This is the fifth edition of a collection where I recommend free, legal, high-quality Science Fiction online. Missed the first ones? Check them out: vol#1, vol#2, vol#3 and vol#4.

This is the Hugo Award Winners edition. All the stories below have won this prestigious award. Enjoy!

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Allen Steele - The Emperor of Mars

Out here, there’s a lot of ways to go crazy. Get cooped up in a passenger module not much larger than a trailer, and by the time you reach your destination you may have come to believe that the universe exists only within your own mind: it’s called solipsism syndrome, and I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. Share that same module with five or six guys who don’t get along very well, and after three months you’ll be sleeping with a knife taped to your thigh. Pull double-shifts during that time, with little chance to relax, and you’ll probably suffer from depression; couple this with vitamin deficiency due to a lousy diet, and you’re a candidate for chronic fatigue syndrome.

Allen Steele is an American writer who had already won a Hugo award in the nineties. With The Emperor of Mars, he won a Hugo and an Asimov Readers' Award in 2011. The story is available on Clarke's World Magazine.

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Thomas Olde Heuvelt - The Day the World Turned Upside Down

That day, the world turned upside down.
We didn’t know why it happened. Some of us wondered whether it was our fault. Whether we had been praying to the wrong gods, or whether we had said the wrong things. But it wasn’t like that—the world simply turned upside down.

Thomas Olde Heuvelt is a Dutch author known by his new novel HEX. He has been writing science fiction in Dutch since 2002 and publishing in English as well since around 2011. The Day the World Turned Upside Down won him the Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 2015.

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Ken Liu - Mono no aware

The world is shaped like the kanji for umbrella, only written so poorly, like my handwriting, that all the parts are out of proportion.
My father would be greatly ashamed at the childish way I still form my characters. Indeed, I can barely write many of them anymore. My formal schooling back in Japan ceased when I was only eight.
Yet for present purposes, this badly drawn character will do.

Ken Liu was featured on the second edition of this compendium with another Hugo-winning story. He won the Best Short Story award back to back in 2012 and 2013, the second time with this story.

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And that's it for the fifth 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 featured in the next volume!

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