What is the best free (public domain) sci-fi book you have read?

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Todd Young

Flatland by E. A. Abbott is my personal preference. ...

+1 on Flatland. It should be required reading in any math or physics degree program.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by ekster

Here it is.
http://www.archive.org/details/Gladiator_261

Originally Posted by dwig

Manybooks also has it: http://www.manybooks.net/titles/wyli...gladiator.html

i downloaded them both, and the one from manybooks is the better of the two (but they're close). i did a little work on the manybooks one and then converted it to mobi for my kindle. i'm really enjoying it so far. i'm halfway through it now

[kacir]

Not exactly Public Domain, or even Creative Commons, but Free To Download and Read and even to pass are the books from The Fifth Imperium. By Baen.
Also have a look at their Free Library.

One of the most recent great free books SciFi I have read is Turing Evolved, written by our fellow Mobilereader David Kitson
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=113810

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by bill_mchale

And you think he would have let the copyright on those stories lapse if he had been alive? ... And please don't treat people like slow witted children just because you don't understand the full thread of their thoughts.

Yes, I do. It's almost all stuff that was originally published in magazines, and most of that didn't get its copyright renewed, because the idea of scanning magazines obviously didn't exist at the time. Eg, the book you recommended, "Space Viking", was originally serialised in Analog magazine, and it's that magazine version that's in the US public domain, not its subsequent novelisation. As I say, nothing to do with his death, and that's not treating anyone like "slow-witted children", it's simply stating a fact. PG has hundred - probably thousands, by now - of magazine SF stories which are written by authors who didn't die soon after writing them. Their copyrights could have been renewed, but weren't. It simply didn't occur to anyone at the time that there was a commercial market for this stuff.

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It simply didn't occur to anyone at the time that there was a commercial market for this stuff.

Is there, or probably better phrased, would there be a commercial market for these stories?

Many of the stories where copyright has been extended, and thus are not in the public domain are not in print -- and have never been reprinted since they appeared in the original magazines.

[Kevin8or]

Originally Posted by Soldim

Many of the stories where copyright has been extended, and thus are not in the public domain are not in print -- and have never been reprinted since they appeared in the original magazines.

Okay, so some people extended their copyright while others didn't. We've strayed from the interesting question: which out-of-copyright sci-fi books do you like and recommend?

[Soldim]

Originally Posted by Kevin8or

Okay, so some people extended their copyright while others didn't. We've strayed from the interesting question: which out-of-copyright sci-fi books do you like and recommend?

Isn't the off topic stuff generally the most fun?

I'll go with an H. Beam Piper title as well Little Fuzzy

[WillAdams]

Do _not_ purchase Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ as an e-book until the errors in it are corrected (unless you're purchasing from a company w/ a reasonable return policy) --- I got it from the Sony bookstore and it was so rife w/ errors that parts of it were un-intelligible, forcing me to type up passages and search for matching pages on Google Books so as to be able to read it.

William

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Do _not_ purchase Heinlein's _Space Cadet_ as an e-book until the errors in it are corrected (unless you're purchasing from a company w/ a reasonable return policy) --- I got it from the Sony bookstore and it was so rife w/ errors that parts of it were un-intelligible, forcing me to type up passages and search for matching pages on Google Books so as to be able to read it.

William

i bought the kindle version from amazon back in the summer of 2009 and [re]read it immediately. i didn't notice any problems other than it was a topaz file

[WillAdams]

Glad to hear the Kindle version is better.

Typos in the Tor version of _Space Cadet_ from the Sony bookstore:

inside front cover --- pricing from hard cover ($23.95, ($31.95 CAN))
``to danger-filled advenTures''
(t should not be capitalized)
``the Space Academy Young men such as Matt and Tex,''
(missing period in-between Academy and Young)

Page listing other titles:
``Requiem Space Cadet''
(missing new paragraph between Requiem and Space)

Copyright page:
``This book is printed on acid-free paper''
(yeah, right)

Contents:
6 "Reading, and 'Riting and 'Rithmetic---"
(apostrophe missing before Reading, should be curly, not stick --- this happens throughout the book)
(I think something is wrong w/ the ship name Aes Triplex)

pg. 11-12
``air stood Hay-worth Hall.''
(discretionary hyphen wrongly instantiated has hyphen)

pg. 12
``gave half to Jar?man''
(discretionary hyphen converted to question mark)

pg. 17-18
``exercise it, in quired''
(extraneous space in inquired)

pg. 22-23
``score showing in it---"yjT''
(score should be a number --- there are a number of instances of the old-style figures being mangled as letters)

&c.

William

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

(I think something is wrong w/ the ship name Aes Triplex)

No, it's fine. "Aes Triplex" means "indestructible bronze" (literally "triple bronze"); it's a reference to a sentence in one of Horace's "Odes":

illi robur et aes triplex
circa pectus erat, qui fragilem truci
conmisit pelago ratem
primus...

Which may be loosely translated as:

Oak and indestructible bronze surrounded the heart of he who first entrusted his frail craft to the wild sea.

This would probably have been an instantly recognisable reference to Heinlein's readers in the 1950s when - in the UK at least - Horace was a staple of every schoolboy's diet.

[alansplace]

Originally Posted by WillAdams

Glad to hear the Kindle version is better.

Typos in the Tor version of _Space Cadet_ from the Sony bookstore:

Spoiler:

inside front cover --- pricing from hard cover ($23.95, ($31.95 CAN))
``to danger-filled advenTures''
(t should not be capitalized)
``the Space Academy Young men such as Matt and Tex,''
(missing period in-between Academy and Young)

Page listing other titles:
``Requiem Space Cadet''
(missing new paragraph between Requiem and Space)

Copyright page:
``This book is printed on acid-free paper''
(yeah, right)

Contents:
6 "Reading, and 'Riting and 'Rithmetic---"
(apostrophe missing before Reading, should be curly, not stick --- this happens throughout the book)
(I think something is wrong w/ the ship name Aes Triplex)

pg. 11-12
``air stood Hay-worth Hall.''
(discretionary hyphen wrongly instantiated has hyphen)

pg. 12
``gave half to Jar?man''
(discretionary hyphen converted to question mark)

pg. 17-18
``exercise it, in quired''
(extraneous space in inquired)

pg. 22-23
``score showing in it---"yjT''
(score should be a number --- there are a number of instances of the old-style figures being mangled as letters)

&c.

William

yikes, that's awful, perhaps you could buy the kindle one and using calibre and apprentice alf, get it converted to your format of choice

p.s. in the quote i hid your typo list in a spoiler so they wouldn't take so much screen space

[Rizla]

The Nightland by William Hope Hodgson.

Here's a quote from H.P.Lovecraft on the subject

The Night Land (1912) is a long-extended tale of the earth's infinitely remote future-billions of billions of years ahead, after the death of the sun. It is told in a rather clumsy fashion, as the dreams of a man in the seventeenth century, whose mind merges with its own future incarnation; and is seriously marred by painful verboseness, repetitiousness, artificial and nauseously sticky romantic sentimentality...

Allowing for all its faults, it is yet one of the most potent pieces of macabre imagination ever written. The picture of a night-black, dead planet, with the remains of the human race concentrated in a stupendously vast metal pyramid and besieged by monstrous, hybrid, and altogether unknown forces of the darkness, is something that no reader can ever forget...

Personally I didn't find the odd style a problem.

By the same author: Carnaki the Ghost Hunter is collection of highly entertaining ghostly Sherlock Holmes inspired stories; The House on Borderland is very good, visionary, and utterly weird...

[VicLavigne]

The golden age of SF has not quite made it into PD, with the exception of a few books and stories. Harry Harrison has a few books that can be found, Clifford Simak also has a few stories. The most famous author that has something for free is probably Isaac Asimov, whose story "Youth" is available as a free download (I've got it but havent read it yet).

I'd really like to see Arthur Clarke and Heinlein released to PD, but under current laws its not gonna happen. At least Heinlein has some books released by the publisher as ebooks, Arthur C. Clarke has nothing released as such.

Vic

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by VicLavigne

At least Heinlein has some books released by the publisher as ebooks, Arthur C. Clarke has nothing released as such.

That's not so. In the UK, at least, pretty much all his books are available as eBooks, published by Gollancz.