Find me free fiction!

September 28, 2015 2:57 PM

I really enjoy posts that solve bookmysteries with links to free, old science fiction. Where's the great and secret library of it?

I'm fond of older science fiction and I often see links to free collections - short stories, old novels - but I'm looking for a repository or eight of such. Criteria:

- Must Be Free
- Science fiction or, at a pinch, fantasy
- Preferably post-1920 until about 1970 (no modern stuff please)
- Would like large anthologies that I can lose myself in for hours
- Would be nice if I could browse it on an iPhone!
- Short stories are nice because the themes change frequently
- I'm also a fan of engineering/spycraft/mystery stories - so along those lines, as much of that hard SF tended to be, would be nice

So what's the secret motherlode of space opera? P.S. I know about Project Gutenberg. :)

posted by Nyx to Writing & Language (8 answers total)

I have found tons of cheeseball fiction free through the Amazon kindle store, which I then read using the free kindle app on my iPhone.

I particularly enjoyed the endearingly ridiculous John Carter series by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
posted by chatongriffes at 3:18 PM on September 28, 2015

Feedbooks.com has a lot of free books, although of course a lot of them are self-published trash, and lots more are modern. However, their "Public Domain" section has a lot of 20th-century books that aren't on Gutenberg, including plenty that fit your categories. E.g. here, here. You can get them in epub format which will go into iBooks.

I believe there are some differences in public domain status between countries, so as the website says, be aware that it might not be legal to download these where you are.
posted by vogon_poet at 3:30 PM on September 28, 2015

I don't think this meets your pub dates requirement, but otherwise there is loads of free SF, including anthologies, at Baen eBooks
posted by slipthought at 3:32 PM on September 28, 2015 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Since you don't specify "legal" as a requirement, if you're willing to struggle through an interface in Russian then litmir.co will have a fair amount of pre-1970 stuff. You might have to fish around to find it but there's usually a download link for the English versions of works - you don't have to read them online. Also, if you know what you're looking for you may be able to bypass fiddling through the Russian by appending "site:litmir.co" to a Google search. (I normally browse most of the web with javascript, css/webfonts, images, and everything else turned off so I don't know if that's one of the sites which tries to infect you with malware.)

If you find copies of the Baen Free Library disks, licensed freely by the Baen Books publishing company and some of its authors, (some titles available individually on the web site) most of the contents are late twencen / early 21st but there are at least some pre-1970 works by Keith Laumer included and maybe more, I haven't gone through them all.

Craig Kee Strete is a Native American science fiction author whose works now appear to be freely licensed.

Two individual short stories I quite like are Sidewise in Time by Murray Leinster (1934), which you can track down with some judicious Googling, and The Year 4338: Petersburg Letters written by Vladimir Odoevsky in Russian in 1835 if you can believe it. There's a link to a translation in the Wikipedia article.
posted by XMLicious at 3:50 PM on September 28, 2015 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Hilobrow republishes the type of thing you seem to be looking for as serials, if you don't mind that format.

Unfortunately, I don't see an easy way to get to a comprehensive index of the books they have available. Each book has an index page of its own you can get to, though. Just select any old chapter, then select "All installments so far."
posted by ernielundquist at 4:05 PM on September 28, 2015

Free Speculative Fiction Online has a search page where you can narrow the results by year.
posted by hsieu at 6:30 PM on September 28, 2015

To add to XMLicious's answer, The Fifth Imperium has a bunch of Baen CDs.
posted by fings at 5:48 PM on September 29, 2015

For the sake of posterity it occurs to me to say: in case litmir.co should disappear in the future, the basic way to find sites like that is to pick a sentence out of a book you already have a copy of, go to something like Google Advanced Search, and type the sentence into the "Find pages with... this exact word or phrase:" field. Some times you have to try a few different sentences or phrases because digitized copies don't match exactly.
posted by XMLicious at 7:40 PM on September 29, 2015