You Know What Part » Stories

Arthur C Clarke Dead at 90

ryan — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 23:29:33 +0000

I wish I had a long remembrance of Mr. Clarke, but I don’t. I’ve read much of his short stories, a couple novels, but, aside from 2001 and a collection of shorts (which included The Sentinel, the pre-cursor to 2001), I always found the person of Mr. Clarke more interesting than his writing. His

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy his writing. In fact the opposite was often true. But his stories, while solid sci-fi, never reached me like the work of other writers (such as Isaac Asimov or Robert Forward).

He did make a wonderful spokesman for the hard core of science fiction and inspired many writers and scientists and will be conspicuously absent from the community. Best wishes and condolences to his family and friends.

Orson Scott Card's webzine

ryan — Tue, 18 Oct 2005 13:25:09 +0000

Orson Scott Card’s webzine, Intergalatic Medicine Show, is up. Each issue costs $2.50 and Card has on the front page that he’ll publish a new story in Ender’s world every month (what’s that little tickle in the back of my mind?).

Ender’s Game is one of the best sf stories around and Card is quite a character.

[via Sci-Fi Storm]

IGMS

What I'm Currently Reading

ryan — Mon, 09 Feb 2004 17:02:55 +0000

Kuro5shin hosts a story called The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect, a trippy (sometimes stomach turning) theory about the future. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever read, but the vision of this future-world is fascinating. It’s written by Roger Williams.

Link

Oldest Tech Manual!

ryan — Wed, 28 Jan 2004 19:01:05 +0000

Stolen from Slashdot:

“How old is the oldest known technical manual? About 613 years, it seems. Written in 1391 by Geoffrey Chauncer for his ten year old son Lewis (Lowys), the manual explains in great detail but very rough spelling and grammar, the intricate workings of the Astrolabe–the predecessor to the sextant. Read Chauncer’s ‘A Treatise on the Astrolabe here.”

Stories by Cory Doctorow

ryan — Wed, 14 Jan 2004 18:01:12 +0000

Just a gratuitous link since I’ve read all this stuff already, but Cory Doctorow blew me away when I first read Ownz0red on Salon. See the rest of this post for links to many of his stories.

Cory operates on the Creative Commons license (thanks to a generous publisher) and his work is freely downloadable, distributable, reproducable, and performable, as long as you give him credit, don’t sell it, and don’t make derivitive works (and he wouldn’t mind if you bought a book, I’m sure).

I already mentioned Ownz0red, my favorite story, which also earned Cory the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. But he has a lot of others available. You can download 6 stories here.

You can also get Down and Out at the Magic Kingdom for free as well (and I highly recommend this story, too).

Other things (commentray aside):
Truncat (requires Salon premium or sitting through the ads)
Liberation Spectrum

Cory is also an editor for Boing Boing, a great blog about pop culture.