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So you love science fiction stories but don’t have the cash to drop on a magazine. Or maybe you don’t want to commit out of the gate to a purchasing an entire magazine issue. What if I told you that you could read award wining science fiction stories from today’s leading authors for free?
There are more science fiction outlets today than ever before. Although traditional print magazines like Analog, Asimov’s, and F&SF lead the pack, there are non-traditional publishing models that are consistently putting out award winning original content from the same field of authors as the big three. The so-called “free to read” model has found a lot of success in the age of Patreon. Issues are published online in a blog format free to read by anyone with an internet connection. Ads help support the content, with most support coming from digital (or in some cases print on demand) sales in more convenient packages like epub, Weightless Books, Amazon Kindle, or DRM-free PDF. One highly successful publication is Clarkesworld, created and edited by Neil Clarke. Clarkesworld has been publishing monthly since October 2006, and has ranked up quite the awards list, including multiple Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards for both individual stories and the magazine as a whole. You can read all of these award winning stories for free, and Clarkesworld maintains a convenient awards list on their website. So why not give them a read? Below are a few stories I’ve personally enjoyed from Clarkesworld to get you started. “The Secret Life of Bots” by Suzanne Palmer, September 2017. 2018 Hugo award winner for Best Novelette, and a classic science fiction story inside a classic science fiction story. “Passage of Earth” by Michael Swanwick, April 2014. An alien is brought into the county morgue by the coroner’s ex-wife for an autopsy. “Bits” by Naomi Kritzer, October 2013. A very fun story about alien sex toys. (I know, I know, but give it a try. It’s actually my favorite on this list, and it shows how Clarkesworld isn’t afraid of topics.) “Five Stages of Grief After the Alien Invasion” by Caroline M. Yoachim, August 2014. A beautiful story of grief and forgiveness after an accidental alien attack. “The Oddish Gesture of Humans” by Gabriel Calácia, July 2020. A nice short story about that odd thing humans do. This is the author’s first published story.  How are you going to not read that cover story? All I’m saying is that I’m going to be reading a lot more short stories.
Earlier this year (Remember when we could still go out and see people without bathing in bleach afterwards? It was back then.) I started reading The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. I highly recommend it if you are into either genre, or just like good fiction regardless of genre. Years ago I had a subscription to Analog, another of the world’s premier science fiction magazines. That was back in college and it was hard for me to keep up with it. You know how it goes. In the last two years I’ve been reading a lot more and trying to do lots of other things less. Unhealthy things like using Twitter; that kind of stuff. About a week ago I took several days vacation before I physically inverted my work laptop. I turned my phone off for five days. Let me tell you, that was fantastic. I’m doing it a lot more. Again, highly recommended. Brace yourself for a shocker: most of what I’m reading is science fiction. Mostly “classic” science fiction, partly out of a desire to better grasp the literary history of the genre, and partly because I do find it fun. Emphasis on “fun” and not on “intellectually stimulating,” which is why I like science fiction in general. I’m not shitting on the classics here. I’ve found some I’ve really loved, like Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, or John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids. Now, these are pretty universally considered science fiction classics, but that certainly doesn’t mean that they age well, and that’s my point. Frank Herbert’s The Heaven Makers, though visionary in that it predicted much of the reality television we are assailed by today, is also predicated on a plot that centers on bestiality. Like, a sexy form of bestiality, which makes it even worse. Lots of science fiction, written by predominantly white conservative men in the 1950s-1970s, hasn’t aged well. There is sexism, obviously. Racism occasionally, just because usually everyone is white. Sometimes there’s that black side character that is there to make the point that racism isn’t a thing in the year fifty-seven billion. Usually there are more aliens than black people, and the aliens are still treated better than black people in the 1960s. Sometimes there are even racial slurs, even when there aren’t any non-whites in the stories! Ah, reading old literature is so much fun, what with the occasionally wanting to vomit. Science fiction is a very vibrant field these days, with women and people of color more and more prominent in the field. Many of the magazines and e-zines are making it a point to publish more underrepresented writers (and have been for years), and the stories coming out are much the better for it. A game I play is to count the total number of stories in a magazine, then count the number of authors with female sounding names and work out a percentage. I argue the split should be around 60/40 either way. (I know this isn’t the best way to do it because I’m gender biasing a name versus a gender or sexual identity, but I think it’s accurate enough for my purposes.) A desire to read more and more contemporary sci-fi, as well as to read more in general, led to me a decision that will result in reading a lot more short stories: I subscribed to all of the big three sci-fi magazines. Analog, Asimov’s, and of course The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Now seemed like a good time as well because with major book stores like Barnes and Noble closed, their sole source of income is subscriptions. If you’re looking for some quality fiction, I really recommending picking up a subscription to one of them, or maybe just ordering some back issues from their sites. Help a genre out. Stay at Home
by Andrew Porwitzky The air was clear, cleaner than it had been in centuries, when the aliens came. They wondered why we all sat at home apart from one another instead of gathering. They landed in major cities, landing in public parks where people still came together, hoping to get an answer. “Why do you live apart?” They spoke all our local dialects without any accent. Even in Alabama. An alien coughed. Then more of them coughed. Then they all fell over dead. It was unsettling. That’s when we learned that despite all our hopes and worries surrounding alien life, H.G. Wells had been right.  I recently discovered Clifford D. Simak and it has been nothing short of a revelation.
To say that Isaac Asimov is my favorite author would be inaccurate. I have a short list of top authors but I don’t put Asimov on that list because he is on a much more selective list and I generally don’t believe in redundancy. Or duplication. No, Asimov is not on my list of favorite authors because he’s on my list of favorite humans. I have somehow, slowly over the last twenty years, fallen in love with Isaac Asimov. I have read more of his works than most, devouring not only his science fiction but his nonfiction essays and books, which are written with as much clarity and charm as his fiction. I don’t deny that a good deal of my nonfiction style comes from his, and Asimov himself said that he was puzzled by the trend of most authors to not acknowledge their influences. It was in that very spirit that Asimov cited Clifford Simak as his greatest literary inspiration alongside P. G. Wodehouse and Agatha Christie. Of course I’d heard of the latter two, but who was Clifford Simak? I had never heard that name in all my dealings with science fiction. At first I thought he was a 1950s author that had since fallen into obscurity. Even now I’m not entirely sure I’m incorrect. Clifford D. Simak, who lived from 1904 to 1988, was an active science fiction writer for most of his life while making a living as a newspaper reporter and editor. He won three Hugo awards, one Nebula, and was the third recipient of the Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master award. (Isaac Asimov was the eighth recipient, in case you were wondering.) What really caught my eye about Simak was that although he had many accomplishments as a science fiction writer he also was one of the three winners of the inaugural Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement for his influence on the horror genre along with Fritz Leiber and Frank Belknap Long. It intrigued me that a science fiction writer who Asimov absolutely adored would be associated with horror since Asimov never wrote with even a whiff of horror. Still, I did nothing with that information beyond filing it away in the dusty storeroom that is my brain before heading to my favorite book store to see what they had of Simak. I found Special Deliverance, which apart from having an enviously great title had a front and back cover that got me excited for some wacky old school science fiction adventure. “It all started when Professor Edward Lansing wanted to know who really wrote that great term paper on Shakespeare and learned that his student had bought it from a slot machine. Going to investigate, the good professor found the machine, which gave him two keys and sent him in search of other slot machines. The third machine he tried took his money and transported him to a strange new world.” When I reached this point of the back cover blurb I was already sold. Normally I wouldn’t have read any further, but I just couldn’t stop. It only got more zany. “Here Lansing meets up with an odd assortment of fellow travelers – including a take-charge Brigadier, a pompous Parson, a female engineer, a lady poet, and Jurgens, a caretaker robot – all of whom are as mystified as he. Plucked from their own timelines, they were players in a game without rules and, seemingly, without a goal. “Thus begins an extraordinary quest by these unwilling adventurers, one that leads them to an immense, featureless blue cube and into an ancient and mysterious city, tempts them with even stranger worlds, and, finally, provides them with a life-or-death challenge…” How could I not immediately start reading that? So I got home and started reading… and I was reading Isaac Asimov. When he mentioned the influence Simak had on him, Asimov said that he tried to copy Simak’s clear descriptive style. He succeeded. I not only immediately enjoyed reading Special Deliverance, I was ecstatic because I’d found an author who read like Asimov but would have his own take on the world and on the science fiction genre. I saw that in action half way through the book, when, without warning, this science fiction/fantasy tale of a band of unlikely adventurers began to incorporate some very chilling Lovecraftian horror elements. I don’t want to give anything away, so I will just say that this book – and Simak in general – are forgotten gems of both science fiction and horror. If you like your science fiction with a bit of horror, or your horror with a lot of science fiction, then do yourself a favor and get a copy of Special Deliverance. Personally, I have a lot more Simak to track down. |
AuthorDr. Andrew Porwitzky is a scientist and freelance writer living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, scientific articles, and essays. Categories
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