Planet of the Damned Harry Harrison http://feedbooks.com/book/2395 urn:isbn:0812535073 en 1962 Novels Science Fiction Hugo nominated in 1962, originally published in Analog Science Fact-Science Fiction as "Sense of Obligation." Brion has just won the Twenties, a global competition to test achievements in 20 categories of human activities -- but before he can enjoy his victory he's forced to leave his homeworld to help salvage Dis, the most hellish planet in the galaxy. Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. http://feedbooks.com/book/2395.png http://feedbooks.com/book/2395.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/2395.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/2395.mobi Blindsight Peter Watts http://feedbooks.com/book/976 urn:isbn:0765312182 en 2006 Novels Science Fiction Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and the fainter one she'll do any good if she is. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them... Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. http://feedbooks.com/book/976.png http://feedbooks.com/book/976.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/976.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/976.mobi Little Fuzzy Henry Beam Piper http://feedbooks.com/book/313 urn:isbn:0809562820 en 1962 Novels Science Fiction The chartered Zarathustra Company had it all their way. Their charter was for a Class III uninhabited planet, which Zarathustra was, and it meant they owned the planet lock stock and barrel. They exploited it, developed it and reaped the huge profits from it without interference from the Colonial Government. Then Jack Holloway, a sunstone prospector, appeared on the scene with his family of Fuzzies and the passionate conviction that they were not cute animals but little people. Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. http://feedbooks.com/book/313.png http://feedbooks.com/book/313.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/313.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/313.mobi Accelerando Charles Stross http://feedbooks.com/book/228 urn:isbn:0441014151 en 2005 Novels Science Fiction The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a highly dysfunctional family before, during, and after a technological singularity. It was originally written as a series of novelettes and novellas, all published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in the period 2001 to 2004. The first three stories follow the character of "venture altruist" Manfred Macx starting in the early 21st Century, the second three stories follow his daughter Amber, and the final three focus largely on her son Sirhan in the completely transformed world at the end of the century. According to Stross, the initial inspiration for the stories was his experience working as a programmer for a high-growth company during the dot-com boom of the 1990s. Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. http://feedbooks.com/book/228.png http://feedbooks.com/book/228.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/228.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/228.mobi Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Cory Doctorow http://feedbooks.com/book/194 urn:isbn:076530953X en 2003 Novels Science Fiction Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches.Now, though, the "ad hocs" are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war.... Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. http://feedbooks.com/book/194.png http://feedbooks.com/book/194.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/194.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/194.mobi Anthem Ayn Rand http://feedbooks.com/book/2837 urn:isbn:0452281253 en 1938 Novels Science Fiction Psychology Anthem is a dystopian fiction novella by Ayn Rand, first published in 1938. It takes place at some unspecified future date when mankind has entered another dark age as a result of the evils of irrationality and collectivism and the weaknesses of socialistic thinking and economics. Technological advancement is now carefully planned (when it is allowed to occur at all) and the concept of individuality has been eliminated (for example, the word "I" has disappeared from the language). As is common in her work, Rand draws a clear distinction between the "socialist/communal" values of equality and brotherhood and the "productive/capitalist" values of achievement and individuality. Many of the novella's core themes, such as the struggle between individualism and collectivism, are echoed in Rand's later books, such as The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. However, the style of "Anthem" is unique among Rand's work, more narrative-centered and economical, lacking the intense didactic expressions of philosophical abstraction that occur in later works. It is probably her most accessible work. Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. http://feedbooks.com/book/2837.png http://feedbooks.com/book/2837.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/2837.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/2837.mobi 2 B R O 2 B Kurt Vonnegut http://feedbooks.com/book/912 en 1962 Short Fiction Science Fiction Humor/Satire 2 B R 0 2 B is a satiric short story that imagines life (and death) in a future world where aging has been “cured” and population control is mandated and administered by the government. Please read the legal notice included in this e-book and/or check the copyright status in your country. http://feedbooks.com/book/912.png http://feedbooks.com/book/912.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/912.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/912.mobi Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll http://feedbooks.com/book/22 urn:isbn:0785824464 en 1897 Novels Young Readers Fantasy Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll. It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit-hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures. The tale is filled with allusions to Dodgson's friends (and enemies), and to the lessons that British schoolchildren were expected to memorize. The tale plays with logic in ways that have made the story of lasting popularity with adults as well as children. It is considered to be one of the most characteristic examples of the genre of literary nonsense, and its narrative course and structure has been enormously influential, mainly in the fantasy genre. http://feedbooks.com/book/22.png http://feedbooks.com/book/22.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/22.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/22.mobi The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Francis Scott Fitzgerald http://feedbooks.com/book/3431 en 1922 Short Fiction This story was inspired by a remark of Mark Twain's to the effect that it was a pity that the best part of life came at the beginning and the worst part at the end. By trying the experiment upon only one man in a perfectly normal world I have scarcely given his idea a fair trial. Several weeks after completing it, I discovered an almost identical plot in Samuel Butler's "Note-books." The story was published in "Collier's" last summer and provoked this startling letter from an anonymous admirer in Cincinnati: "Sir-- I have read the story Benjamin Button in Colliers and I wish to say that as a short story writer you would make a good lunatic I have seen many peices of cheese in my life but of all the peices of cheese I have ever seen you are the biggest peice. I hate to waste a peice of stationary on you but I will." This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+50 or in the USA (published before 1923). http://feedbooks.com/book/3431.png http://feedbooks.com/book/3431.pdf http://feedbooks.com/book/3431.epub http://feedbooks.com/book/3431.mobi