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| Endless electronic vistas by DarkNeon |
Why Haven’t You Read This? Part 2-Electric Boogaloo
It only
recently occurred to me that I am broke. Oh sure, I have a day job as a jeweler
but most of my income is used to pay my bills, which leaves me little to no
income that I can allocate to entertainment, which is why I usually hang out at
my friend Jim’s house, where I abuse his hospitality watching movies on his
giant-ass TV and gobbling down his wife’s cooking.
 |
| They keep showing me these incomprehensible word jumbles whenever we’re playing Scrabble, though. I’ll never get married couples… |
This lack
of resources has led me to seek new venues of entertainment, as well as means
to quench my thirst for some damn good fiction. It has also apparently led many
people to want to make some good fiction (myself included), which exists out
there for free, available to you at the touch of a button.
But since
there’s a shitload of all that out there and I can’t expect to be able to keep
track of it all, here are some basic ground rules that I’m setting down:
The stories must have a minimum of 1000 words
length
There are loads of great flash fiction stories out
there. They’re scary, they’re fascinating, they’re depressing, they’re
wonderful but they’re also so goddamn many that you can’t hope to make sense
out of them. 1000 word stories, on the other hand, are way easier to pick,
since most of them are mediocre at best, but there are a couple of unexpected
gems hidden there.
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| So remember kids: those 300 extra words could turn your mountain a’ gold into a pile of shit! |
No series of novels.
Novel
series lost their charm for me since the end of Harry Potter. That’s not to say
that there isn’t going to be a series that will sweep me of my feet ever again
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| Come on, Gunslinger…entertain me! |
It’s just
that I don’t have time for them, not just yet. I want clear, concise things
that are outlined and resolved through the course of their own narrative,
simple as that.
An Audiobook is fine, too
Especially
if it’s read by Morgan Freeman (PROTIP: there may not be any audiobooks in this
list read by Morgan Freeman. Feel free to read the following caption in his
voice, however)
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| “I noticed Fenris the wolf and his pack as I looked through my telescope, chasing down a meteorite, their powerful jaws tearing at its rock-flesh, their tongues lapping at the ore-blood in its veins. They looked pretty fucking cool and I got a pretty weird boner that I am totally okay with” |
No Fanfiction.
Not unless
it’s something unbelievably violent that’s unwilling to never take itself
seriously for even one damn second, written by someone who understands what the
hell diction or syntax is or how it works.
 |
| “April Fourth, 2013. Fluttershy realizes, as she’s balls deep inside Rainbow Dash's eye-socket , that she may just be fucked in the head” |
With that in mind, here’s…
The Shapescapes Essential Electronic
Reading List (presented in no particular order)
Second Variety by Philip K. Dick
 |
| Because genocidal super-robots will never be out of fashion. |
LibriVox is
one of those websites that has a TON of awesome material but has somehow still
eluded me, despite my best efforts to find great shit online.
I guess it
must have been a need for cosmic balance that not only led me to find LibriVox, but also a pretty sweet
audiobook version of one of Philip K. Dick’s earliest and most brutal fucking
stories, Second Variety.
So close your eyes and click the link, if you’re feeling like you need to have your goddamn mind blown sometime soon:
So close your eyes and click the link, if you’re feeling like you need to have your goddamn mind blown sometime soon:
The Sex Life of the Gods by Michael Knerr
 |
| Janet began orgasming uncontrollably at the mere sight of a launching rocket. Some say it’s because it looks like a giant metal dong. I think it’s because of advanced aeronautics. Bitches love advanced aeronautics |
This book,
despite its weird-as-fuck title, makes for an excellent read. Whereas Second
Variety is about mankind destroying itself in fire, Sex Life of The Gods is
about humanity reaching out to the furthest stars and then proceeding to fuck
anything that moves.
It also has
something to say about the way human sexuality is changing and predicts a lot
of the relationship trends and problems we face today, but it’s mostly about
the fucking.
The Tunnel Under The World by Frederick Pohl
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| Mankind in love with itself in love with its junk in love with themselves… |
This, along
with Scud The Disposable Assassin, are the only two properly presented and
downright haunting arguments against
consumerism, that present a very accurate depiction of our current society.
Who Goes There? By John W Campbell, Jr.
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| Because you don’t want your kid to grow up a fucking pansy. |
The book
that sowed the seeds that grew into John Carpenter’s The Thing and made
shapeshifting, unkillable aliens cool is a kid’s book. It’s something that was
intended to be read for 14-year olds and it’s something that I’m going to force
down my kid’s throat when he’s too young to tell me otherwise and it’s going to
be the goddamn least I could do for
him.
Is he going
to experience some horrible nightmares and think that something has borrowed
his dad’s skin? Maybe, but at least he’s not gonna ask any dumb-ass questions
when someone asks him to go get the fucking flamethrower.
The First Person to Surgically Remove Their Own
Brain by Thomas Thompson
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| Excerpt taken from the Neurosurgeon’s Handbook, 2013 |
Appearing
on issue 22 of the NoSleep podcast, this story is crazy as fuck and awesome. I
won’t spoilt you the ending, but it has to do with brain removal, a crazy-ass
surgeon and something going wrong, maybe, I don’t know.
(Warning: I
may actually know but chosen to forget it)
Blindsight by Peter Watts
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| The literary equivalent to getting sucker-punched in the dick. |
“Dude, you
gotta read this! Dude, you gotta read
this! Dude, you gotta read this!” my
friend George would pester me about this book, busting my balls and I ignored
him, until I realized that I had just gotten through most of the good stuff on
my e-reader, leaving me with no other choice than to try it.
So I
uploaded it, started reading the first few pages and did my best to ignore the
voices whispering in my ear. When I put it down, a few hours later, I realized
that I was feeling very tired, scared and in desperate need of a hug.
Because
that’s what Blindsight does: it eats at your brain and spits out terrors that
do not vent into nightmares. They root themselves in your soul instead.
This Crowded Earth by Robert Bloch
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| Everything sucks now and it’s all your fault. |
Robert
Bloch is an iconoclast, blasphemous in his work and he enjoys taking a dump on
established narrative tropes and look awesome doing it. He’s also the only
person that I would go back in time just so I could have a beer with before he
got famous and talk about the crazy goddamn ideas that he hasn’t put down in
paper yet.
Hell, I’d
probably share the holding cell they’d put us in after we got caught for DUI
and I’d still be grinning like an idiot the entire time.
Listen to
this awesome audiobook version of his work, here:
Greek and Roman Ghost stories by Lacy
Collison-Morley
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| Say what you will about the Greeks, we knew our damn necromancy. |
Ancient
Greco-Roman apocryphism and pagan practices are considered taboo in Greece
nowadays. Oh sure, we believe in the evil eye and we occasionally adorn
ourselves with some charm or another and we may have been performing some of
their cleansing rituals up until the 60’s, but we think we’re way too cool for
that shit.
We keep
forgetting how we used to treat the afterlife like a depressing version of
Christian Hell or how we had built a religion that focused on chanelling the
dead and may have gone through a hero-worship phase. And that’s a goddamn
shame, if you ask me.
Listen to
this audiobook and brag to your Wiccan friends about it, mostly because Wiccans
suck (but also because you’ll be smarter for it)
The Jewel of the Seven Stars by Bram Stoker
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| Bram Stoker-Putting the ‘Oh my God, run! Run for your lives!’ in horror. |
Hey kids!
You like Dracula? You like how it set off that chain reaction of masturbation
and undead rape fantasies? What’s that? You hate that too?
Well then
how do you feel about a story concerning the possession of an archaeologist by
an ancient Egyptian Sorceress and the mayhem that follows her rampage? Doesn’t
it sound fucking awesome? Sure it fucking does!
Listen to
it here and denounce all shitty vampire tropes today!
Repent, Harlequin! Said the TickTockMan by
Harlan Ellison:
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| And all around him and inside him, there was the cruel ticking of a clockwork world… |
It’s funny.
It’s haunting. It’s awesome. It’s the most referenced and quoted story in the
English language. My hyping it won’t do it any goddamn good whatsoever.
Read it
here:
(Sorry guys, but apparently the link was recently taken down. I will replace it soon as I find another upload of the story)
And for the
shocker…
In A Thousand Years by Hans Christian Andersen
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| You wish your future was this awesome. |
It’s a
scifi story written by a dude in 1852 who wrote some of the most famous fairy
tales ever, where he describes today’s world in excruciating detail. And it
blows your goddamn mind, how spot on he is at it!
There’s jet
engines, there’s cameras (though they’re more like Polaroids than digital
cams), there’s mention of TWO World Wars and he also hints at a
post-apocalyptic Europe!
Best. Fairy
Tale. Ever.
Addendum:
You know,
this is fun. I keep finding these things everywhere and the shit I’ve listed
here don’t even begin to take into account the stories and audiobooks made by
lesser known or aspiring authors
.
Maybe with a little bit of feedback, I could
get a Why Haven’t You Read this with aspiring dudes and lasses from all over
the interwebs, as long as the submitted stories follow the established
guidelines.
On a
slightly related note, wanna see the dumbest fucking thing I ever wrote? It’s
violent as fuck and it’s partially about Pokemon!
http://www.wattpad.com/13384569-tales-of-team-rocket-chapter-one
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