Free Science Fiction Stories

You may remember a while back that I was lamenting the lack of credible speculative fiction that has made it through to the mainstream in recent years. Of course, one or two people set me right on that one, pointing out a great wealth of excellent sci-fi that didn't feature some future in which we had made it to the stars and were battling alien foes that bore a striking similarity to our enemy du jour here on our own planet. Still, most of the new sci-fi short stories coming out today seem to be set here on Earth and feature a lot of gadgets and high technology - i.e. a situation that I regard as unrealistic.

Anyway, cutting to the chase, I decided to publish my own short story on Ether Books and this is now in a competition for 'Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Short Story'. It's about a cloned man living in the not too distant future in a chaotic world that has turned its back on the technological mistakes of the past. His companions keep dying in mysterious circumstances and he gets a message that he must escape - or die himself. It's set on the Spanish island of Ibiza and is a very condensed 6,000 words - cut down from the original 20,000 word novella.

If you want to read it - and I'd like you to - you need to have either an iPhone or an iPad (sorry, no Androids here) and download the app for Ether Books (yes, the irony, I know ...). It is totally free and won't cost you a penny, what's more it only takes a minute to download the app, and a few seconds to download the story. Plus, there are 49 other sci-fi stories in the same competition that you can also read for free. The story that gets the most downloads wins.

Obviously, being the nice chap that I am, if anyone doesn't own one of these iDevices (and if you're sensible enough to be reading a blog like this then maybe you don't) but wants to read it anyway, just send me an email and I'll send you a copy.

Here are the instructions for reading it:

- Download the app for Ether Books - you can find it on their website www.etherbooks.com
- Open the app and go to the genre 'Sci-fi and Fantasy Comp' and look for 'The Amnesiac'. There's a scary-looking picture of me next to it to help you identify it.
- Click download and then read it. When you are finished you can rate it with stars.
- That's all.

I hope you like it and thanks for reading!