Best new fantastic online fiction
March 22, 2010 1:20 PM   Subscribe

What are your best sources for online science fiction / fantasy / horror short stories?

I really enjoyed reading Kij Johnson's stories online. What favorite blogs / sites do you read which link to online short stories in a fantasy / horror / sf vein? I realize there are a million sites out there.

No steampunk please.
posted by benzenedream to Writing & Language (13 answers total) 20 users marked this as a favorite
 
Mefi's own Faint of Butt runs a great site called MicroHorror that hosts short horror fiction. It's got a decent link section, but you could MeFi Mail him and he might have some other suggestions too.
posted by OmieWise at 1:25 PM on March 22, 2010


Best answer: Strange Horizons.
posted by Naberius at 1:29 PM on March 22, 2010 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Thanks for the plug, OmieWise! The best recommendations I can make are the ones I've already listed on the links page: Flashes in the Dark (a flash horror blog with content similar to MicroHorror) and infinity plus and HorrorMasters, neither of which has been updated in a while, but which offer extensive archives of genre fiction. For something lighter, you might enjoy Creepypasta.com, a collection of nightmarish little stories that bounce around the Internet.
posted by Faint of Butt at 1:35 PM on March 22, 2010


Best answer: I'm a fan of the Escape Artists podcasts, which do weekly readings of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
posted by NoraReed at 1:39 PM on March 22, 2010 [1 favorite]


Kick back and have some headphone fun with OTR
posted by timsteil at 1:55 PM on March 22, 2010


Analog has always been great but is set up for the Kindle and Sony Reader. Science Fiction and Fantasy is also available for e-readers and also on Audible. If you like SF then support the publishers and writers.
posted by JJ86 at 2:24 PM on March 22, 2010 [1 favorite]


Best answer: Clarkesworld is pretty uniformly awesome.

I like Ideomancer's stuff, in general.

Abyss and Apex usually has at least one story I like in every issue.

And seconding Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Pod Castle. Probably my favorite 'magazines' ever.
posted by Scattercat at 3:12 PM on March 22, 2010


Best answer: SF Signal do regular Free Fiction posts with more free fiction than you could possibly ever consume...

If audio is your thing I'm quite fond of the StarShipSofa podcast, though there's usually some other stuff mixed in there as well.
posted by Artw at 3:18 PM on March 22, 2010


Tor has a few free shorts, plus comics and other odd bits of distraction. (Watch out for steampunk.)
posted by filthy light thief at 4:32 PM on March 22, 2010


Seconding StarShipSofa. It's the closest audio equivalent to the trade mags that I've seen (the 'other stuff' Artw mentions are fact articles, interviews, reviews, etc.)

Somewhat related to that, Matthew Sanborn Smith (a 'Sofa irregular) has a fun podcast of his own short, quirky stories. I quite like his style, and they're only around five minutes long apiece.

Now that I think of it, Smith does (or has done, he hasn't had one on in a while) a feature called 'Fiction Crawler' on StarShipSofa, where he finds and recommends online stories and story sites.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 6:34 PM on March 22, 2010


Best answer: Free Speculative Fiction Online
posted by Zed at 5:17 AM on March 23, 2010


It's not exactly a general source for fiction, but Peter Watts has a number of dark sci-fi novels available to read online. They're all good, but my favorite was Blindsight.
Charles Stross also has some novels available. Accelerando is the only one that I read, and it was quite good.
posted by Vulpyne at 9:17 AM on March 23, 2010


How did I blank on Baen Books' Free Library? Novels (usually the first one or two in a series) available for free in a variety of e-formats.

Also, most (all?) of Cory Doctorow's work is out there in e-formats for free.

Spider Robinson does a podcast of various things.

Damn, this is going to be one of those threads that has me waking up in the middle of the night exclaiming, "Oh! And soandso! How did I forget that?!"
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 10:28 AM on March 23, 2010


« Older Ultra basic classical physics: force, energy...   |   Just a head of iceberg lettuce and a fork, please Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.