Just a brief note to pimp a couple of cool links I’ve found recently:
1. Rudy Rucker, a Tor author, is offering a free download of his SF novel Postsingular on his website. Relevant details and download link is here. I’ve just started reading this one, but it’s very good stuff, which is what I’d expect from Tor.
Full Disclosure: I know Tom Doherty (Junior, not Tom Doherty, Sr., who runs Tor). Tom has been kind enough to support my writing efforts through his distribution biz, Cardinal Publishers Group. I met Tom at a book signing I did in Ellettsville, Indiana in 2004. He was wandering the stalls talking to authors and when he got to mine, mentioned that he was a big science fiction fan and asked if I’d ever submitted to any of the big publishing houses. I admitted to my limited success. He asked if I’d ever thought about submitting to Tor. I gushed about how much I loved Tor books and thought that Patrick Nielsen Hayden was an editorial genius and how very much I’d like PNH to have my baby, literally or figuratively, whichever he preferred. Tom’s very cool response? “Tor Books? Yeah, that’s my dad.” I was, as you can imagine, rather gobsmacked. Tom very generously invited me to attend Cardinal’s Indiana Authors Expo at the State Fair later that summer, and even arranged that I would meet his father, who was in town on business, but was taking the afternoon to chase the grandkids about the fairgrounds. All of which was very, very cool, believe me. My wife tells me that I spent ten minutes gushing all over Mr. Doherty (Senior) about how awesome I thought he was. Fortunately, Beth was much less giddy and carried the bulk of the conversation so I (theoretically) didn’t end up looking like a complete idiot. I’ve got photo evidence of this somewhere. If I can find it, I’ll upload a picture.
2. David Wildman is experimenting with a fascinating novel concept at The Book of the Enemy. Essentially, he’s got a novel blog salted with multimedia supporting documentation spread out across the web. Again, I’m just starting to dip into this one, but it’s got a very Reznorish/Year Zero/ARG sensibility to it that looks fun, conspiratorial and vaguely dystopian. The non-novel bits need fleshed out a bit to seem less like props at this point, but it’s an interesting start on experimenting with new storytelling forms that are only possible with New Media.
3. Last, but not least, if you’re looking for free e-books on a variety of topics, check out Wowio. You can download up to three books from their library per day. The fiction section is a bit thin at the moment (especially the science fiction, which is my thing), but there are some tasty non-fiction offerings. I’m currently reading Eric Drexler’s Engines of Creation 2.0 and playing around with Bart D. Ehrman’s Lost Christianities & Lost Scriptures.
The original Engines of Creation was one of my primary sources while writing From the Hands of Hostile Gods, so I’m excited about the updates for 2.0. And I’m a sucker for anything Gnostic, as regular readers of A Vessel for Offering have realized. (And yes, there’s even more Gnostic pseudo-scholarship coming in the next novel, Agnosis. Which reminds me: as of this morning’s post, Vessel has three chapters remaining to be posted. We’ll start Agnosis probably on the following Monday.)
Filed under: Miscellany Tagged: | book of the enemy, david wildman, kvetching with tom doherty, postsingular, rudy rucker
