Ben Rosenbaum's "The Ant King" sf collection as a free CC download

Ben Rosenbaum sez, "The marvelous Small Beer Press has put the entirety of my new short-story collection The Ant King and Other Stories under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license and made it downloadable in a number of formats. To celebrate I am having a little contest for the best derivative works!"

Ben is a superb writer, and his title sotry here, "The Ant King," is one of the strongest sf stories I've read in the past decade, and a modern classic of geek fiction. Go, download. You'll thank me later.

Sheila split open and the air was filled with gumballs. Yellow gumballs. This was awful for Stan, just awful. He had loved Sheila for a long time, fought for her heart, believed in their love until finally she had come around. They were about to kiss for the first time and then this: yellow gumballs.
Stan went to a group to try to accept that Sheila was gone. It was a group for people whose unrequited love had ended in some kind of surrealist moment. There is a group for everything in California.
After several months of hard work on himself with the group, Stan was ready to open a shop and sell the thousands of yellow gumballs. He did this because he believed in capitalism, he loved capitalism. He loved the dynamic surge and crash of Amazon’s stock price, he loved the great concrete malls spreading across America like blood staining through a handkerchief, he loved how everything could be tracked and mirrored in numbers. When he closed the store each night he would count the gumballs sold, and he would determine his gross revenue, his operating expenses, his operating margin; he would adjust his balance sheet and learn his debt-to-equity ratio; and after this exercise each night, Stan felt he understood himself and was at peace, and he could go home to his apartment and drink tea and sleep, without shooting himself or thinking about Sheila.

The Ant King, Up From the Depths with a Giant Cockroach Loaded Down With Riches (Links, Free Downloads, and a Contest), Buy The Ant King (Thanks, Ben!)

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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Talia

I agree, great story!

The story was also featured on the 5th installment of the short fantasy fiction podcast Podcastle. So if you’d prefer to take it in in audio form, you can check it out here.

:)