SF&F Short Stories Online

This is another of “The Best and the Worst” that I don’t think I’ll be doing a “worst” of (unless I find an archive of really horrible fiction lying around somewhere). Since I’m poor, I read a lot of my SF and F online, and wanted to highlight some of the best places to read science fiction and fantasy for free, as well as some of my favorites from those magazines.

Escape Pod

Man oh man, I cannot even tell you how much I love Escape Pod. Started by Steve Eley, and run by a bevy of wonderful people, Escape Pod is a weekly podcast that’s been going strong since 2005. Each week, they record a science fiction story for our edification, and most of them are quite good. It’s kind of fun to have people read short stories to you.  One of my favorite things about Escape Pod is their yearly Mur Lafferty Christmas story, which I listen to while I wrap presents at two in the morning.  Also, every year they record all of the Hugo nominated short stories so that listeners who are WorldCon members can hear the stories for free before voting.

Some of my favorite stories:

Best Books I’ve Ever Read

People tend to ask me what my favorite book is a lot. it’s one of those standard questions – what’s your favorite color, what music  do you listen to, etc., etc. It’s really hard for me to pick one specific book as my favorite, since my favorites tend to change every month. But here are the best books I’ve ever read, books I read over and over again  and recommend to my friends and give to people as gifts. In no particular order:

Ariel by Sylvia Plath

Ariel is the book that originally turned me onto poetry. For most of my life, having been force fed lots of crappy children’s poems and Robert Frost (oh, how I despise him), I found poetry to be a useless genre. But, the summer before my junior year, I read Ariel for a class assignment, and it was nothing like any poetry I’ve read before. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is beautiful, dark, and (most importantly) brief, never overstaying its welcome, and this is undoubtably her finest work, and my favorite book of poetry.