Tlönista

Kind Of Like Free Comic Book Day, But With Less Pictures

SF author Jo Walton has declared today the very first International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, when professional writers put work online for free.

Here’s some of my absolute favourite SF short stories, which the authors had already put online.

“A Niche” (PDF!), Peter Watts
This perfect little story is kind of dark. How dark…? From the story note in The Hard SF Renaissance, Starfish (the novel of which “A Niche” became the first chapter) won critical acclaim in North America but received

rejections from both German and Russian publishing houses on the grounds that it was “too dark”. (Being considered too dark for the Russians remains one of Watts’s proudest accomplishments.)

“The Hierarchy of Contempt” (PDF!), Peter Watts
A gleefully scornful little essay slamming Margaret Atwood’s claim that Oryx and Crake isn’t SF.

“A Colder War”, Charles Stross
Cold War. Cthulhu. Go now. Read. (Stross has also made available his Locus-nominated novella Missile Gap — Cold War plus flat earth.)

“How To Talk To Girls At Parties”, Neil Gaiman
This story will make you a better human being.

“What’s expected of us”, Ted Chiang
I love Chiang because his writing isn’t just SF, it’s hard philosophical SF (in the same way that you could say Neal Stephenson writes “economic SF”, or Ursula K. LeGuin writes “anthropological SF”). Unfortunately my favourite story, “Seventy-Two Letters” (preformationism! epigenesis! golems!), isn’t online. This one’s pretty cool too, though.

Jo Walton’s collecting more IPSTP work as the day goes on.