Amazon Shorts: Short Stories for 4 Bits

Some time ago, Amazon.com began selling “Amazon shorts”, short stories in a variety of formats (PDF, HTML and text) that cost a mere 49 cents. You can purchase hundreds of these stories, in just about every genre: science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, literature, and there are even nonfiction texts.

For example, you can get The Second Coming of Charles Darwin, by my friend James Morrow, who describes it as follows:

I wrote this satiric fable in hopes of adding a new and phantasmagorical wrinkle to the Darwin Wars, the ongoing conflict between religious conservatives and evolutionary thinkers over the source of our planet’s biological diversity. The plot turns on Omar, a cyborg tortoise dispatched via time machine from a high-tech future to the Galápagos Islands of September 10, 1835. His audacious mission: to alter the local fauna so radically that, when Charles Darwin arrives seven days hence, he will never become inspired to father the theory of natural selection.

(While you’re at it, check out Jim’s astounding novel The Last Witchfinder!)

Amazon shorts is a great idea–e-stories of all kinds, available for a pittance and a few clicks. Authors include historian David McCullough, suspense author Jeffrey Deaver, sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson, and many more. But first, do check out James Morrow’s story; it’s a brilliant satire/alternate history that raises many interesting questions.