act! Tickets are available now from the Box Office.

Neil Gaiman, the british author famous for the comic book series The Sandman, wrote this story as Sherlock Holmes meets Cthulhu. It was first published in the Shadows Over Baker Street anthology in 2003, and it won the 2004 Hugo Award for Best Short Story, and the 2005 Locus Award for Best Novelette. Neil himself offers this story as a PDF in his website.

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William Gibson - Burning Chrome

It was hot, the night we burned Chrome. Out in the malls and plazas, moths were batting themselves to death against the neon, but in Bobby's loft the only light came from a monitor screen and the green and red LEDs on the face of the matrix simulator. I knew every chip in Bobby's simulator by heart; it looked like your workaday Ono-Sendai VII, the "Cyberspace Seven," but I'd rebuilt it so many times that you'd have had a hard time finding a square millimeter of factory circuitry in all that silicon.

William Gibson originally published Burning Chrome on Omni Magazine in 1982. It was his first story to be set in the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis urban sprawl that set the stage to his Sprawl Trilogy, containing Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. It's also the first written appearance of the word Cyberspace, coined by Gibson. This online version is a sample story from the Hackers Anthology, published in 1996.

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And that's it for the first volume of Steemit's Free Online Sci Fi Compendium. What's your favorite story? What's your favorite Sci Fi author? Leave a comment and it might be feature in the next volume!

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