Introduction

Like many other people, I got a Kindle for Christmas.  Being an avid reader, particularly of science fiction, I immediately started digging around looking for things to read on it.  I quickly discovered that there is a wealth of free literature out there, much of it free and generally unavailable in book form.  Some has been released into the public domain by amateur or professional authors, and some is old enough that the copyrights have expired.  I'm sure that some of them are excellent reading, and some of them are awful, so I'd like to sort through some of these and share the ones that I think are worth reading.

I like reading current speculative science fiction, but I've always had a thing for the old stuff.  I find it fascinating seeing how authors extrapolated the future from what was known in their time.  The inventions or concepts they came up with, references to technologies we don't use much anymore.  One of my favorite pieces is a black-and-white science fiction film from 1902 - Le Voyage Dans De Lune - depicting a group of scientists piling into what amounts to a huge bullet and shooting themselves to the moon.  When they're done killing natives they all pile back in, except the last guy whose job it is to push the capsule over the edge, so they'll fall back to earth.  He grabs onto the back and hangs on for the ride.

Due to exposure to modern science, I don't know anyone, 108 years later, who would put up with this in modern fiction. It likely wasn't meant to be taken really seriously in the first place (note the rocket sticking the man in the moon in the eye), but nonetheless this film is from a time when nobody really knew, there certainly  could have been someone living up there.  Some people probably had figured out that there was no air between the earth and the moon, but nobody had been up there to check it out in person.  Everyone knows now that if you shot that thing out of a cannon fast enough to hit the moon, you'd be squished flat on one side of the trip or the other.  But when it was made, people watched it and wondered.

The boundaries of the unknown and the things we're willing to suspend disbelief for have been pushed a lot since then, from the radius (or interior) of the earth and oceans, to the outer planets of our solar system, to other galaxies and the end of the universe itself.  The more questions we answer, the more we create.  Current science fiction deals with light-speed travel vs. ftl, wars between galaxies, biological modification and runaway nanotechnology, the evolution of life over the millenia or our translation into pure software constructs.  Huge heady concepts, fascinating to read about, and I love the lot of it.  But there's also something about looking back and reading the speculations of those who came before, wondering if there were men on the moon, speculating about transmission of pictures through the air, wondering how we would live with these mechanical constructs called robots.

And a lot of it is freely available and waiting for me to load it on my Kindle, which was certainly someone's idea of speculative fiction, way back when.

Coming up next:  The City At World's End, by Edmond Hamilton