Update: The second book of the Rifter triology is also available for download.
Sci-Fi author Peter Watts has released
Starfish, the first book in his Rifter series, under a Creative Commons license. Since the author
doesn't mind the redistribution and transformation of his work, I attached
HTML, iSilo and Plucker versions (updated!) of the book to this post for your convenience. From Publishers Weekly:
Set in the early 21st century, Watts's debut describes a future when the search for energy leads to the tapping of geothermal sources deep in the ocean, as in the Pacific's Juan de Fuca Rift, near Canada's Northwest coast. The maintenance workers of the dangerous underwater power plants are selected for their psychotic tendencies, which enable them to forget their previous lives on dry land, and are then surgically altered to survive the intense pressure of the sea's abyssal depths. These changes, which render the workers amphibious, also leave them less than well equipped to face the threat of powerful, archaic bacterialike creatures that proliferate at the ocean bottom and use human hosts to carry them upward to dry land, where their superior DNA could render our species obsolete...The novel's pacing is excellent, making this, overall, a good bet for beach reading.
[via
SFSignal]