The Bush League Critic

Tor.com commisioned John Scalzi to write a new short story in celebration of the site's second birthday. The President's Brain is Missing was the result - and it's available for everyone's free reading pleasure right now.

Also, previously published original Tor.com short stories are available for purchase (99 cents each) on a variety of ereader platforms. From their blog post:

Starting tomorrow, twelve of the first thirteen original stories published on Tor.com will be available on a bunch of e-book platforms, including the Kindle store, Apple’s iBooks store, Barnes & Noble’s e-bookstore, the Kobo store, and the Sony Reader store, for 99 cents each. These are in effect little e-chapbooks, complete with the original Tor.com art on their “covers,” designed to work properly with the current generation of e-book devices and reading programs.

The stories going up are:

• “After the Coup” by John Scalzi
• “Down on the Farm” by Charles Stross
• “Shade” by Steven Gould
• “The Girl Who Sang Rose Madder” by Elizabeth Bear
• “Catch ’Em in the Act” by Terry Bisson
• “Jack and the Aktuals, Or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory” by Rudy Rucker
• “A Water Matter” by Jay Lake
• “The Film-makers of Mars” by Geoff Ryman
• “Firstborn” by Brandon Sanderson
• “Errata” by Jeff VanderMeer
• “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” by Jo Walton
• “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon” by Ken Scholes

A thirteenth story, Cory Doctorow’s “The Things That Make Me Weak And Strange Get Engineered Away,” will join these soon on several of these platforms.

So feel free to gobble up some free - and some very cheap - reading from some quality authors.