Orson Scott Card’s InterGalactic Medicine Show is offering stories for free. Great news for hypocrites like me who would like be paid for their stories but have a hard time paying for other peoples’. (I don’t have much of a personal library because I sit 9 to 5 in a 665,000 square foot library with 6.5 million items on 98 miles of shelves.)
They’re releasing one story from each of the first four issues. The first is Edmund R. Schubert’s “Trill and the Beanstalk,” which features a US-China race to Mars, something recent events are making very plausible.
There’s also an Orson Scott Card story, “The Yazoo Queen,” from the Alvin Maker world. It falls between Heartfire and The Crystal City, but it also called to mind Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus when it raises the question of whether slavery or human sacrifice is the greater evil.
Some of my favorite passages from the Alvin Maker series are when Alvin and some other large personality meet and size each other up, Mike Fink being exhibit number one. On the Yazoo Queen the headline bout is with Jim Bowie, who also appears in The Crystal City. While the story evidences much of what makes Card’s work great, it’s best seen as a prelude to that book.
I also enjoyed Eric James Stone’s “Tabloid Reporter to the Stars,” where the lottery to select a journalist to accompany mankind’s first contact mission to an alien world falls upon a reporter who can’t seem to get away from his tabloid background. I like the ironic voice, the bits of hard detail, and the groan-inducing final twist.
If you haven’t checked out IGMS before you should, and here’s your chance.
