books and science fiction

Amazon.com We have one bookstore selling new books in town and the selection is, charitably, somewhat limited for my particular tastes. The nearest large chain bookstore is 45 minutes away. Amazon.com is like a good tool or ideal piece of software--unobtrusive and works well. No muss, no fuss, books in my hands in 3 days. Book titles on my site are linked to the corresponding listing (when it exists) on amazon.com. Click through from my site, buy the book, and amazon.com will give me a kick-back. (27 May 2003. I've been an Amazon Associate for, what, 5 years? I have yet to earn enough for them to cut me a check.)

Laissez Faire Books.

Science Fiction I like science fiction, and have for about as long as I've been able to read. I read it less now because I have less time and there seems to be less good stuff to read. The book racks are infested with Trek spinoff novels, computer game spinoff novels, Thud & Blunder, pointless Mystic Quests and derivative cyberpunk. This is some of the good stuff:

"Cordwainer Smith" One of the best. A bit of an acquired taste. Don't mess with Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons. Cordwainer Smith.com (run by his daughter.)

Avram Davidson

Olaf Stapeldon in Last and First Men, and Star Maker. Classics worth reading. Find out what the adjective "stapeldonian" means.

C. S. Lewis' Out Of The Silent Planet. The first book of his "space trilogy". Dr. Elwin Ransom, philologist, is kidnapped to a Lowellian Mars, a habitable but dying world with canals and three vaguely humanoid alien species. And angels. A powerful arguement against "manifest destiny" as an excuse for space travel.

"This only first try. Soon they go on to another world." --Weston

"But do you not know that all worlds will die?" --Oyarsa Malacandra, the ruling "eldil" of Mars

"Men jump off each before it deads -- on and on, see?" --Weston

"And when all are dead?" --Oyarsa

the Arthur C. Clarke Image Archive. He wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey and a lot of better books. Most of Clarke's recent fiction is at least partly a travelogue in the Wonderful Socialist Paradise of the Future(TM). A contemporary of Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Still (as of Y2K) alive and writing.

Clark Ashton Smith

Chesley Bonestell. See also bonestell.com.

Greg Egan

scifidimensions.com

Seeing Ear Theater

Sci-fi Weekly A more or less weekly web newsletter about science fiction.

Locus The science fiction news monthly for quite a few years now. What books are upcoming, which novel won the Hugo, who's ailing or dead, that sort of stuff.

Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 More informative than the official TNT B5 site. Includes detailed episode synopses to date. As of November 25, 1998 the shows 5 year run is complete, the story told. Babylon 5 is like nothing you've ever seen on TV before--makes Star Trek (as good as can be sometimes as long as you ignore the <aaack!> politics) look like a pointless meander. It's a complete, coherent story 5 years long. Action scenes and big space battles aplenty, but the most intense and memorable scenes are of two people in a room, talking. Ageless hard questions:

"Who are you?", "What do you want?", "Why are you here?", "How will this end?", "It's easy to find something to die for. Do you have something to live for?"

Vernor Vinge's Marooned in Realtime (most recently published as part of Across Realtime). If we can keep from making ourselves extinct in a mass death, or stunting ourselves with socialism there will be a time (and historically soon) past which our future is incomprehensible (perhaps not even human). The book also touches on the Fermi Paradox (why aren't intelligent aliens here now?). Vernor Vinge's home page.

Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. Pham Nuwen in the Slow Zone. 8000 years in our future, 30000 years before his (his? really?) appearance in A Fire Upon the Deep, humanity has slowly spread through a volume about 400 light years across. The Wheel of History in the Slow Zone is very evident. The nomadic trader culture of the Qeng Ho persists, rooted planetary civilizations rise and fail predictably (though for a variety of reasons). Progress has plateaued, with very infrequent advances. This is the story of first contact with an alien civilization on it's first ramp up to high tech. There is, of course, more to it. "Hard Sci Fi."

S. M. Stirling's Draka novels: Drakon, The Stone Dogs, Under the Yoke and Marching Through Georgia. This alternate history depicts a modern slave society that is the horrible antithesis to the happy prosperous free society L. Neil Smith wrote about in The Probability Broach. This book may give you "relentless enemy" nightmares (does me sometimes). The first three novels are now published together as The Domination, with some tie in material but without the appendices that give much background detail on his alternate history.

Earth Abides, by George Stewart. A "survivalist" novel from 1948. A virulent plague wipes out all but a scattered few. This book follows one survivor through his life, as a small tribe gathers around him. Civilization does not restart. (Nits can be picked. The hero is unlikely to find usable gasoline 20 years after TEOTWAWKI. Handmade archery equipment is not easy for a naieve boyer to make without the tradition behind it.)

Someone did graphics of Larry Niven's Ringworld "This group of web pages originated as my final project for a Procedural Textures Course I took at George Washington University in the Spring of 1995. For my final project, I chose to produce images of Larry Niven's Ringworld. Niven invented the Ringworld as a compromise between a planet and a Dyson's sphere." Larry Niven's Ringworld is a good example of "hard science fiction", where the setting (a habitat consisting of an artificial ring orbiting a star) absolutely dominates the story. There are 2 sequels, somwhat less readable.

Moon of Ice by Brad Linaweaver. Nazis win their part of WWII, and turn out to be only middlin' competent at actually running an empire. The life and times of Hilda Goebbels, revolutionary anarchist.

Kelly Freas SF artist from the Golden Age, still alive and active.

Does anybody know whatever became of John Schoenherr, an artist who did a lot of SF and childrens books in the 1960s and 70s?

H. P. Lovecraft. Much of his stuff is available here, through some quirck of copyright law.

David Brin who argues here that Star Wars is rather sinister.

Atlas Shrugged "I will stop the motor of the world."--John Galt. Watch a society collapse, and quickly. Feel free to skip the 60 page speech (you'll know it when you see it), and try not to take the philosophy too seriously. A brute force, low tech future as it might have looked from 1945. The United States, the last dwindling beacon in a dreary world full of collectivist People's States, is being made to run down and fall apart like a cheap, badly made windup clock. Sometimes you look around and wonder if someone's making the scenario come true.

Science Fiction Writers of America

An analysis of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy. Heinlein is another "must read".

Robert Heinlein's bomb shelter.

Eric Frank Russell's The Great Explosion

E. M. Forster's The Machine Stops. "Utopia" falls apart. From 1909.

Emil Petaja 1915-2000.

Christian Fandom and the Christian Fandom Reading List

Stuff you absolutely won't find at Waldenbooks

Tom Nadeau's Seven Lean Years. Excerpts on the author's home page. We've been told that these are good times. The author thinks this is a lie. I spent 13 months trying to find a permanent work in a field with a supposed 1 megabody (or so) shortage during supposed good economic times. I'm inclined to agree. A nice cathartic rant about how things really work in high tech.

Loompanics Alternative lifestyle books for "right wing nuts". They published . . .

Claire Wolfe's cute little book called 101 Things to do 'Til the Revolution. If you're the sort of person that thought the O. J. trial or the JonBenet Ramsey murder was significant news you'd probably think this is a book about conspiracies and bomb making and such. It's not. It's a book about clearing you head, taking responsibility for your life, living free and being prepared for the what may yet come. There are 101 very short chapters on such things as "Get rid of your dependencies", " Kill your TV", "Celebrate April 19" (what happened on April 19? bunches, it turns out.), "Don't let your possessions imprison you", "Don't blame anyone else for your troubles", "Identify the informer in your midst" (hint: it's probably the guy who wants to blow stuff up), "Visualize Vermont carry" (Vermont what?), "Build your skills", "Just say NO" (got nothing to do with drugs), and "Use PGP intelligently". Recommended, with a grain of salt.

Don't Shoot The Bastards Yet is Claire Wolfe's latest, similar to 101 Things, but more action oriented. The title's a play on her now famous opening line for 101 Things: "America's at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, and too early to shoot the bastards." If you like these two books, you should also look up Claire's archived Free Life columns at WorldNetDaily. There's at least a books worth of stuff here (hint hint).

The University of Pennsylvania hosts the On-Line Books page which includes Banned Books On-Line.

Paladin Press They have a catalog in Acrobat format you can download.

Delta Press "or more than 20 years Delta Press Ltd. has been the catalog to turn to for some of the most outrageous and hard to find books anywhere! Its' constant goal is to give its readers, (collectors, gun enthusiast, law enforcement agencies, and many others) the best selection of unusual and hard to find books on a variety of informative subjects.

Javelin Press "Boston T. Party"

Unintended Consequences by John Ross. He asks one of the right questions:

"The end result, which we want to avoid, is the concentration camp. The gulag. The gas chamber. The Spanish Inquisition. All of those things. If you're in a death camp, no one would fault you for resisting. But when you're being herded towards the gas chamber, naked and seventy pounds below your healthy weight, it's too late. You have no chance. On the other hand, no one would support you if you started an armed rebellion because the government posts speed limits on open roads and arrests people for speeding. So when was it not too late, but also not too early?"

300 years ago John Locke in his Second Treatise on Government had something to say about this problem: "I answer, such revolutions happen not upon every little mismanagement in public affairs. Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under, and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves, and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected, and without which, ancient names and specious forms are so far from being better, that they are much worse than the state of Nature or pure anarchy; the  inconveniences being all as great and as near, but the remedy farther off and more difficult." Sound familiar?

Jeffry Snyder's Nation of Cowards touches on these issues as well. This book (the title essay, plus a number of others published over 10 years, mostly in American Handgunner)

Electronic Books -- the future of publishing? Not quite ready for prime time.

Peanut Press has Asmiov's and Analog available for download and formatted for PDAs. I couldn't get it to work on my Casio (before I stepped on it. That front panel glass is thin.)

Pulpless.com Books available (science fiction mostly) for download in HTML or Acrobat format.

Books for free! A Gutenberg Project mirror. The Gutenberg Project is a volunteer project to transcribe and make available for download classic literature in the public domain. The vast majority of it is in ASCII format (the real standard). Walnut Creek CDROM also has a CD of Gutenberg Project stuff.)

• The Gutenberg Project at University of Illinois
• Carnegie Mellon
• The Official Gutenberg Project page and the List of Mirrors

Christian Classics Ethereal Library at Calvin College. These aren't the usual pop Christianity ephemeral fluff. These are, many of them, the hard books that have lasted out the centuries.

On conflict: The Art of War and The Book of Five Rings.

Science Fiction ebooks at Baen

Net Assets, by Carl Bussjaeger. "What would you do for cheap orbital access available to everyone?"

Light and Matter ":Educational materials for physics and astronomy"

Banned Books on-line -- some of them anyway.

Technical books online at the O'Reilly Open Book Project