Project Gutenberg's science fiction bookshelf | Hacker News Reader

Project Gutenberg's science fiction bookshelf

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114 pointsfogus39 comments

Recommendation, EE Smith's Triplanetary. This is the first book the Lensman series, unfortunately I do not see the rest of the series available through this means.

While a product of his time these stories are incredible. If you like space battles he had some very original ideas, some of which even many modern science fiction writers haven't touched.

A note on various of the Gutenberg SF entries: the versions on Project Gutenberg may be the magazine serial versions. They may differ substantially from the book versions. (Shorter, to fit magazine space limitations.)

Copyright law was different back then, and magazine versions had different copyrights than book versions. In many cases, magazine copyrights were not renewed, but book copyrights were, so you'll see magazine serial versions on PG but the books won't be available.

This is particularly true for E. E. Smith's Lensman and Skylark of Space series: the book publication versions aren't on PG. (I have no idea who currently holds the rights to the Lensman series.)

It is possible to find them on the darknet, but quality will vary.

Ah, cool, they've got some of E.E. Smith's stuff and Campbell's stuff. Capek's R.U.R. as well. A bunch of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

I also spy some cool short works of Phillip K. Dick (Second Variety), some Cory Doctorow, some Harry Harrison. Very nifty!

Beware of the Jules Verne translations, they might be way worse than the recent ones.

I fail to see why older translations should be any worse. I mean this isn't great poetry, just very entertaining literature :)

Victorian-era translations of Jules Verne are very mixed.

Some translators just didn't bother to get the science right (this is evident in "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth.") They would mis-translate units of measurement (using feet instead of meters) and just simply eliminate the "boring geology" that they didn't understand.

Verne was also a Frenchman and the English translators were mostly British. So any anti-British or liberal tendencies were removed so as not to offend Victorian sensibilities. This sometimes included racist stereotypes that Verne never intended.

Finally, Verne was (and is) not seen as a serious author by English readers (eg: your own comment dismisses Verne as merely "entertaining literature.") His works were frequently abridged and marketed as juvenile fiction. After a while, nobody bothered to translate his works because, the copyrights of the original translations were in the public domain, and they were "good enough."

This is slowly being corrected by some fine new translations (the 20,000 Leagues translation mentioned elsewhere is important in that regard.)

This was actually a very big problem with Russian Literature. Constance Garnett was a prolific translator of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekov. Apparently her speed of translating the massive works made her popular with publishers of the day.

Today her works are still being published, despite their clear inferiority to newer translations that are not yet in the public domain.

There really is a quality difference. Several of Jules Verne's works were serialized in news papers at the time and then a slap-dash translation was made very quickly so they could publish them in other countries. The translations were often so bad that Verne himself commented on them. In some cases the translations omitted and abridged parts of the works as well.

It very much does a disservice to Verne's reputation to read such poor quality translations. Indeed, perhaps the reason why you do not consider Verne's work to be "great poetry" is because you've never been exposed to any good translations.

Here is a volume that might be worth acquiring, for example: http://www.amazon.com/Amazing-Journeys-Journey-Circling-Leag...

I only really began to appreciate what work it takes to make a definitive translation when I read about all the effort that Walter James Miller and Frederick Paul Walter put in to Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea -- it's no mean feat.

You can find an example in an old comment of mine http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4075879

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/sep/11/julesv...

Oh boy, but are we missing the 'Golden Man' from Phillip K. Dick ? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Golden_Man

Some recommendations for people:

Omnilingual by H. Beam Piper, known for his alternative time line stories.

Beyond Lies the Wub, by Philip K Dick, a collection of his early short stories.

A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The beginning of his Mars series about its civilization's decline.

While I'm quite certain that this has nothing to do with anything, Beyond Lies the Wub sounds like an awesome album name for a dubstep or EDM anthology.

You're not alone. The Verge published a feature titled "Beyond lies the wub: a history of dubstep"

http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/28/3262089/history-of-dubstep...

Is there a way to know what other Hacker News readers recommend?

I use Goodreads, but while I've found it pretty good as a source of new books to read, the ratings system ends up with everything coming within a few points of 4 (4.1, 3.9, 4.2).

I'm guilty of tagging books I read with either 4 or 5 usually, unless it's pretty bad.

Anyway, what I wanted to ask was if there was a way to know what a subgroup of readers thinks of a book.

We could make a HackerNews group on goodreads.

Edit: created: http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/94469-hackernews

Joined :)

Well, the first book recommended is The Pragmatic Programmer, we can all get behind that one :)

If you want recommendations based on what you've read, I've found that goodreads recommendations (http://www.goodreads.com/recommendations) are pretty good once you've added a bunch of books you enjoy to shelves based on genre (they can be all over the place if you only look at your general read/to read/favorites). I've read a couple books that I had never heard of this way and I have yet to be disappointed.

I am also pretty guilty of rating books highly, but I also think it's a bit of a thing where I'm not likely to read a book I won't enjoy. On the bright side, it means if a book has an exceptionally low overall rating, I know to avoid it because it doesn't appeal to anybody.

There has been book recommendation threads around here at times, search probably would find them. The recommendations/reviews/comments probably are still mostly valid.

True, but they're mostly focused on Entrepreneurship, Management, etc :) . That's all good of course, but I was wondering about science fiction, fantasy and stuff.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32759/32759-h/32759-h.htm

"This is Good." - Conan

There is a really good selection of REH on the Australian version of PG:

http://gutenberg.net.au/plusfifty-a-m.html#letterH

I love Project Gutenberg.

For those of you who enjoy listening to audio books, there's a project called Librivox -- http://librivox.org -- that provides volunteer-read audio versions of public-domain books. (The quality of the volunteers is mixed, and sometimes every chapter is read by a different person, which can be a little disorienting, but hey, it's free!)

Looked into that recently - what is interesting is that they have a rule against allowing ratings on the productions, because - due to the free effort aspect - they worry that it will make it discouraging for other producers to invest their free time in recording new productions.

I can't help thinking this is a less-than-ideal solution. What are some ways to make it easier for a listener to find a good production, while simultaneously protecting producers from discouragement?

I haven't heard of Librivox before, and I'm too lazy to actually check the site, but my thoughts:

Upvote-only, no displayed view/play count. This protects the producers by letting them assume neutral reasons for low approval ratings–maybe everyone who does listen to their reading is just too lazy to upvote–while providing a mechanism to say, "This one was good."

I could also see making the upvotes invisible and using some magical algorithm to convert raw numbers into a range from "no one has given an opinion" to "lots of people liked this".

What i really want to see is a great Tablet front end for Gutenberg. I haven't found one yet and haven't gotten around to making one either :-(

FBReader has an decent interface for searching, but you need to know what you are looking for. There's not a good way to browse via the app.

I'll second FBReader; works great on my N900. Though you do have to have your library organized outside of it, it doesn't browse well.

They have an xml document with their entire catalog, but I have given up trying to parse it.

That thing is massive.

I've downloaded a few Gutenberg books using iBooks. They seem to have a fair few, but I don't know how he catalogue compares to Kindle.

How about the kindle native app for iPad from amzn? It seems to have a good amount of gutenberg stuff and is quite good.

pleasantly surprised with the selection. a couple kurt vonneguts, a bunch of philip k dicks, lots of jules verne, as well as h. g. wells.

awesome!

any recommendations where to start? :)

I'm personally starting from the beginning. :-) http://blog.fogus.me/2012/09/21/the-amazing-colossal-science...

Interesting list. I've read most books in it. There's a bit too much listening to literary critics in there - e.g. Mieville is skilled writing, but it is not SF - not really.

Add in Neal Asher for the 2000s. Breakneck action space opera, wily AIs, disgusting wildlife, rarely a dull moment, Banks on speed.

Also, almost any Vance is bound to be enjoyable, after you acquire the taste (the P.G.Wodehouse of SF, not that it is comic, more of a sardonic tone).

And yeah, Lem, The Cyberiad, the non-existing-book reviews, whatever. Also, Pierre Boulle, amazingly unknown in spite of the movies (Les Jeux de l'esprit should be mandatory reading in some sophomoric circles.)

Brilliant list, fogus.

I would highly recommend adding Richard K. Morgan's work to the 2000s. Very very well written stuff.

Are those available on Project Gutemberg? I saw some classic authors (A.E. Van Vogt, etc) which should be.

Nope. Remember that Project Gutenberg hosts books which have lapsed into the public domain. That's not true for a lot of the stuff mentioned. (A decent collection of Van Vogt is available through Baen Book's Webscriptions program, though it lacks classics like Slan.)

You will find the occasional oddity: a couple of Samuel R. Delany's early Ace Double publications just popped up, and Chip is still very much alive. Chip has been in the business a long time - if they've lapsed into the public domain, it's because he allowed them to.

(It is weird when you see stuff appearing on PG by people you know/knew - Delany among the living, and Terry Carr and Laurence M. Janifer among the deceased.)

H.Beam Piper, amazing writer.

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