Futurismic's weekly catalog of free sf

The science fiction blog Futurismic is now running a regular Friday feature devoted to rounding up the best free sf online this week. As more and more people have discovered it and sent them their picks, the list has grown, and this week, it seems to have achieved some kind of watershed moment, with a list of fiction so mind-croogglingly awesome that it makes me wish I could fork another instance devoted to nothing but reading. Here's just the first few, from manybooks.net:

• Beyond the Vanishing Point by Raymond King Cummings
• The Hunters by William Douglas Morrison
• Cubs of the Wolf by Raymond F. Jones.
• The Devil's Asteroid by Manly Wade Wellman
• The K-Factor by Harry Harrison
• The Misplaced Battleship by Harry Harrison
• A World is Born by Leigh Brackett
• Space Prison by Tom Godwin
• The Day of the Boomer Dukes by Frederik Pohl
• The Worshippers by Damon Knight
• The Burning Bridge by Poul Anderson
• Spell of Catastrophe by Mayer Alan Brenner
• Warning from the Stars by Ron Cocking
• -And Devious the Line of Duty by Tom Godwin
• Jubilation, U.S.A. by G.L. Vandenburg

Link

[#1 posted by Lee , September 15, 2007 5:35 AM]

A step in the right direction ... thanks!

[#2 posted by Paul Raven , September 15, 2007 11:45 AM]

Thanks for the plug, Cory -- but I should reiterate here that I rely heavily on the regular posts at SFSignal for much of the links I put in our Friday Fiction posts.

And as an extra, I'd like to mention we'll be back to regularly posting fresh sf short stories as soon as the time-budgets of the volunteer Futurismic team allow us to get a new theme for the website sorted! w00t!

Paul Raven - Non-fiction editor for Futurismic

[#3 posted by bcrowell , September 15, 2007 3:16 PM]

ManyBooks looks like a cool site. I run site with a similar, but not identical mission, theassayer.org. Project Gutenberg also does something similar. As far as I can tell, here's how the three are different:

• project gutenberg - Only does old public-domain books. Hosts the books themselves. They only do books, not shorter works.
• theassayer.org - I focus on modern books whose authors have intentionally made them available on the web for free. I don't host the books myself. I only do books, not shorter works. Users can post reviews, and can add books to the catalog on their own.
• manybooks - They seem to do both old public-domain works and modern ones, and their catalog seems to include not just books but shorter works as well. They don't host the books themselves.

[#4 posted by vls , September 15, 2007 4:28 PM]

Project Gutenberg does shorter works also and much of the recent SF has been fairly modern stories that were not renewed for copyright.

As a matter of fact, all but a couple of the stories listed above were produced for Gutenberg by Distributed Proofreaders.

[#5 posted by bcrowell , September 15, 2007 5:09 PM]

Re #4, thanks for the information. I've also noticed after poking around some more that in quite a few cases, manybooks does host the text as well, and that they also accept reviews.