I would’ve, too, but I was restricting my list to those on the Gutenberg site.
Gutenberg does have it, just not on that list.
Thanks for finding it! Much under-rated, in my view!
I guess the early sections before his adventure starts might seem a bit slow to modern expectations… There’s at least one scene early on worthy of Jerome K. Jerome, though!
She, but otherwise thanks; I was trying to be clever with my links but I guess I was mainly elusive.
And thanks to everyone else for the recommendations! As much science fiction as I read, I really have no idea about the origins, so I am delighted and psyched about my new “to read” list.
You may enjoy Ursula Le Guin. I believe she has some ebooks available.
Here are some of my favorites (some older than others):
Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – Powerful aliens offer us peace and prosperity, but we must give up our dreams of going to the stars.
The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke – The challenges, setbacks and triumphs of building an orbital elevator or “beanstalk.”
All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman – A spy for a distant-future republic begins to lose his own identity the longer his career runs.
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman – If you’ve already read Heinlein and Scalzi’s military sf, you really should read this. Relativity draws soldiers in an interstellar war away from their homeworld.
Tool of the Trade by Joe Haldeman – A Soviet sleeper agent in late 1980s Boston develops a practical form of mind control, and decides to use it for his own purposes as both the CIA and the KGB try to catch him.
Fatherland by Robert Harris - Chilling alternative history about a murder investigation in a 1964 Nazi Germany.
Friday by Robert Heinlein – A courier/spy in the future is betrayed but decides to fights back.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein – Colonists on the Moon revolt against Earth’s harsh rule.
Time for the Stars by Robert Heinlein – Telepaths are able to keep starships linked as we explore nearby worlds.
Fevre Dream by George R.R. Martin – Dark vampire novel set along the Mississippi River before the Civil War; the kind of book Bram Stoker and Mark Twain might have written together!
Tuf Voyaging by George R.R. Martin - Satirical sf novel about ecological engineering, overpopulation, absolute power and war. One of my all-time favorite sf books. Love it, love it, love it!
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger - The inadvertent and uncontrollable time-travelling of a young man wreaks havoc with his decades-long romance with his eventual wife.
You can also find a lot of stuff over at the Baen Free Library.
The Night Land is some amazing imagination. So good, there are a bunch of stories on-line set in it. One of the best is “Awake in the Night”, which I read in a printed anthology somewhere (which is how I found the original), but is available along with a bunch of other stories on-line at http://www.thenightland.co.uk/nightfic.html#content
Haven’t read the works listed at the link, but Clifford Simak wrote City, one of all-time-favorite Sci-Fi books (short story collection, as with most pulp era sci fi).
H. Beam Piper wrote some excellent stuff (and there’s surprisingly little known about the guy, besides the fact he was a firearms enthusiast and talented writer who later committed suicide) and most of his non-Paratime or Little Fuzzy stuff is on Project Gutenberg from what I can see.
Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein is also an excellent book and I’m going to mention Dune (by Frank Herbert) as well- and, of course, the collected works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, for obvious reasons.
Hear, hear!
Anyway—I’ll suggest Cyril Kornbluth, who is horribly underexposed. And it seems his story The Adventurer—definite favorite of mine.—is on Gutenberg. Any of his other stories Two Dooms; The Little Black Bag; That Share of Glory; The Mindworm, or his perhaps overall classic, The Marching Morons, should be at the top of the list. I’d buy those for a quarter!
Poul Anderson’s Brain Wave is a good’un, too, if you can find it.
Thanks for the list. I read H. Beam Piper’s “Lone Star Planet” long ago and I’m going to read it again.
I recommend it to the OP. It’s not Great Science Fiction. It’s space opera, in this case very close to horse opera, an alternate title being “A Planet for Texans”. It’s a fun read.
It’s easy to forget how bad some of the old science fiction was:
In case you’re curious, Axelson in in charge of a bunch of space communists who have a death ray on the moon.
I’m surprised by some of the stuff Gutenberg has. Ben Bova, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, and Jack Vance, for example, are all still alive - how can their work be in the public domain?
Who owned the copyrights on their stories: the authors themselves? The magazines in which the stories were published?
I have just posted about him in the current vampire thread, but Peter Watt’s work is excellent and available for free download in his website. There’s a trilogy of novels there, of which I recently read and highly recommend the first book, Starfish, a great stand-alone novel called Blindsight and a bunch of short stories I haven’t read yet.
If i had to compare the guy with someone it’d be Greg Egan: both write very hard sf with incredibly out there ideas meticulously researched. Starfish is a very good novel and I liked it a lot, but Blindsight is one of the best sf novels I’ve ever read. It’s a first contact story, but the crew sent by Earth to make contact with the aliens is by itself more alien then most other authors would ever manage to think up:[ul]
[li]the captain is a vampire and he commands the AI that actually runs the ship (in the novel vampires are a recently rediscovered and revived species of hominids that evolved to prey on humans - they’re completly plausible and scary as hell, just not in the way you’d expect);[/li][li]the military officer is a pacifist and controls her soldier drones through a neural link;[/li][li]the ship’s doctor is so interfaced with his clinical tools that he can taste or touch or hear the results of his tests and is crippled without the machinery;[/li][li]the linguist has had her brain divided so she could have multiple personalities and act as a one person translation team - she’s nicknamed “The Gang of Four”;[/li][li]our protagonist is a “jargonaut”, a person whose function is to interpret and communicate to ordinary humans what all these people are saying, since they’ve become so complicated that non-augmented humans just can’t keep up - and oh, he only has one hemisphere of his brain.[/li][/ul]
As if that wasn’t enough, the actual aliens are some of the most genuinely alien I’ve ever read about, the prose is excellent and the whole thing has layers upon layers. I was actually troubled by the philosophical questions raised by the book and haven’t stopped thinking about it since I finished it, about three months ago. The guy even included an appendix with some of his sources and suggestions for further reading in the actual science behind his stuff.
All that said, it’s a heavy book, very complicated near the ending and demands close reading. It’s much more “literary” than most sf I’ve read and doesn’t offer the same sort of thrills I’ve come to expect from a first contact story. It reads very much like a “thesis” novel and is only rescued by the fact the author managed to be so incredibly creative. In a sense it’s like one of those Asimov novels in which all the important action happens with people sitting down and talking, but much more sophisticated than anything the Good Doctor could ever hope to write.
Olaf Stapledon has been mentioned, but not for the novel that made him a legend: Odd John. I don’t think it’s old enough for Gutenberg yet; neither is Philip Wylie’s Gladiator. Both are worth hunting down, though.
Was it a 1920s-style death ray, perchance…?
Take a look at Jack Vance’s “Demon Princes” series if you haven’t seen it before; the five-volume story of an obsessed but on the whole good man’s search for revenge on five star-faring master criminals who destroyed his life and family when he was a boy. The first is Star King. If you look it up on Wikipedia, beware of massive spoilers - sorry!
Thanks for this recommendation! I read it on the ride over, and it made staying up for 27 hours completely manageable - I could barely get to sleep at 1 the next afternoon because I didn’t want to stop until I know that everything was ok.