Five Years Of Sci-Fi Short Stories For Free From Tor

By David Wharton | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

McCallWe’ve got your back here at GFR. We consider it our function to share the most interesting science stories with you, to explore the weird little footnotes of science fiction history when we run across them, and even occasionally to point you towards some free stuff. It must be your lucky day, because this story falls into the “free stuff” category. The folks over at Tor.com are celebrating their fifth anniversary by releasing a free ebook collecting five years’ worth of original science fiction.

There’s no catch or sneaky fine print so far as we can tell, but it will make you register with the Tor website, which takes like 10 seconds. Once you’ve got your account set up, you’ll be able to download The Stories: Five Years of Original Fiction on Tor.com in three different ebook formats. You’ve got the all-purpose PDF, the .epub (Nooks, iBooks, KoBo, Sony), or the .mobi (Kindle, no relation to the pasty bald musician). That should pretty much have you covered unless you’re planning to read the stories on some incredibly obscure platform that is operated by steam. (It’s worth noting, however, that at the time of this posting I could not get the .PDF file to load, but the .epub works just fine.)

This is no flimsy collection, either, which makes the free price point even more appealing. This book packs in 150 stories, which could easily chew up several weeks of your time, unless you’re a mutant speed reader like my wife, in which case you’ll have already blown through it before I even finish typing this sentence. See? Told ya.

The book includes stories by some top-tier talent, as well as tons of names you might not be familiar with (I wasn’t, and I run a freakin’ website devoted to science fiction.) Here are a few of the more noteworthy entries from the table of contents:

Tor’s site also mentions that they’ll be uploading five new stories throughout the day tomorrow, July 17:

Wednesday July 17th:

  • 8:00 AM: “The Best We Can” by Carrie Vaughn
  • 9:00 AM: “One” by Nancy Kress
  • 10:00 AM: “Dragonkin” by Lavie Tidhar
  • 11:00 AM: “Contains Multitudes” by Benjamin Alan Burgis
  • 12:00 PM: “Old Dead Futures” by Tina Connolly

If that’s still not enough to whet your appetite for sci-fi, allow us to steer you back toward the bundles we highlighted last week, both of which ask you to donate whatever you feel is appropriate in exchange for the free books. They include books by Cory Doctorow, Gregory Benford, Cherie Priest, and more.

On top of all that, you can always keep up to date with Tor’s original short fiction by bookmarking this page. Might be time to log some serious couch time, people.

Header image by the late, amazingly talented Robert McCall