In Reed's story, which first appeared last year in Clarkesworld Magazine, George Bailey finds himself in a foreign dimension looking at a woman who strongly resembles his wife Mary. But George isn't here to learn an important lesson about his self-worth; instead, he's been dropped here without rhyme or reason by interdimensional traveler with too much time on his hands. Fortunately, Mary, the librarian of a much more advanced civilization than George's, quickly surmises what's going on:

"Then how do you know he was an angel?"

"He said he was."

"And after you rescued him...what happened? Wait, no. Let me guess. Did your angel make noise about earning an aura or his halo-?"

"His wings."

"Really? And you believed that story?"

George gulped.

"And what did this wingless man promise you, George."

"To show me..."

"What?"

"How the world would be if I'd never been born."

She couldn't help but laugh again. Really, this man seemed so sweet and so terribly lost. She was curious, even intrigued. Not that the stranger was her type, of course. But then again, this was a remarkable situation, and maybe if she gave him a chance...

It may not be a heartwarming tale of personal redemption, but it's an interesting tale of parallel worlds, and an optimistic one in its own right.

A Woman's Best Friend [Clarkesworld Magazine]

It's the story of a plant biologist who flies into a remote northern area to research a new discovery: A field of grass. Perhaps the only one left on Earth. With just a few spare descriptions of ocean farms and arctic settlement, Millet manages to evoke a world that has been completely transformed both by climate change and overpopulation. And, like I said, it has a kind of bittersweet hopefulness to it that you rarely find in ecopocalypse fiction. It reminds me a bit of Douglas Coupland's new novel (which I'll be reviewing soon!), Generation A, which is also an oddly hopeful tale of a near-future ecological collapse.

You can listen to Martha Plimpton read Millet's roughly 5-minute story via Studio 360.

Project Gutenberg
Project Gutenberg is the premiere spot for finding free books online, and they've arranged their science fiction collection into a nicely-organized bookshelf. From the bizarro contents of 1930s Astounding Stories to every single novel HG Wells ever wrote, you'll find a wealth of classic science fiction.

Suvudu Free Library
If you're craving contemporary novels for free, Random House's Suvudu Free Library brings new fiction to you for free. So far they've posted eight books, including ones by Laurel K. Hamilton and Elizabeth Moon. They promise to add more every month, so check back for a free dose of new fiction!

Baen Free Library
If you like swashbuckling escapism, then you won't want to miss Baen's massive free backlist of novels, many from the 1980s, all available for free download.

Google Books
Google has a small collection of public domain science fiction novels and zines from before 1923.

Strange Horizons
One of the best and longest-running science fiction journals online, Strange Horizons consistently publishes incredible fiction from promising newcomers and stars alike. The site is updated weekly with fiction, art, poetry, and reviews, and you can plunder their extensive fiction archives whenever you like for that much-needed free fiction fix.

Tor.com
Tor.com is another amazing online publication, connected with the publisher Tor, which updates daily with reviews, blog posts, art, commentary, and (hooray!) tons of free fiction from authors you know and love. Cory Doctorow serialized his new novel Makers on Tor.com before it hit print, and you'll see regular stories from luminaries such as Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, and John Scalzi. Check out the fiction archives, or just browse the site.

Book View Cafe
Book View Cafe publishes a lot of free fiction online, especially out-of-print recent classics that deserve to remain available to hungry readers. Some books are also available for download for a small price - most are under $5. You can browse their science fiction and speculative fiction sections (they also have horror, romance, and many other genres). I was amazed to discover that they are serializing Vonda McIntyre's 80s classic Superluminal for free, and that's just one of many gems you'll discover by browsing here. (Often a book that's available as a complete download for cash is also available in serialized, chapter-by-chapter format for free - so check all your options.)

Free Speculative Fiction Online
One of my favorite resources online for finding new free fiction is called simply Free Speculative Fiction Online. Created by Richard Cissée, this pleasingly minimalist site exhaustively lists every new (free) short story, novella and novel posted online that is in the spec fic genre, broadly defined. Come here to find old favorites or strange new tales from authors you never would have encountered otherwise. It's a must-bookmark resource.

Image by Eric Doeringer, from a weird and slightly mean art project via Art in Odd Places.

In "The Machine Stops," almost everybody lives underground, and we're given hints that the surface of the Earth is no longer habitable. And all of your needs are met by the Machine, which is a kind of master computer that supplies beds, baths, foods, and other comforts and staples — so you never have to leave your little cell. And most significantly for those of us who do most of our socializing via the Internet, everybody uses the Machine to communicate.

At one point, our main character, Vashanti, puts herself in isolation mode for three minutes, so she can talk (basically via webcam) with her son Kuno, who's on the other side of the world. When she goes out of isolation, her room is filled with all of the tons of messages and communications that she's missed over the past three minutes. It really is like Forster is describing turning your IM and Twitter clients back on and being bombarded:

There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Vashti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one"s own ideas? Would she make an engagement to visit the public nurseries at an early date? - say this day month.

Eventually, Vashti and people like her outlaw visiting the surface of the Earth altogether, and as the years pass they begin to worship the Machine which supplies all their needs. And then Kuno warns Vashti that "the Machine stops." Vashti shrugs it off, until more and more things start going wrong — the computer produces mouldy artificial fruit and stinking bathwater, and then it stops providing beds upon request. By the time Vashti realizes that the Machine really is failing once and for all, it's way too late to save herself, or the other humans who are living underground and depending on the Machine for everything.

It's well worth reading "The Machine Stops," not least to contemplate how you'd manage if the Internet suddenly crashed. But it's also fascinating to realize that the first story of computer failure, 100 years ago, predated the first story of robot revolution, Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) by a dozen years. For some reason, you'd think that we'd have come up with computers turning against us first, and simple computer failure later.

"The Machine Stops" has been adapted into an episode of the British TV series Out Of The Unknown, a 2004 stage play (also broadcast on the radio a couple years ago), and apparently now a short film (see image, up top.)

Top image from the Freise Brothers, makers of a short film based on "The Machine Stops." [The Machine Stops at NCSA Web Archive]

"Six From Downtown" definitely reminds me of Link at her best, with its stark, dreamlike imagery. But it's more brutal, with a host of images including a man fishing for mermaids (and then grilling them), and another man working as an exotic dancer and showing off his prehensile tail (and then using it to strangle a customer). The exotic dancer segment is also reminiscent of Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, for obvious reasons. And in the last section, a man comes home to find his wife's upper half has flown away. Again:

Before 5AM, I ride a third cab home to the condo. I check to see if my wife is back but she isn't. The lower half of her body is still standing where she left it, next to the window, wearing only the floral patterned panties I don't like very much. I look out the window of our 33rd floor unit and see the grey skies slowly changing hues.

I know she'll fly back. She's on her way home.

I realize that I am desperately hungry, that everything in my system since midnight has been smoke and alcohol.

They're trying to have a baby, without much success, and you sense that they're not going to have much in the future, either.

I found "Six From Downtown" via poet Barbara Jane Reyes, who offers it up as an example of the burgeoning field of Philippine speculative fiction. (For more on SF in the Philippines, check out this summation by Charles A. Tan.) Reyes also offers a really provocative explanation of exactly what people mean by "magical realism" — they mean native superstition, filtered through a haze of exoticism:

I've been thinking that magical realism is that thing you call ethnic literature when you don't know what to do with their "folk" beliefs still existing and manifesting themselves in the modern day. You don't know why those old beliefs still exist, and why the mythical and spiritual are so incorporated or fused into their everyday modern lives.

It defies conventional logic in modern, secular societies, to still believe, but more so, it defies conventional logic in modern, secular societies for those old beliefs and mythical deities to manifest themselves in our modern daily lives. Advanced as we think we are, we decide that such conventionally unexplainable phenomena are the province of the superstitious, backward, third world, unenlightened. We hear their testimonies of encounters with the fantastic with an air of doubt, and we judge them. In high literature, these stories become exoticized, objectified, hence, magical realism. In poetry, perhaps it's also objectified and othered as the mythopoetic.

Top image by Kevin LaPena. ["Six From Downtown" by Dean Francis Alfar, via Barbara Jane Reyes]

Published in the February 1931 issue of Astounding Stories, "Werewolves Of War" by D.W. Hall takes place seven years in the future, after the Slavs have overrun Europe and are now laying waste to the United States. The last scrappy defenders of America are just barely holding off the Slavs at California, and doing battle in the hazardous no-man's land of Nevada. D.W. Hall gives us the kind of writing you just don't see nowadays. Witness:

Trapped again!

But this time, Lance swore, they'd not get away without paying dearly for it!

Under the mesh of his gas-mask the lean lines of his jaw went taut. Tense, steely fingers flipped to the knobbed control instruments; the gleaming single-seater scout plane catapulted in a screaming somersault. Lance's ever-wary sixth sense told him the tongues of disintegrating flame had licked the plane's protected belly, and for the fact that it was protected he thanked again his stupendous luck. He pulled savagely at the squat control stick; the four Rahl-Diesels unleashed a torrent of power; and the slim scout rose like a comet, and hurtled, the altitude dial's nervous finger proclaimed, to ten thousand feet. Lance eased off the power, relaxed slightly, and glanced below.

So the Slavs have amazing super-weapon, the disintegrating flame, which takes out American airplanes by the dozen and whose secrets baffle America's scientists. Only the heroic squadron leader, Lance, is able to strike back at the Slavs using his acidic bullets, which give off "acrid white smoke" after they hit. This is a "scientific war," as Lance's commanding officer notes. But there's a traitor amongst Lance's unit, the Werewolves Of War, and nothing can stop the relentless encroachment of the villainous Slavs:

Werewolves of War, the batch of planes he belonged to had been christened, and it was a richly deserved title. In front of the front they fought, detailed to desperate, harrying missions, losing an average of ten men a day. The ordeal of gas and fire and acid bullets added five years to a man's brow overnight-if he served with the Werewolves of War.

Lance was only twenty-four, but his hair was splotched with dead gray strands; his eyes were hard and weary; his face lined with new wrinkles. Ah, well, it was war-and a losing war, he had to admit, that they fought. If a miracle didn't come, America would crumble even as old Europe had, before the overwhelming Slavish troops.

Even now, as Lance knew through various rumors, the Slavs were massed for a grand attack. And with what could America hold them back?

The unit also includes a comical Cockney mechanic, a refugee from a defeated England. My favorite part is when the story mentions that Lance "Immelmanned up." That's going to be my new catch phrase: "Immelman up, why don't you?" Lance suspects his fellow officer, Praed, is a coward and a spy — but he little realizes the shocking truth about Praed's identity, and how it relates to an amazing new secret super-weapon... the Flying Torpedo! But to win, they must destroy San Francisco utterly!

The whole story just went online recently, as part of Project Gutenberg — and in fact, that whole issue of Astounding Stories is on the site, for your astonishment and delight. Also included in the issue: "Tentacles From Below!" by Anthony Gilmore, "Phalanxes Of Atlans" by F.V.W. Mason, and "The Pirate Planet" (not to be confused with the Doctor Who story) by Charles W. Diffin. Enjoy! [Project Gutenberg via Free Speculative Fiction Online]

Bird's "Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer" starts with the Fab Four accepting Lorne Micahels' joking offer to appear on Saturday Night Live. The performance reinvigorates the band and they start work on another album. For the next few decades, the Beatles collaborate with Michael Jackson (who ends up with a very different legacy), have faux press fights with the Rolling Stones, and protest the War in Iraq. Personally, I'm glad they managed to save The Muppet Show:

December 14, 1980. Having "had a sit back" (Ringo) after Eventually's staggering success and taken time to concentrate on their own projects and personal lives, the Beatles make their first televised appearance as a group since the SNL reunion, appearing on The Muppet Show. (Lennon leaves New York for the first time in six months to do the gig, eventually spending the entire month of December in England.) The episode is the highest rated episode of The Muppet Show in the show's history and the most watched television program of the entire year, beating even the news coverage of the 1980 American presidential election. The undisputed highlight of the episode is the "battle of the bands" between the Beatles and the Electric Mayhem (although Starr says his duet with Fozzie the Bear remains his personal favorite moment). Jim Henson would later say that the Beatles episode "rejuvenated" his joy in working on the show, which by that point he had begun to feel was growing stale: the show continues for another seven seasons.

Read it all the way to the end to see how Ringo pulled the whole thing off.

Scenes From An Alternate Universe Where The Beatles Accepted Lorne Michaels' Generous Offer [Mightgodking — Thanks to Derek Pegritz]

Image by ~WickedAwsome.

People have suggested that this story might have been the inspiration for Paranormal Activity, but I think the two stories are fairly different. They do share a really scary idea, however, which is that things scarier than nightmares are happening to you while you sleep. And they can be captured on camcorders.

After our main character's ex-girlfriend accuses him of snoring, he decides to set up a sleepcam to see if he is, in fact, snoring. But he finds out more than he ever wanted to know about what's happening to him while he sleeps. Here's an excerpt, where he first watches footage from his sleepcam:

There was a long embarrassing fart an hour or so into the night, but absolutely no snoring. I heard something move in the kitchen like stuff settling in the plastic trash bag, a totally familiar sound. In fact, I couldn't tell if it was on the tape or had just happened in real time. I heard the house creaking and the distant sounds of traffic and once an auto horn. Several hours later, a siren screamed in the distance, and my sleeping self moaned. The 3:00 a.m. train went by, five miles to the south. I had stopped hearing that whistle a long time ago. It was comforting somehow to hear it again. I speeded the tape forward.

I was home free.

Joanna had been jerking me around.

But then a woman said, "Shush!' and giggled softly, and I gasped and jerked my hand up and drenched the front of my shirt with my drink.

I looked around wildly, thinking it was Joanna talking, thinking maybe it hadn't been on the tape, thinking maybe she was standing right behind me, but most of me knew she wasn't there. And the superspeed scenario I played in my mind where she'd sneaked into my bedroom last night to talk on my tape was stupid. Besides it hadn't even been her voice.

"Just look at him," the voice whispered.

I could hear someone moving around in the room. The rustle of clothing, the bump of a leg maybe hitting the side of the dresser or the chair by the window.

"Sure," a man whispered, "he's adorable."

The woman giggled again.

Then nothing.

I carefully put my glass down on the floor. I felt cold. My ears were ringing and my breathing was fast and shallow. I pulled off my wet shirt and threw it at the bathroom door.

And it only gets creepier from there, folks. Definitely worth reading in the afternoon - you know, when it's still light out.

Read the whole story for free at Small Beer Press. Thanks, Gavin!

Image of Bre Pettis sleeping via Bre's sleepcam!

Book View Cafe is serializing Superluminal, releasing a new chapter every week, as well as selling the e-book version. The novel is a great example of science fiction that sits between contemporary posthuman SF, and the old-school SF swashbucklers of the mid-twentieth century, when nobody worried about whether faster-than-light travel was more or less realistic than teleportation gates. McIntyre is a major science geek, and the book is packed with intriguing speculation on biotech. It also boasts memorable characters whose relationships are pleasingly realistic.

Here's how the book begins:

She gave up her heart quite willingly.

After the operation, Laenea Trevelyan lived through what seemed an immense time of semiconsciousness, drugged so she would not feel the pain, kept almost insensible while drugs sped her healing. Those who watched her did not know she would have preferred consciousness and an end to her uncertainty. So she slept, shallowly, drifting toward awareness, driven back, existing in a world of nightmare. Her dulled mind suspected danger but could do nothing to protect her. She had been forced too often to sleep through danger. She would have preferred the pain.

Getting your heart removed is just one stage in the biohacking required to become a pilot in Superluminal.

You can read the serialized novel at Book View Cafe (buy the ebook here) - also, check out a new interview that author Sue Lange did with McIntyre about her work.

Hisae Iwaoka created this gorgeously-drawn, haunting tale of an orphan coming of age in the lower echelons of Saturn Apartments society. VIZ is publishing the newly-translated manga for free in their online magazine Sig Ikki - a new issue goes up every month, and there are three up already.

Here's what Sig Ikki says about Saturn Apartments:

The society of the Ring is highly stratified: the higher the floor, the greater the status. Mitsu, the lowly son of a window washer, has just graduated junior high. When his father disappears and is assumed dead, Mitsu must take on his father's occupation. As he struggles with the transition to working life, Mitsu's job treats him to an outsider's view into the various living–room dioramas of the Saturn Apartments.

Saturn Apartments via Sig Ikki

The essay, called "Crazy Friend," is a winding, mildly obsessive tale of how Dick's stories guided Lethem out of childhood, into a turbulent adolescence, and at last settled him in a career as a critically-acclaimed writer. He begins by talking about his boyhood relationship with two cool older girls who didn't get why he thought Dick's writing was so important, and ends by introducing us to Lethem's life as a Dick fanboy and showing us snippets of his early writing about Dick (some interesting stuff). Ultimately, Lethem says, Dick is the archetypal "crazy friend" whom we've all known. And whom we all love.

Plus, we get to find out more about Lethem's tattoo:

I [selected] a gooey fictional substance that gives title to the book in which it appears – I dare you to think of another example.* I never wear sleeveless shirts, but word of my tattoo has circulated, slightly, a viral rider on my own moderate fame, and I'm occasionally called on by sly interlocutors to sheepishly exhibit it while signing at a bookstore. In two decades I've watched my spray can swell, shrink and grow slack with the changing contours of my arm, gain hairs, survive mosquito bites. The simple colors haven't faded badly, but the blue outline has blurred, victim of the entropy the spray-product Ubik was supposed to combat. Dick ensured Ubik's immortality; I've ensured its mortality.

If you've enjoyed Lethem's novels, or are a fan of Dick, this is a must-read.

Read the rest on Jonathan Lethem's website.

Television writer Paul Simms' piece "Attention, People of Earth" imagines the first extraterrestrial missive to Earth, if the extraterrestrials in question were the sorts of creatures who read The New Yorker and want to assure us that they don't intend to steal our vast reserves of gravel:

You may be wondering how we know your language. We are aware that there's a theory on your planet that we (or other alien species from the far reaches of the galaxy) have been able to learn your language from your television transmissions. This is not the case, because most of us don't really watch TV. Most of our knowledge about your Earth TV comes from reading Zeitgeisty think pieces by our resident intellectuals, who watch it not for fun but for ideas for their print articles about how Earth TV holds a mirror up to Earth society, and so on. We mean, we'll watch Earth TV sometimes-if it happens to be on already-but, generally, we prefer to read a good book or revive the lost art of conversation.

Sadly, Earth TV is like a vast wasteland, as the Earthling Newton Minow once said. But, for those of you who can understand things only in TV terms, just think of us as being very similar to Mork from Ork, in that he was a friendly, non-gravel-wanting alien who visited Earth just to find out what was there, and not to harvest gravel.

Attention, People of Earth [The New Yorker via Mental Floss]

Clickwheel have teamed up with 2000AD owners Rebellion to offer 2000AD Origins, a free collection of the first episodes of such classic strips as Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, Rogue Trooper, The Ballad of Halo Jones and many more (including more recent creations like Nikolai Dante and Shakara) in both PDF and CBZ format. Featuring early work from Watchmen's Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, as well as other comic greats such as Kevin O'Neill, John Wagner, Ian Gibson and Dan Abnett, this is an almost-perfect way to get introduced to the self-styled Galaxy's Greatest Comic. Spludig Vur Thrigg, as Tharg would say.

2000AD Origins [Clickwheel]