I know it sounds old-fashioned but my family have took up reading together since we were forced to live mainly indoors. My personal choice was English sci-fi books because I wanted to use this opportunity to improve our English skills and because I’ve always been a fan of the genre. We’re about to finish a free ebook novel and I would like to find another one of similar or better quality.
Are you aware of any sci-fi novel available for free on the Internet, of good artistic quality and appropriate for family reading sessions? Thank you in advance.
Project Gutenberg is not a bad idea, but I find it hard to identify something that doesn’t feel dated. Cory Doctorow seems to have a fresh voice but I’m not sure his texts are appropriate for family reading.
Yes, although it doesn’t have nearly as much as it used to.
John Scalzi’s Agent To the Stars is available online here and should be appropriate for all ages (though I appreciated it more when I listened to the audiobook read by Wil Wheaton, which is not free).
Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper is at least a minor classic and is in the public domain.
Tor.com occasionally offers a free e-book for a few days, but they don’t have anything available right now.
Do you have a library card? Your local library should provide access to e-books. There’s a national network that many libraries are part of, called Overdrive/MetroNet I think. The selection is kind of hit-and-miss, a lot of popular mystery/detective/action thriller/romance serial novel stuff, but lately I see MetroNet has been adding a lot of classic novels, and I know I’ve seen an H.G. Wells novel or two- “War of the Worlds” and maybe “The Time Machine”. Pretty sure I’ve seen some Philip K. Dick too.
Both Greg Egan and Peter Watts have links to several of their works on their home pages, with the latter including four of his novels, among them the excellent Blindsight.
I intend to pursue my plan from home, on my computer. I live in Bucharest and we’re on quarantine now. I want to prolong my own quarantine until the entire situation seems to settle down - we have the means to support ourselves through this process.
I am familiar with H.G. Wells’ work (most of which I have read) - while I like it, my family might find it too serious to enjoy. I am not sure Philip K. Dick is available for free online - I only found a short story in the past, if I remember well.
Whaddya mean, “not free”? Books that are old enough to be in the public domain typically are free, at least if you get them from someplace like Project Gutenberg.
On Amazon, Dracula and Frankenstein are available in numerous different editions at different prices, including $0.00 (look for the AmazonClassics Edition if you want a free one), and the same goes for many other classics.
Now, it is true that Amazon has many more recent Kindle books available for under $5 (either permenantly or when they’re on sale).
Thank you for the recommendations. These are interesting authors, whom I will have to enjoy reading on my own. My family is not as fond of science fiction as I am.
