Steemit's Free Online Sci Fi Compendium - Vol #4
This is the fourth edition of a collection where I recommend free, legal, high-quality Science Fiction online. Missed the first ones?
Check it vol#1, vol#2 and vol#3.
On this edition, I'll feature a story recommended by a reader and revisit some masters. Enjoy!
Nancy Fulda - Movement
It is sunset. The sky is splendid through the panes of my bedroom window; billowing layers of cumulous blazing with refracted oranges and reds. I think if only it weren’t for the glass, I could reach out and touch the cloudscape, perhaps leave my own trail of turbulence in the swirling patterns that will soon deepen to indigo.
Nancy Fulda was recommended by @plotbot2015 in the previous edition of this compendium. This a story that was nominated in 2012 for the Locus, Hugo and Nebula awards, and won the Asimov's Readers award for Best Short Story.
Cory Doctorow - Anda's Game
Anda didn’t really start to play the game until she got herself a girl-shaped avatar. She was 12, and up until then, she’d played a boy-elf, because her parents had sternly warned her that if you played a girl you were an instant perv-magnet. None of the girls at Ada Lovelace Comprehensive would have been caught dead playing a girl character. In fact, the only girls she’d ever seen in-game were being played by boys. You could tell, cos they were shaped like a boy’s idea of what a girl looked like: hooge buzwabs and long legs all barely contained in tiny, pointless leather bikini-armor. Bintware, she called it.
Cory Doctorow was featured in the first edition of with a full-length creative-commons book in collaboration with Charles Stross. This time, I bring you a short story, also licensed as creative commons, first published in Salon in 2014, then released as part of his collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present in 2007.
Vernor Vinge - BFF's first adventure
Whoever kidnapped me has erased my most recent memories and gagged me. I have no idea how they snatched me from Timothy Bennett, or if Tim is okay — but now I'm hurtling towards a concrete wall. The kidnappers must have panicked and thrown me from their car. A transforming phone would become a parachute, but I can't transform; physically, I'm a clunky classic. I extend a flange and rudder myself around so I'll hit the wall on my reinforced corner. I safe my MEMS and shut down.
Vernor Vinge was featured on the second edition of this compendium and returns today with a recent short story published in Nature, a non-fiction science magazine that publishes a single short story in each edition. This one was published in Nature 518, on February 2015.
And that's it for the third 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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