Technology

Back in the summer I wrote a post on eBooks and readers. Using the iPhone app Stanza I went online and found a free pulp science fiction eBook – The Penal Cluster by Randall Garrett. For the original article look here.

Now I was impressed with the cover, and Jeremy was not impressed that I chose a book for it’s cover! Well I have now finished the book and I can say it was a good pulp fiction read.

It had all the elements, a hero, space rockets and ray guns, a heroine in distress and even “aliens” taking over the Earth… and at the end there was an unexpected twist to the plot.

So if you want to try out a free eBook I’d recommend this one.

A wide selection of pulp science fiction is available today, because being mostly copyright expired, it has found it’s way into electronic and online libraries and collections. I am not sure that when the authors wrote these “pulp” books that they would ever had believed that copies of their work would be so widely available in the 21st Century.

These collections also include many classic science fiction works from authors you have heard of, HG Wells and Jules Verne to other not so well known authors. Try Olaf Stapledon’s “First and Last Men”, as recommended by Amy H Sturgis. Tony Smith at the StarShipSofa has podcast a number of copyright free stories from Gutenberg in the past as well as being the home of Amy’s “Look Back in Genre History”.

The new podcast Journey Into… is replaying old radio shows, covering a wide variety of genres, all of them “pulp”, as well as new recordings of both older and contemporary stories. I was listening today to a Hornblower story, that was first transmitted on the BBC in the late 1960s. It is the mix of material that Marshal Latham is promising us that has quickly made his podcast one of my favourites.