Sci-fi Book Club

The folks behind the Tor.com website have been putting out high quality science fiction bits for free for over a year now if memory serves.  I get the Tor emails in my in-box, and they either tell me to go read something on their website, or provide a link so that I can download it.  I always do so.

Tor's experiment is a bold one, in an industry where several high profile publications still refuse to accept submissions by email.  And where the internet is seen by certain members of the community as nothing but a collection of "pixel stained technopeasants."  I haven't heard any actual data, but the fact that Tor continues to publish free science fiction on their website certainly indicates that it's working for them.


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When history looks back on this decade (which I guess we have agreed to call "the oughts") I think what will be remembered most vividly is the break-out stars of the genre who came to literary fame through alternate routes.  Routes which - not to put too fine a point on it - heavily involved the internet.

John Scalzi, Old Man's War

John Scalzi had a wildly successful blog first, and his fiction career only came later.  Scalzi was a professional author long before penning Old Man's War and several other hits of the decade.  As one of the earliest wave of professional bloggers, he successfully built up an audience for his blog, which also happens to be where he archived copies of his then-shareware (now-freeware) book, Agent to the Stars.


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NeuromancerWilliam Gibson’s Neuromancer is clearly one of the most influential sci-fi novels of the 20th century. It is testament to his creativity and imagination that this visionary book now sounds cliché and rife with familiar terms because it has served as the inspiration for countless other works from literature, film and even videogames.

This is a technological fantasy set in a world of virtual reality known as The Matrix. People jack in to this alternate reality and genetic enhancement is the norm thanks to the shady science of nerve splicing and microbionics. The mega corporations battle for control and employ all kinds of unsavoury characters who engage in stealth, surveillance and corporate sabotage.

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In my mind, I have been reading this book for about two years now.  In reality, I read half of it two years ago, stuck in a bookmark, and left it on the end table.  For a while it traveled around in the back seat of my car, and I kept meaning to take it into the coffee table with me.  Then I brought it into the house, because we had a big storm coming, and I would want something to read if we lost power.  Once, I took it on a business trip, because I thought I would finish reading it on the plane.

I guess I have to admit to myself that I am never going to finish this book.  Which is a very different thing from bailing on a book halfway through - which, by the way, I do without a qualm all the time.  Life's too short to slog through a book that isn't interesting me.


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