Archive of Lewis Shiner's writing http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm http://tinyurl.com/xmas-52 Courtesy of Subterranean Press, here's a brand new Christmas story. If you like it, please consider buying one of their fine books while you're there. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/ave_m.html Bob Welch died on June 7. In memorium, here's a 1990 piece I wrote about his pop-metal band Avenue M, with new notes that talk about the impact he had on me. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/cities_fr.htm The marvelous Claire Michel returns with a French translation of the short story version of "Deserted Cities of the Heart," just in time for both the end of the world (24 December, 2011, according to the story) and the release of my novel BLACK & WHITE in France from Sonatine (retitled Les péchés de nos pères). Will I get to be big in France before we go up in smoke? http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm My latest novel, DARK TANGOS, is now available thanks to the generosity of Bill Schafer at Subterranean. Publishers Weekly said, "Shiner plunges into the dark recent history of Argentina in this thriller that tells a gentle love story against a backdrop of sheer terror." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm With SLAM and SAY GOODBYE, I have completed my quest to bring my entire backlist into print in beautiful uniform editions. You can order the trade paperbacks from amazon.com or other online retailers--why not pick up a couple to show Bill Schafer of Subterranean Press that he was right to support Fiction Liberation Front? http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/perfidia_fr.pdf Many thanks to Claire Michel, who translated "White City" into French 20 years ago, and who just reappeared with this unexpected bonus, a new translation of "Perfidia." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm To celebrate the release of new trade paperback editions of my novels GLIMPSES and FRONTERA, both books are now available as free downloads on Fiction Liberation Front. Big kudos to Bill Schafer of Subterranean for his unflinching support of these free editions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38tqmJuzJ5A Check out the video of me reading "White City" at the Regulator Bookshop from last December. You can see it on the FLF site or go straight to YouTube with the link above. Note that it's in two parts, due to YouTube length restrictions. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/primes.html I've just posted "Primes," one of my favorites of my own stories. I started out to write a fable about overpopulation, and ended up writing one about racism. I suppose that tells us something--if we hadn't used up so many resources and crowded ourselves nearly to extinction, would there be so much greed and hatred in the world?

"Primes" is a milestone, because it brings to a close the first phase of the job I started back in the summer of 2007. I have now posted all of my published short stories (with a few exceptions, noted below) for free download, and in the process made a lot of other stuff available as well, including novels, screenplays, audio files, nonfiction, and translations, many of them never seen before. (The exceptions are collaborations, stories I wrote for the Wild Cards shared world anthologies, and one awful story from Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine that should never have been published except that I lost a bet with Joe Lansdale.)

There's still more to come. As Subterranean continues to bring my novels back into print, I'll post PDF versions here. I'll eventually get all my collaborations posted. There will be more nonfiction and at least another surprise or two--so stay tuned. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/wild4u.html More snow is falling, and four more stories are up on the FLF site: "Wild for You," "White City," "Deserted Cities of the Heart" (short story version), and "Scales." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/secrets.html Here's one more blizzard bonus from Collected Stories, a short-short called "Secrets." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/oddman.html We're snowed in here in North Carolina, so I've posted a stack of short-shorts, including "Oz," "His Girlfriend's Dog," "Omphalos," "The Best Part of Making Up," and "Odd Man Out." Plus a couple of notes, and a link to the original story from my Collected Stories, "The Death of Che Guevara," hosted by Subterranean Magazine. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/duck.html For the new year, the debut of a brand new short story, "Duck." Thanks to Richard Butner, who suggested I might want to write this down, and who gave me a valuable reading of the first draft. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/kidding.html Solstice festivities continue with "Kidding Around," which was pretty much handed to me (sans the more sinister plot elements) by Kimberly Rector, a student of mine at a Texas A&M high school writing workshop back in the late eighties. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/cities.pdf The complete PDF file of my 1988 novel Deserted Cities of the Heart is now available on the Fiction Liberation Front site. The novel is newly reprinted in a gorgeous trade paperback from Subterranean, along with the trade paperback of last year's Black & White, and the definitive collection of my short fiction, Collected Stories. Happy solstice! http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/kiss.html I was a big fan of spy novels, from Ian Fleming to Len Deighton to Philip McCutchan (what, you never read the Commander Shaw novels?). However, the only spy fiction I've written to date is "The Kiss," a weird little piece that came to me complete in a dream somewhere in the late 1980s. I put it aside after transcribing it, and when I discovered it years later had no memory of it at all. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/rakeoff.html Walter Tevis wrote brilliant, concise, hard-boiled suspense stories like "The King is Dead" and "The Hustler" (before it was a novel, before it was a movie) as well as SF like Mockingbird and The Man Who Fell to Earth. I was a huge fan, though I can't say I had quite mastered the form in "Rake-Off," a very early suspense story that relies on momentum to make up for its lack of credibility. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/plague.html "Plague" and "Promises" both draw on the idea of aliens taking us over, the Xirconian mythos that my friend Mike Minzer and I developed in college. (For other examples, see "Twilight Time" and "Kings of the Afternoon.") "Plague" is also a nice antidote for the many stories here that take themselves too seriously. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/language_notes.html More stories coming soon, I promise. In the meantime, an interesting correction to my story "Language" from a multi-lingual reader. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/bloodrel.html "Blood Relations" is a loving tribute to the swamp monsters that were a part of the seventies comic book zeitgeist (especially Steve Gerber's brilliant Man-Thing). This was my first sale to The Twilight Zone magazine and the beginning of a great relationship with my favorite magazine editor, T.E.D. Klein. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/lizard_ru.pdf My friend Sergey Artomov has come through with another translation into Russian, this time of "Lizard Men of Los Angeles." Spasiba, Sergey! http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/tinker.html This early, highly sentimental effort was my first professional SF sale. It appeared in Galileo, where John Kessel, Connie Willis, and others also debuted. This is a lightly edited version of the final draft I submitted, which differs considerably from what actually showed up in the magazine. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/musicover.html As the current war in Iraq drags on, with more killings, maimings, and broken families every day, I bring you this souvenir from the first Iraq war. When the Music's Over was a 1991 original anthology benefiting Greenpeace in which I required the writers to resolve the conflicts in the stories without using violence. This is the introduction from that book. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm#audio Jeff Archer Black, a longtime radio professional, music freak, and close friend, recorded a couple of my stories as demos of his voiceover and production work. I'm delighted with these and hope there may be more to come. If you like what you hear, drop Jeff a line: jab {at} buzzcat [dot] net. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/language.html "Language" is a story that asks yet again the eternal question "What is love?" No final answers appear to be forthcoming. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/gentlerain.html I wrote "Like the Gentle Rain" for an Eaton Conference sponsored by UC Riverside in 1996. It was a response to J.D. Bernal's 1929 essay "The World, the Flesh and the Devil," which was the topic of the conference that year, and features quotes and paraphrases from Bernal as the words of the "Master." No brains in tin cans for me, thanks! http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/denouement.html In "The Long Denouement," a 1976 parody of Raymond Chandler, tough guy writers go up against wise-cracking editors and desperados on the wrong side of the printed page. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/mystrain.html FLF returns by popular demand! (Thanks, Jen.) To celebrate Elvis's birthday (January 8), herewith a pair of stories inspired by the King. I offer "The Shoemaker's Tale" as an antidote for the paranoia and derangement of "Mystery Train." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/stuff_it.html With no warning, this Italian version of "Stuff of Dreams" ("Roba da sogno") appeared in my email box, courtesy of one Aldo Carpanelli, translator and man of the world. Molte grazie, Aldo! http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/relay.html "Relay" is weird one that came nearly word for word out of a dream. The Philip K. Dick influence is evident yet again. I wrote this in 1981 and never sold it; its only previous appearance was in my collection The Edges of Things. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/dancers.html "Dancers" is one of my most overtly cyberpunk stories, written in the spring of 1982, shortly after I read Gibson's groundbreaking "Burning Chrome" in manuscript. But the story was so grim and ugly, with its weird, terse dialog and its lack of the amphetemine-fueled hijinks that became a cyberpunk hallmark, that it only found a home after five years--and then only in Night Cry, a horror magazine. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/snowbirds.html Yes, even back in 1982 we knew pollution was causing climate change, as you can see in my story "Snowbirds." Wearing its Philip K. Dick influence on its sleeve, with its time travel and traffic jams, this remains a favorite of mine. It's also the only story I ever sold to the hard SF pulp magazine Analog, where it failed to find an audience. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/genedrain.html "The Gene Drain" is a self-conscioiusly "cyberpunk" story from 1989, lampooning the evangelical dictators of the period, as well as the hardening clichés of cyberpunk itself. I found the title (sans definite article, but accompanied by a downward arrow) chalked on the wall of a construction site, apparently instructions to someone named Gene. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/blackwhite.pdf With the full support of my publisher, I've made my brand new novel, BLACK & WHITE, available on Fiction Liberation Front. This is just the first step in our plan to reprint all of my novels, and offer all of them for free on the Web. For reviews and information about the book, see my main site: www.lewisshiner.com/blackwhite.html http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/brujo.html I changed my mind about "Brujo" and rewrote the monster-eats-hero typical horror ending after I'd already sold it to F&SF. Luckily Ed Ferman agreed with me and printed the new ending when it became my second publication in the magazine. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/stompin.html I went to high school with the genius behind The Subgenius Foundation, sometimes known as Ivan Stang, and discovered his pamphlet "The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die" while living in Austin. It made as much sense as anything else to throw in some Subgenius lore along with the unused ideas from several notebooks and the kitchen sink when I wrote "Stompin' at the Savoy" in the mid-80s. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/jeffbeck.html "Jeff Beck" is quintessential mid-80s Shiner: rock and roll, a bad marriage, and a magic wish. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/perfidia_ru.pdf I am pleased and proud to host the work of my new friend, Sergey Artomov, who put a huge amount of work into translating my story "Perfidia" into Russian. Sergey has worked for major Russian publishers, recently translating The Good German by Joseph Kanon, for example. He emailed me from Kaliningrad with the offer to translate some of my stories for free. My friend and tango partner Iryna Kadol also volunteered to edit the translation. Huge thanks to both of you. With the Spanish translation of "Americans," I felt I had enough to launch a new "Translations" section on the FLF home page. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/warathome.html "The War at Home" deals with the weird quasi-mystique the Vietnam war had during the 1980s, before the disaster in Iraq came along to remind us what it was really like. http://www.lewisshiner.com/blackwhite.html For those of you who haven't heard through other channels, I've sold my new suspense novel, Black & White, to Subterranean Press, the folks who did such a great job on my Love in Vain collection a few years ago. The book is scheduled for June, 2008, and will have a signed, limited edition as well as a trade hardcover. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/humanv.html For a while in the mid-80s I was the most prolific SF writer in Texas, with a story coming out in one magazine or another every month or two. From this period comes "Till Human Voices Wake Us," my "mermaid" story. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/velvet.html In the 1990s I had a brief vogue in SF academia, thanks largely to George Slusser of the University of California at Riverside. I gave a few academic papers at the Eaton Conferences that UC Riverside sponsored, including this on one the Daniel Clowes graphic novel, Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/ninehard.html I can't seem to get enough of them. "Nine Hard Questions about the Nature of the Universe" is an early SF story about flying saucer kidnap, physics, and God. It was also the title story of my first collection. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/gold.html "Gold" is one of several stories I've written for Joe Lansdale anthologies. For some reason the stories I've written for Joe--including "Dirty Work," "Lizard Men of Los Angeles," and "Steam Engine Time"--end up being among my favorites. This story of Jean Lafitte and the Texas banking scandals of the mid-19th century is no exception. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/sailor.html The short story "Soldier, Sailor" was my first attempt at a Ballardian condensed novel. I later reversed the condensation process to come up with my first novel, Frontera. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/cyberpunk.html My appearance on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times with "Confessions of an Ex-Cyberpunk" provoked a small tempest in the teapot of science fiction. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/lipstick.html "History as Swiss Cheese" was my review of Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces. Marcus once told me it was the only review he'd seen of the book that "got everything right." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/dreamsci.html Dream Science by Thomas Palmer is one of my favorite novels, and I'm still really happy with this review I wrote of it for SF Eye. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/tommy.html "Tommy and the Talking Dog" was inspired by Andrew Lang's multicolored Fairy Books and the brilliant and unpredictable novels of Daniel Pinkwater (e.g., Lizard Music). http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/kings.html "Kings of the Afternoon" comes from the late 70s and was a real breakthrough for me. By writing about James Dean in an altered context (post apocalypse, flying saucers) I was able to have a character act out in ways I'd previously been afraid of. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/real.html "Real Life" is a previously unpublished piece written for Details magazine in the early 90s. Hip, ironic New Journalism is not my strong suit, but there are moments I like in this. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/dirty.html FLF returns from vacation with the final Sloane-related detective story, this one an uncomfortable confrontation between a down-on-his-luck ex-football player, a lawyer of dubious integrity, and the plaintiff in a case of rape. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/buyin.html Here's "Buyin' My Heartaches A Beer," from my 1974-76 apprenticeship, a story that was "too sexy, violent and too sentimental" for Alfred Hitchcock's, but nonetheless got me firmly pointed in the direction of mystery writing. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/prodigal.html "Prodigal Son" is the last of the Dan Sloane, Private Eye short stories, as featured on the audiobook Missing Persons. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/killing.html The second of the Dan Sloane, Private Eye stories from the 70s, "The Killing Season." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/tough.html For a while in the 1970s I was a private-eye writer, producing three short stories and a novel about a character named Dan Sloane. I've just posted "The Short, Unhappy Career of Lew Shiner, Tough-Guy Writer," the introduction I wrote for the Sloane stories when Crossroads Press collected them (Private Eye Action As You Like It, with Joe Lansdale). I've also posted the first of those stories, "Deep Without Pity." In the next few weeks I'll put up the rest of the Sloane stories, plus two others I refer to in the introduction: "Dirty Work" and "Buyin' My Heartaches A Beer." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/stuff.html Another very early piece, but a landmark in my career (my first of many sales to F&SF) and a story I'm still very fond of. http://www.geocities.com/dougiec3/comicstrip1.html The wonderful artist Doug Potter illustrated this version of my Western story, "Steam Engine Time," capturing the flavor of 1890s Austin beautifully. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/apparition.html I wrote "The Apparition" in 1980, but it didn't see print until my 1991 collection The Edges of Things. This is obviously early work, but I still find parts of it extremely creepy. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/stoked.html I wrote "Stoked" in 1987 as a warmup for my skatepunk-and-anarchy novel Slam, which included only a few bits of the original story. This marks its first appearance since its original publication. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/twilight.html The latest addition is "Twilight Time," a best-of-the-year story from 1984, featuring an alternate 1961 with aliens and flying saucers--and an "alternate" present with the Constitution on hold. http://www.nuevasinergia.com.ar/%20_cuentos_shiner.htm Mi cuento "Americanos" ya es disponible en español. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/longride.html I've added "The Long Ride Out," my first Western short story, which I liked enough to rewrite in the 90s, but never found a home for. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/americans.html The first three chapters of my novel Deserted Cities of the Heart appeared as excerpts in various magazines in the late 1980s. All three of those stories are now on the site. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/circle.html In response to my first reader request, here's "The Circle," an early story that's been reprinted in a couple of Halloween anthologies. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/sitcom.html My 1995 story "Sitcom" about the horrors of network TV is now live. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/flf.xml RSS subscriptions are now available. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/fractal.html Posted a short-short from the 80s called "Fractal Geometry." http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/autosalvage.html Added a brand new appreciation of the 60s band Autosalvage. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm Better organized homepage format features the screenplay adaptation of my novel GLIMPSES. http://www.lewisshiner.com/liberation/index.htm Launched Fiction Liberation Front with four newly published pieces.