There are over 119 free Sci-Fi and Fantasy stories in this email.
There are over 119 free Sci-Fi and Fantasy stories in this email.
I wonder how heavy they would be if they were printed out...
I know, lots of emails this week, but a lot of things aligned.
I’ve had a load of stuff happening these past few days, most of which I’ve actually not told you about because your eyeballs are busy enough already.
It’s time to give those balls a rest.
One of those things that I did was a slight rebrand. On the Substack explore page, it shows writers and then their publications. So when you find me, it used to say “Phillip Carter - Writes THE WEIRD WORLDS OF PHILLIP CARTER” and I liked that title, but I wanted it to feel a bit more friendly, and be clearer what I do here, so I changed it.
It is now “Phillip Carter - Writes Sc-Fi and Comedy for humans”
Sounds better, makes more sense, and explains what I do. Because most of my stories, even the more serious ones (such as the almost-funded-in-the-past Earthloop Trilogy) have a sense of humour to them. I’ve always thought that the new wave of hyper-serious fiction is less realistic than fiction in which characters can tell jokes. I know many scientists, most of them are funny people, so it is always strange to me to see Sci-Fi taking this deadly serious route, as if astronauts stranded in space won’t make light of the situation to calm each other down.
Humour is Human, and it’s sort of my thing.
I’ve been so busy this week with FF stuff that I’ve not even finished my post about how I made two of my own stories permanently free on Amazon, but I have. I’ll put a link at the bottom of this email for anyone interested. So much content. So many stories…
So with that in mind, I’m careful with how I pick these freebie shelves. Not least because I don’t want to share hundreds of them with you, but because I judge the books by their covers and see which ones I think might be weird enough to get your attention. I know my specific brand of storytelling is strange, so I try to find books which look like they could align with my strangeness.
I didn’t think this week’s FF would cross over with my Stephanie cover reveal or anything else, but it has, so it’s been a busy week. With that in mind I will vanish for a bit after this post, to give you time to recover.
ALL HALLOWS EVE
My short sci-fi horror Mycelial is in here, as are numerous types of creepy stories by other authors. Zombies, aliens, monsters, you know the drill.
MEGA GIVEAWAY
And this one is a repost. It was at the end of last night’s Stephanie cover reveal, which you can jump back to >by clicking here<, if you missed it.
A selection of novellas, novels, short stories and similar things, the SciFi and Fantasy mega giveaway has quickly become one of my favourite bookshelves to be a part of. It’s a shame I didn’t upload my new Stephanie cover before it went out, as the new one is a lot nicer. Anyway, this bookshelf can brag to its friends that it is above average, as it brings with it no less than 119 free stories.
Which is incredible. I don’t even know how you’ll have time to look at all the covers, but there’s some good ones. My personal favourite is this cover, because I don’t think we have enough skeletal antics in media any more.
One of my oldest novel ideas actually, which I wrote when I was 13/14, was about nanobots piloting human skeletons in some weird dystopian war. Naturally, I built the entire story out of Lego. It was brilliant, and around 1.5 metres long (for the 82% of my readers who are American, that’s about the length of a football field, if you built it for ferrets). I need to remake it.
I also need to visit America soon for a book tour…
Anyway, here’s the link to the bookshelf.
See you all next week, or next month, when I will hopefully be rolling out a new thing which is big and shiny and lots of fun. No spoilers.
And for those interested in my two permafree stories, they are THE CERTAIN UNIVERSE and HOLOGRAM KEBAB - DELUXE, both of which are available for free on Amazon and every other eBook retailer I could think off. Just visit whobuiltthehumans.com to find them. They’ll be free for a long time, so there’s no rush, probably best to check the freebie bookshelves above instead as these beasties are fleeting, ethereal things.