Jeffrey A. Carver always posts his latest science fiction novels on his website to download for free, although they are real books and will be published in the print medium too, and that’s brought him to my attention. I’m always searching for free sci-fi eBooks you see.
It turns out that this author also offers an online science fiction writing course at http://www.writesf.com/ and is the creative talent behind the novelization of the Battlestar Galactica Sc-Fi TV series.
I just finished reading Sunborn, after having it lurking in the inards of my laptop for a long time, downloaded but forgotten and forlorn as I worked on creative stuff for my sci-fi RPG blog. Creative stuff like resources pages of spaceships, planets, monsters, droids and starmaps – all with one eye on their use in sci-fi role playing games – had been getting in the way of me reading science fiction for fun. But then I realized that science fiction books are some of the most useful resources for science fiction role-playing games such as Traveller, and I added this sci-fi bookworm slot to the blog, along with the nifty bookworm logo art.
And if science fiction books are a good resource for role-playing games then free sci-fi eBooks are even better (because they don’t cost anything, and because you don’t have to drag yourself down to the local Borders or Barnes and Noble to find them). So I remembered Sunborn in its resting place within my laptop, imported it into Mobipocket, transferred it to my Smartphone and started to read – mostly on the tram to work, and in my lunch breaks.
After reading for a chapter or two it dawned on me that it was the third installment in a trilogy. But luckily for me it stands alone very well; it even drops hints about the previous installments in this sci-fi opus without spoiling them. In fact I think I’ll probably be reading the second installment of the trilogy next.
I was struck from the very beginning with the role-playing game ambience of this story; the number of characters for instance is very reminiscent of a group of player characters. There are a handful of them to get to grips with right form the get go in chapter one who adventure together like a party of science fiction role-playing game player characters working their way through a game scenario. The linear plot and the fact that the characters are forced, like it or not, to undertake their perilous mission only add to this feeling. Each character is interesting and they share a bunch of experiences, from the earlier installments of this trilogy of internet science fiction eBooks.
With so many characters from all over the galaxy there is a lot of communication between different life forms, which is glossed over a little bit, but even at this level of detail there are a lot of pages with just talk, and I could have survived with less of it.
There are a lot of very imaginative ideas on the other hand; stuff that grabs the attention of the game master and is just crying out to be included in a game setting. There is for example the idea that stars are intelligent, which is intriguing, and the story is populated with even more imaginative and strange creatures than that. There seems to be the potential for emergent intelligence in any complex system, and this rings true for me.
I also very much liked the sense of history this work of eBook fiction has. It is normal for characters to discover the ruins of eons dead civilizations in science fiction, but this free sci-fi eBook has the remnants of almost extinct ancient civilizations speculating about beings so old that they are hardly more than a myth to them. I love stuff like that. There is a great abundance of ideas about where research and discovery can take us, and although there are challenges an threats, this vision of a possible sci-fi future is very benign.
The element that really caught my attention for use in role-playing games though was the spaceships. The alien spaceship in the story is a very advanced structure which has a hull generated exclusively by force fields; and the poor human passenger has to be reassured that the generators foe these fields are very reliable, and there are backups. This force field structure means that the layout of the ship, although it contains physical structure too, can be changed relatively rapidly. The idea suddenly dawned on me that I needn’t spend hours creating deckplans for high tech level spaceship RPG designs (I complain about how long deckplans take to produce in this post). All I need to do is note somewhere in the game stats that the spaceship is almost infinitely reconfigurable – a contemptible, lazy and unworthy shortcut – but very tempting none the less.
Along with this free sci-fi eBook, I have also read and reviewed a whole load of other science fiction that is freely available for download around the internet.
Including: Ventus, a great free sci-fi eBook which starts out as a middle ages set bit of fantasy, sword and sorcery and turns into a really interesting exploration of nanotech.
and Star Dragon, a truly inventive chunk of sci-fi that brings the effects of interstellar distances home with some force, essential reading for any Traveller game master.
I also found this cool sci-fi fiction magazine. It has some high quality stuff too, and I’ll keep searching.
