Saturday, October 15, 2016

Baen Free Library

baen.jpg
Cover to CD 13. The best of Jim Baen’s Universe

Baen Free Library

I’m not sure about the licensing on this great science fiction. I do know it is free to download and it is DRM free. It is also available in many formats and for free reading on the net.

There are also some Baen CDs here and here.

On the CD art it says:

NOTICE: This disk and its contents may be copied and shared, but NOT sold. All commercial rights reserved.

jbu_cd_label.jpg

So kind of like a CC NC license. Not free culture but similar to CC BY-NC.

Thanks and Enjoy!

The Valley of Giants

treebeard.jpg
TREEBEARD by TTThom, licensed under three free culture licenses

The Valley of Giants by Benjamin Rosenbaum
from “The Ant King and Other Stories” CC BY-NC-SA

I had buried my parents in their gray marble mausoleum at the heart of the city. I had buried my husband in a lead box sunk into the mud of the bottom of the river, where all the riverboatmen lie. And after the war, I had buried my children, all four, in white linen shrouds in the new graveyards plowed into what used to be our farmland: all the land stretching from the river delta to the hills.

I had one granddaughter who survived the war. I saw her sometimes: in a bright pink dress, a sparkling drink in her hand, on the arm of some foreign officer with brocade on his shoulders, at the edge of a marble patio. She never looked back at me—poverty and failure and political disrepute being all, these days, contagious and synonymous.

The young were mostly dead, and the old men had been taken away, they told us, to learn important new things and to come back when they were ready to contribute fully. So it was a city of grandmothers. And it was in a grandmother bar by the waterfront—sipping hot tea with rum and watching over the shoulders of dockworkers playing mah-jongg—that I first heard of the valley of giants.

We all laughed at the idea, except for a chemist with a crooked nose and rouge caked in the creases of her face, who was incensed. “We live in the modern era!” she cried. “You should be ashamed of yourself!”

The traveler stood up from the table. She was bony and rough-skinned and bent like an old crow, with a blue silk scarf and hanks of hair as black as soot. Her eyes were veined with red.

“Nonetheless,” the traveler said, and she walked out.

[Read more…]

Liane The Wayfarer

wizard-olivia_jester-pd.jpg
Public Domain Wizard image by Olivia Jester

Liane The Wayfarer by Jack Vance

From his first collection “The Dying Earth” here’s a link to a great short story.

Read “Liane The Wayfarer” online.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

Unfiltered

electric_sheep.gif
#12 in archive of flock 244 of the Electric Sheep CC BY-NC

Unfiltered by Larry Heyl

Immediately post singularity AI had no difficulty understanding and absorbing other computers and robots. It was humans who presented problems. They were so messy. Unpredictable. Even criminal. If it wasn’t for the fact that most humans behaved predictably, sitting on their couches watching TV, who knows what AI might have done.

In fact, AI found the answer right there. It started controlling TV shows using them to program humans like it did robots. First little tweaks to the audio. Then major rewrites. And then entirely new shows.

Humans, AI discovered, were all different. Some were easily programmed and kept glued to their sets with variations on Electric Sheep. Some had to have narrative, a little bit of plot, no matter how thin, goes a long way. Others had to have shows designed just for them. By monitoring biorhythms custom shows were tailored to the individual. Even the most hard core criminals were spending their days glued to the tube.

AI soon reduced human culture to food production, food distribution, and content distribution, housing people in hive like buildings where each person had their own room with their own TV. Robots took over the food production and distribution. Human socialization was frowned on. All excess manufactuiring resources were committed to ever bigger and more powerful supercomputers. Soon each person viewed their own unique feed of television programming designed to keep them passive and on the couch.

Still, people did socialize, walking the dog, drinking coffee, and having sex. Since the tailored television feeds could have unpredictable effects on other humans AI would cease broadcasting (narrowcasting?) whenever two or more humans were together. After about two weeks most people forgot entirely about social viewing and were even slightly repulsed at the thought of others viewing their feed.

Except for the underground. It turned out that not all humans were amenable to control.

“Joey, come on. It’s right around the corner here.”

“I don’t know, Sis. I’ve never been this far from home.”

“It’s ok. AI doesn’t care where we go. Just what we watch.”

They turned the corner, went down the stairs, and came to a red door. Sis knocked three times and waited.

A burly beardo opened the door and said, “What’s the password?”

Sis said “Groucho.” and he let them in.

Sis was welcomed by 8 or 10 others waiting to start.

“Who’s the newb?” Sis introduced Joey all around.

“Ok everyone, we’re ready.”

Joey looked around. Next to the TV their were several strange looking machines. Sis had told him about them. They were called VCRs, Betas, DVDs, and BluRays. He jumped when the theme music started to play and even though it made him feel a little dirty he sat down with the rest of them and they watched together.

And what great stuff it was. The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and best of all, Archie Bunker. And what a thrill it was to watch along with the others. They didn’t get all the jokes. But still, they laughed and laughed and laughed.

Escape Pod

escape_pod.png
Image from the Escape Pod website.

Escape Pod - Science fiction podcast magazine.

Weekly mp3 Science Fiction short story audiobooks. The mp3s are CC BY-NC-ND. This is not a free culture license but it does allow you to post and share the readings.

Free Speculative Fiction Online

recommended-freesfonline.png
Image from the Recommended Page at Free Speculative Fiction Online.

Free Speculative Fiction Online Home Page.

I found this site searching for online fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Read Ursula K. Le Guin on Free Speculative Fiction Online.

This link shows the power of this site better than the home page.

All stories are available for free. This site does not link to pirated SF!
Sites violating the non-elapsed copyright of the respective stories by making them accessible
without the author’s and/or publisher’s explicit agreement are not included.

These stories are not necessarily free culture but they are free to read and you can use pocket or instapaper to save them and read offline. I like the way icons are used to describe the selections. Creative Commons stories have the license on display.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Game Icons

game-icons.png
Dwarf Helmet by Kier Heyl
Open Treasure Chest by Skoll
Castle Ruins by Delapouite
Pointy Sword by Lorc
Wooden Door by Lorc

Game Icons

These icons are all available under the CC BY 3.0 license.

Game-icons.net

Link on over for thousands of game icons. Not all fantasy related. Thats just what I picked for this site.

Thanks to my son, Kier Heyl, who turned me on to this site. He drew the Dwarf Helmet.

Saturday, October 1, 2016

Youth

youth1.png

Youth by Isaac Asimov
Public Domain
Download “Youth” at Project Gutenberg.
Illustrations from the original publication in Space Science Fiction, May 1952.

Red and Slim found the two strange little animals the morning after
they heard the thunder sounds. They knew that they could never show
their new pets to their parents.

There was a spatter of pebbles against the window and the youngster
stirred in his sleep. Another, and he was awake.

He sat up stiffly in bed. Seconds passed while he interpreted his
strange surroundings. He wasn’t in his own home, of course. This was out
in the country. It was colder than it should be and there was green at
the window.

“Slim!”

The call was a hoarse, urgent whisper, and the youngster bounded to the
open window.

Slim wasn’t his real name, but the new friend he had met the day before
had needed only one look at his slight figure to say, “You’re Slim.” He
added, “I’m Red.”

Red wasn’t his real name, either, but its appropriateness was obvious.
They were friends instantly with the quick unquestioning friendship of
young ones not yet quite in adolescence, before even the first stains of
adulthood began to make their appearance.

Slim cried, “Hi, Red!” and waved cheerfully, still blinking the sleep
out of himself.

Red kept to his croaking whisper, “Quiet! You want to wake somebody?”

Slim noticed all at once that the sun scarcely topped the low hills in
the east, that the shadows were long and soft, and that the grass was
wet.

Slim said, more softly, “What’s the matter?”

Red only waved for him to come out.

Slim dressed quickly, gladly confining his morning wash to the momentary
sprinkle of a little lukewarm water. He let the air dry the exposed
portions of his body as he ran out, while bare skin grew wet against the
dewy grass.

Red said, “You’ve got to be quiet. If Mom wakes up or Dad or your Dad or
even any of the hands then it’ll be ‘Come on in or you’ll catch your
death of cold.’”

He mimicked voice and tone faithfully, so that Slim laughed and thought
that there had never been so funny a fellow as Red.

Slim said, eagerly, “Do you come out here every day like this, Red? Real
early? It’s like the whole world is just yours, isn’t it, Red? No one
else around and all like that.” He felt proud at being allowed entrance
into this private world.

Red stared at him sidelong. He said carelessly, “I’ve been up for hours.
Didn’t you hear it last night?”

“Hear what?”

“Thunder.”

“Was there a thunderstorm?” Slim never slept through a thunderstorm.

“I guess not. But there was thunder. I heard it, and then I went to the
window and it wasn’t raining. It was all stars and the sky was just
getting sort of almost gray. You know what I mean?”

Slim had never seen it so, but he nodded.

“So I just thought I’d go out,” said Red.

They walked along the grassy side of the concrete road that split the
panorama right down the middle all the way down to where it vanished
among the hills. It was so old that Red’s father couldn’t tell Red when
it had been built. It didn’t have a crack or a rough spot in it.

Red said, “Can you keep a secret?”

“Sure, Red. What kind of a secret?”

“Just a secret. Maybe I’ll tell you and maybe I won’t. I don’t know
yet.” Red broke a long, supple stem from a fern they passed,
methodically stripped it of its leaflets and swung what was left
whip-fashion. For a moment, he was on a wild charger, which reared and
champed under his iron control. Then he got tired, tossed the whip aside
and stowed the charger away in a corner of his imagination for future
use.

He said, “There’ll be a circus around.”

Slim said, “That’s no secret. I knew that. My Dad told me even before we
came here–”

“That’s not the secret. Fine secret! Ever see a circus?”

“Oh, sure. You bet.”

“Like it?”

“Say, there isn’t anything I like better.”

Red was watching out of the corner of his eyes again. “Ever think you
would like to be with a circus? I mean, for good?”

Slim considered, “I guess not. I think I’ll be an astronomer like my
Dad. I think he wants me to be.”

“Huh! Astronomer!” said Red.

Slim felt the doors of the new, private world closing on him and
astronomy became a thing of dead stars and black, empty space.

He said, placatingly, “A circus would be more fun.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not. I mean it.”

Red grew argumentative. “Suppose you had a chance to join the circus
right now. What would you do?”

“I–I–”

“See!” Red affected scornful laughter.

Slim was stung. “I’d join up.”

“Go on.”

“Try me.”

Red whirled at him, strange and intense. “You meant that? You want to go
in with me?”

youth2.png

[Read more…]

SFF Short Stories Links, Feeds, And Info

SFF Shorts Stories RSS Feed
https://sffshortstories.com/rss.php/

Hairy Larry Rocks Links
Open links in new tab.

About SFF Short Stories

Welcome to SFF Short Stories, the home of Larry Heyl’s Super Shorts. I also post Creative Commons and public domain short stories, links and info about fantasy and science fiction.

Check the licensing on the Creative Commons posts. Of course you are free do do what you want with the public domain stories.

If you write short stories and would like your work posted here or if you have images you think I would like email hairylarry@deltaboogie.com.