SF ebooks, redux

Yet another reason why giving away Free Electronic Books is a really fine idea - the latest one from Tor, Karl Schroeder's Sun of Suns, arrived last Friday and I finished it in a few hours. It's really rather good - but if it hadn't come through that push channel, I'd never have known about its existence. After that, though, I'll be looking for the rest of the series (and yes, spending actual money on them) and downloading a copy of his first novel, Ventus.

Ventus is a novel of information apocalypse set in the far future. For a thousand years the sovereign Winds have maintained the delicate ecological balance of the terraformed planet Ventus. Now an alien force threatens to wrest control of the terraforming system away from the Winds...

Reflections on the life of Arthur C. Clarke

I was brought up on his work, alongside Asimov and Harrison, and I wouldn't have missed out the attitude he gave us, We can do anything - we can be anything - the future is not to be feared, for all my hopes of resurrection and eternal life amid the stars.

I want to highlight one aspect of his life and work - we all know that he was one of the very first to envisage and promulgate geostationary communications satellites. His work was cited as prior art against a patent application, in fact - because of him, nobody owns the idea. Nobody controls the fleet of steel stars that relay our words across oceans.

Tor.com

As has been seen in various fine establishments around the Internet, Tor Books are launching a new website devoted to Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fandom, and Thynges of Interest to Science Fiction Fans. Which, of course, consists of Nearly Everything.

There will be a very decent helping of free non-DRM'd content, and in fact they're emailing out links to free SF&F ebooks every week already. So for your convenience and entertainment, reviews.

• Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson. Sanderson is the designated successor who'll be finishing Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series - when I first read about that, I thought 'who?', but he's a pretty readable writer. It's a shame, really, that I can't say more than that to his credit. He writes Very Thick Fantasy books, safe and fluffy, that won't challenge readers or present potentially unwelcome new ideas - the characters are all made of pure, noble, upstanding cardboard, and the themes are in the fine spot-the-inspiration tradition of Big Fantasy. The principal point of both Mistborn and Elantris seemed to be for both the main character and the reader to work out how the magic system worked. Nevertheless, despite all that, and despite his almost complete lack of technical ability as a writer, he still managed to keep me interested and more than happy to read to the end and pick up the next one. The closest similar writer, and I didn't think I'd ever say this about a fantasy author, is Jilly Cooper. Sanderson : Eddings :: Eddings : Tolkien.
  
• Old Man's War, by John Scalzi. Modern classic SF, military but not militaristic, extremely good. It's very much written in an SF sensibility, so I don't know whether it'd make a good starting point for people without the SF reading protocol hardwired into their brains.
  
• Spin, by Robert Charles Wilson. Good solid SF - reminds me a bit of Alistair Reynolds' Century Rain and a bit of John Barnes. Some interesting messing with time, but mostly it's about people.
  
• The Outstretched Shadow, by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory. Very readable fluff fantasy with elves in it, book 1 of a trilogy.
  

Next week's is Farthing by Jo Walton, which I'm very much looking forward to.

Anyway, yes, obligatory visual arts content - Tor are also offering desktop wallpaper versions of SF&F covers. My current background is John Jude Palencar's cover for Charles de Lint's Someplace to be Flying, trimmed to present the girl and the crows without the text. (No link to the Tor version, since it's temporary - two new ones each week.)