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Need a break from holiday commercialism? Want to send a much-needed gift to groups cleaning up one of 2010's worst disasters? Great! Check out Breaking Waves, an anthology featuring award-winning writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Vonda McIntyre. More »
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If you grew up reading Andre Norton's 1970s YA fiction like Star Ka'at, then you'll want to cast back further into history and check out some of the novels from her Time Traders series, many of which are free online. Today, the resourceful nerds at BoingBoing linked to the third book in the Cold War series that pits time-traveling Soviets against time-traveling U.S. spies. The third book, The Defiant Agents, is about how a group of Apache natives colonize space (yay for getting to be the colonizers this time around?), but the first book (Time Traders) sets the scene by giving us a 1950s-style temporal arms race between the commies and the capitalist pigdogs. Download them both and while away a couple of afternoons. More »
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Ever since the 1950s, when business environments were slowly being populated by giant, mainframe computers and their minicomputer progeny (which were not so mini in size), science fiction writers have toyed with the idea that computers are about to become gods. You see this in David Gerrold's 1970s novel When HARLIE Was One, as well as in the Terminator franchise, where a computer unleashes Armageddon. But if you trace this theme back, there remains one classic of the computer-as-god genre, and it's a 1950s short story by Isaac Asimov that's available for free online. More »
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Jeff VanderMeer is one of those authors whose books seep into your brain, trickle down your spine, and lodge somewhere deep in the insect parts of your DNA. Heavily influenced by Lovecraft, VanderMeer is perhaps best known for the dreamy-crawly short story collection City of Saints and Madmen, set in the brooding metropolis Ambergris, a location where many of his other stories and novels are set. Now his latest novel The Situation, which is about office politics at a beetle-implant development company, is available as a free download online via Wired. Yes, it's this week's lunchtime reading. More »
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Firefly fans and the Browncoats at Whedonesque are rejoicing this week because they have a free ebook set in the Firefly universe from author Steven Brust. Yes, My Own Kind of Freedom is today's lunchtime reading (and, depending on how quickly you read, possibly tomorrow's and the next day's too). More »
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