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For those who don't know what I'm talking about, a Creative Commons license is a way for a work's creator to allow other people to use the work in certain well-defined ways without those other people having to explicitly ask for permission ahead of time. The creator retains copyright on their work, and the creator decides which kinds of uses are legitimate and which aren't; and in all cases, anyone who wants to use the work is required to attribute it correctly to the original creator.

For example, some authors would be happy to allow anyone who wants to do so to translate their work into another language or another medium. ("Want to make a music video out of my story? Go ahead!") Some authors would be fine with letting other people make copies of their work as long as nobody is making any money from the copying. And so on; there are a variety of license options.

I'm still waiting for final confirmation from a few of the authors who wanted to CC license their work. But here are the confirmed pieces we've added CC licenses to so far, listed by author. Most are fiction, but some are articles or poetry. Different authors chose different licenses; for details, see the license information at the end of each piece. I'm not explicitly mentioning publication dates in this entry, but the dates of these pieces range from 2002 through 2006.

Dean Francis Alfar

L'Aquilone du Estrellas (The Kite of Stars)

He told her that such a kite was impossible, that there was no material immediately available for such an absurd undertaking, that there was, in fact, no design for a kite that supported the weight of a person.

Marie Brennan

Mesoamerican Calendars

In ancient Mesoamerica, measuring time was a complex business, often involving multiple different calendars at once . . . [but] explanations rarely go beyond the math.

The Logic of Sacrifice

[H]uman sacrifice ... has been practiced in a number of real-world human societies, where the entire population was made up of real people, rather than the one-dimensional caricatures bent on slaughter which populate so many fantasy novels.

Bull-Leaping in Bronze Age Crete

The average individual could not possibly hope to take a flying leap at a charging bull and emerge in one piece on the other side.

Ireland's Ancient Code

The questions of how and why ogham was developed have puzzled linguists and archaeologists for decades.

That Fairy-Tale Feel: A Folkloric Approach to Meredith Ann Pierce's The Darkangel

The Darkangel evokes more than one genre, including the gothic and (in certain places) science fiction, so what quality are we pointing to when we say it echoes the feel of a fairy tale?

Kaolin Fire

Pockmarked Cement

Dharma Shankar, Ph.D., is in his field, juggling ears of corn while the locusts approach.

M. Frost

Telling

soldiers of your enemy wait / stroking the flanks of their guns.

Gavin J. Grant

You and Me

We are acting on realities as perceived by our forecasting and planning departments.

Hold Tight

--When the world was young, one of them said, we played with you. We were friends, great friends. I was young, you were young, maybe you don't remember me? We played Red Rover, Leviathan chasing Giant Squid, high tig, rainbows and sunbeams, hide and seek, tops and bottoms, forts and castles. Those were good days. Do you remember yet?

How to Start a Small Press

The first and best thing you can do if you want to start a small press is talk to people--lots of people!--until you find some you can work with.

We Are Never Where We Are

In '36 in Spain, on the losing side, we realized we couldn't give more than we had. We'd almost given everything: you were in a field hospital with a bullet in your thigh and we were arguing over how deeply we should be involved. We'd already lived so long and I thought we should be more than just footpads serving time.

N. K. Jemisin

Cloud Dragon Skies

Even so, we kept our guard up. Who knew what new diseases they might have developed, up in the sky and surrounded by strangeness? Infected blankets. Germs as spears and arrows. Accept no gifts from them, the griots had warned, but of course people are greedy.

Alaya Dawn Johnson

Shard of Glass

I guess that I couldn't imagine my father actually hurting us. The danger was something only my mother understood--she knew what she had taken, and how much they would risk to take it back.

Ken Liu

Algorithms for Love

Every interview we did followed the same pattern. The moment when Clever Laura™ first turned to the interviewer and answered a question there was always some awkwardness and unease; seeing an inanimate object display intelligent behavior had that effect on people. Then I would explain how Laura worked and everyone would be delighted.

Beth Adele Long

Rapunzel Dreams of Knives

"Do you want to go? His country is truly beautiful. Though it's awfully cold and the men are said to be unusually brutish."

David Lunde

Absolute Zero

Some nights I think that the stars / Have died

Ruth Nestvold

Princes and Priscilla

"She doesn't need to run a kingdom. She needs to marry and produce an heir. That's her function!"

Happily Ever Awhile

It wasn't that she hadn't forgiven him; she could hardly do otherwise, as much as she loved him, and it wasn't in her nature to be vengeful. She had forgiven her stepsisters, after all, when they stood there in front of her with bloody feet, their toes cut off to steal her prince from her.

Jenn Reese

Winged

Anne kept her wings unfurled behind her as she sat, like a great snowy cloak. Franklin always told her to sit like that whenever she could because it maximized her best feature. Wings were a gift to men as well as to women, he said, and it would have been selfish of her to disagree.

The Dream Factory

You need a bunch of realistic fantasy creatures for the movie, and Stan Winston figured out long ago that it was easier to hire off-world than build all these bizarre creatures from scratch. It's a big industry secret.

Tales of the Chinese Zodiac

A series of short tales connected to the animals of the Chinese zodiac. Each story in the set is also licensed individually.