I’ve seen quite a few free stories and novels available the past couple of days so thought I’d post them here in case anyone has missed any of them.

Tor.com has decided to bring back having free e-books available on the site for a limited time. Right now War for the Oaks by Emma Bull and Dogland by Will Shetterly are available for download here. (If you are not a registered user already, you will need to sign up in order to access these.)

Also on Tor.com is a short story by Elizabeth Bear entitled “The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder.”

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, a story from the forthcoming Fast Ships, Black Sails anthology edited by Jeff and Ann VanderMeer is available as a PDF on the Geekdad Wired Blog – “Boojum” by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear. (As I’m sure anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, those are my two favorite new authors I’ve discovered this year.)

I am reading Hell and Earth, the second part of “The Stratford Man” duology in Elizabeth Bear’s Promethean Age series now, which is even better than the first two books in the series. It’s much more mature and has none of the problems of too many characters that Whiskey and Water had – in fact, the new duology has a rather narrow focus on Christopher Marlowe and Will Shakespeare that works excellently. While the first set of books had more references to mythology, this set has more references to history and literature (but characters such as Puck and Lucifer are still present and the first set of books certainly had a few references to literature and history as well). Either set of books can be read first as long as the two parts are read in the correct order (Blood and Iron followed by Whiskey and Water or Ink and Steel followed by Hell and Earth). I think I would have started with Ink and Steel first since it does take place before the other books and now there are parts I want to reread because of it.

I’m hoping to make some progress on reviewing this weekend since I have no major plans (although I may end up doing some cleaning now that I’ll be home for a weekend finally -ick). The next reviews will be The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia and Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds. After I’m done with Hell and Earth I’ll review the duology (which was originally intended to be one book until it grew too long).