Classic and New Sci-Fi for Free

I had no idea that Richard Kadrey had put the text to his first novel, the cyberpunk classic Metrophage, online, but he did. And now The Infinite Matrix, an online magazine edited and published by science fiction author Eileen Gunn, has published Kadrey's new novel, Blind Shrike, as a free download in PDF format under a Creative Commons license. The author describes it as "a pretty traditional fantasy quest, just one that, to me, makes sense in George W. Bush's America." Early chapters include a barroom discussion on the worst ways to die, the creation of the planet, and a guy getting mugged in an alley by a demon.

On a separate website, the book's designer, John D. Berry, shares his insights into making a novel-length text bearable in PDF.