A Word From Me

If you're interested in going to space yourself as well as reading about it, take a look at my list of links to organisations that are working on cheaper access to space, or my general space links page.

Brief rant: it's my firm belief that, if most of the things we so love to read about are to have any chance of coming to pass, the essential first step is to make space flight routine, reliable, and above all, affordable, just as air flight is now. Until this comes to pass, any attempts to build stations, colonies, or other desirable things in space will amount to no more than counting our chickens before they are hatched: since the benefits are disputable and the costs are colossal, space "programs" will not be able to attract much private-sector money, and so will be utterly at the mercy of politicians; and we've seen how far they can get us!

Links

Some of these links may be out of date. I pruned a few in October 1997 and some more in August 1998.

Better ScF link collections than mine

The Linköping SF&F Archive at Lysator
The Science Fiction Resource Guide, which even has a link back to my site, under "Personal fannish home pages".
the Internet Speculative Fiction DB with a wealth of bibliographic data
Stefan's SF link collection
NESFA the New England SF Association the New England Science Fiction Association
Ahasuerus the Wandering Jew once had a home page with FAQs, biblios, and other SF links. As of November 1997, most of it has moved to various places in the ISFDB. His copy of the FAQ for rec.arts.sf.written will move to http://www.geocities.com/Athens/4824/sf-written.htm. Sadly, this is a text file that has been renamed to ".htm" without any reformatting being done; even more sadly, it's at GeoCities, where you will be pestered with pop-up ads (unless you use a browser that doesn't support them -- and Opera seems not to).
Jim Gifford's Heinlein site
SFF Net has quite a lot of stuff.
Magic Dragon with lots and lots of links.
Paul Urayama has a well-organised list of links which happens to include one to my SF site.

Book recommendations, reviews, etc.

Vote on your [least] favourite books
The Linköping SF&F Archive has many reviews
I'm thinking of putting some of my own opinions on The Book Engine
Urban Fredriksson's collected reviews
Dani Zweig's Belated Reviews of various authors
r.a.sf.w fantasy booklist by Finn, whoever he is (has neat unicorn)
Urban Fredriksson's list of SF books worth reading, which I mostly endorse
Alexandria Digital Literature is a sort of automated recommendation service; it collects your ratings of as many books as you care to click in (the interface is quite well thought out and quick) and then offers to recommend books you haven't yet told it about. It's not infallible (and doesn't claim to be), but not too bad considering that it's only a program.
Christina Schulman, for whose taste I have some respect, has written a score or so of reviews of books she's read.
Amy Sheldon has put up a long list of fantasy authors (it's over 150k bytes) with brief comments about their books.
Delphi reviews etc.

technology and suchlike

for those who want space travel to become as commonplace as it is in many ScF books, I recommend the Space Access Society (see also my space pressure groups page).
extract from The Silicon Jungle by Rothman & Clarke (so to speak)
Relativity FAQ from rec.arts.startrek.tech (written by someone with a brain, though!)
Dyson Sphere FAQ by Anders Sandberg
some ideas about changing the human genome, also by Anders Sandberg. Well worth reading.
A brief and lucid explanation of the advantages of space over planets as a place to live, by Mike Combs.

Authors

There are many web sites dedicated to (and, in a few instances, actually run by) individual authors. Most are not hard to find. A couple to which I choose to draw your attention are:

Cordwainer Smith (he's dead, sad to say, so his daughter runs the site)
C.S. Friedman

other

Christian "naddy" Weisgerber
The FAQ for rec.arts.sf.written is probably here or nearby.
Essays by David Brin on privacy vs freedom in the future and "The New Meme"
John Redford introduced me to some of my favourite ScF, and has some interesting articles on his site. They're perhaps not directly related to ScF, but after all, the subject matter of ScF is the whole world.
If you're looking for ScF stories posted on the Web, free to read but better than most free stuff (some of it can really turn your stomach), Alan Dikkers has found some that are quite fun and collected their addresses here. Oh, and he links back to my site. Nice guy.

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