The Philippine Online Chronicles

Here at Pinoy Pop we've spent the week leading up to Independence Day showing you ways to build up your genre libraries--say, in preparation for the new school year or the Independence Day long weekend--without hurting your wallets, and while we've pointed the way to a lot of places where you can get a lot of bang for your buck, there's no way you can get a better deal than "Free Stories" and that's what we're here to talk about. The Internet, aside from creating a boom in panda sneezing videos, has also ensured that there is not only a greater amount of free, quality speculative fiction stories, but that it's easier for people around the world to get these stories. Free online speculative fiction comes in many forms, each of which may be worth a more through examination later on, but for now let me open your eyes to a few of the options available for your free fiction fix.

Speculative Fiction Webzines: Our very own Eliza Victoria has already covered one major source of online genre fiction: speculative fiction webzines. These sites are an excellent source of quality speculative fiction, which is one reason we've been trying to raise awareness of them via our reviews (for instance, for recent issues/stories of Crossed Genres, Strange Horizons, and Expanded Horizons.) One thing I would like to emphasize is that while many of the larger webzines--such as Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, Weird Tales and Fantasy Magazine--cater to the entire gamut of speculative fiction (each with their own preferred/editorial slant of course), there are other webzines which bear a more specific focus and cater to specific audiences. If you're a fan of a particular subgenre of speculative fiction, you just might find a webzine that is devoted to publishing exactly the type of stories you love, whether that be as broad as science fiction (the recently launched "Lightspeed Magazine"), or more niche subgenres such as secondary world/adventure fantasy ("Beyond Ceaseless Skies"), golden age space opera ("Raygun Revival"), steampunk ("Steampunk Magazine" and "Gatehouse Gazette"), or Lovecraftian horror ("Innsmouth Free Press"). There's even a magazine for those who prefer to mix and match genres ("Crossed Genres").

Webcomics: For those who prefer their speculative fiction to come with illustrations, there are a multitude of high quality webcomics being published that are well worth your time--and which, for those with substantial archives, will drain you of large amounts of that time in one go. There's too much out there to deal with webcomics with anything less than a full blown feature, but for those who need further proof of the quality of these free online comics: the Hugo Awards has has a Best Graphic Story category for two years now, and two webcomics--Schlock Mercenary and Girl Genius--have been nominees in both years… and last year Girl Genius won. Locally, we've also started to recognize quality Filipino webcomics.

Podcast Fiction/ Audio Fiction: Another topic that we'll cover in greater depth in the future, for now, suffice it to say that the rise of mp3's and the iPod resulted in a boom in spoken word speculative fiction, which, like speculative fiction webzines, cater to a wide variety of different genres, and in a variety of formats, from short fiction stories to serialized novels, to radio play type productions. Of the short fiction podcasts, the most well known are the three that belong to the Escape Artists family: Escape Pod (science fiction) PodCastle (fantasy) and Pseudopod (horror).  This is another venue for speculative fiction which we'll be trying to cover regularly here on Pinoy Pop via podcast fiction reviews.

Promotional Freebies: One tactic that publishers have taken to recently is to release certain older books--especially early books in a continuing series--as free downloads online. This serves as an excellent way to give new readers a painless way to try out series and authors which they might otherwise never become aware of. The best example of this strategy is Baen's Free Library which has over one hundred ten books available for download, in a variety of formats, including the first volume of Eric Flint's 1632 series, which I mentioned in my Alternative History Primer. (There's even a section which shows you which books are part of a series, and which of those parts are available for download.) Another example is the Suvudu Free Book Library which is part of the Suvudu website of publisher Random House.  The free books they have available (not always from Random House) change from month to month, so check back at least that often--this month the big titles they have available are His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik, and Sheepfarmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Moon (which, as a Baen book, is also available from the Baen Free Library). One thing that Suvudu also does to set itself apart is release not just first volumes of a series, but original short stories made by their authors, in the universes where these series take place. (For instance they have several Star Wars short stories available at the site.)

Of course, publishers aren't the only ones adopting the tactic of free ebooks as promotional tools, and as far as authors are concerned, Cory Doctorow is a staunch advocate of this strategy. All of his novels, from the award-winning Little Brother (which I reviewed here) to his newest book, For the Win, are available for download at his website. There are also events where free ebooks are made available for a limited time, such as Free Comic Book Day (when sites like Wowio make certain digital comics available for free download) and the Annual World eBook Fair (the fifth fair will be held from July 4 to August 4 this year--you can see my coverage of last year's fair at my old blog, Bahay Talinhaga).

There are ways to ensure you don't miss out on books and stories that might only be available for free for a limited amount of time. Many of the speculative fiction news site announce the availability of free fiction, and SF Signal is especially good at finding these freebies (they have a category of posts for free fiction). Amazon also recently divided its Kindle bestsellers list into free fiction and pay fiction, and you can easily check to see if a newly available free genre ebook is burning up the charts.

Fanfiction and fan comics: While the very existence of fanfiction is a divisive issue for some authors and fans, on both legal and ethical grounds, it must be emphasized that the term fanfiction (and the comics equivalent) only denote the relation of the created work to the original creator and/or copyright holder. To say a piece of fiction is "fanfiction" says nothing about the quality of the work, and there are more than a few professional level authors creating professional quality fanfiction as labors of love. That being said, it is much easier to find quality pieces of fanfiction in communities/archives with custodians/gatekeepers than in the wilds of fanfiction.net.

Public Domain Books: Of course, for some works, copyright is no longer a concern.  One can find older genre works--and non-fiction resource material that will help you appreciate, or create, speculative fiction--in public domain text archives such as Project Guttenberg, the World Public Library, and by searching for public domain books at Google Books. (For a local equivalent, try our sister site Filipiniana.net.)

[Image source: Screen capture from the 4th Annual World eBook Fair Copyright holder/s maintain appropriate rights.]