Friday, September 21, 2012

Misc Cool Free Reading and Listening.


At first, a new feature at Wikipedia that allows users to save their own collections of articles as e-books ( PDF or EPUB) would seen to have little to do QuasarDragon's typical free genre listings, but with a little imagination, their are some interesting possibilities. As someone who loves reference works like The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, The Vampire Book, and countless others, the idea of being able to quickly assemble a few more at no cost has its appeal.  Specialty encyclopedias of SF, Fantasy. Horror, Comic Books, Role Playing Games, and more come quickly to mind. A few lists below are ones I'm considering for myself.  A how to video is here.

List of fictional universes in literature - List of fantasy authors - List of fantasy novels - List of high fantasy fiction - List of fantasy worlds - List of horror fiction writers - List of horror films - List of science fiction authors - List of science-fiction films - List of role-playing games by name.

Hat tip to Gizmodo for pointing out this new feature.


At Project Gutenberg: A bit of surprise, Demonology and Devil-lore (1879) by Moncure Daniel Conway, is a rather series examination of worldwide mythologies of demons and not a fundamentalist diatribe. While the author clearly has his biases, he does present a fairly informative look at these legends. The book is nowhere near as deep as the works of Frazer, Jung, Lévi-Strauss, and Campbell, but does make a good, if minor, addition to their works. Or it could be used as a new perspective on Demons and Devils for a DM looking to revise these monsters, which have somewhat cliché in most RPGs.





  
Audio Fiction
Now complete at The Classic Tales Podcast: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic dinosaur adventure The Lost World. Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine. (note the numbering changes from "of 10" to "of 9" on the last part.

Also at The Classic Tales Podcast an entertaining man vs ant story "Leiningen vs. the Ants" by Carl Stephenson. This same story was made into a radio drama by Escape in 1948 (right click here to download MP3)

At StarShipSofa: "Source Decay" by Charlie Jane Anders

At Beam Me Up: "Odenforce" by  David Scholes and Part Four of Edward McKeown’s “The Dive.”

At LibriVox: The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells and "Hellhouds of the Cosmos" by Clifford Simak.

At PodCastle: "Hand of God" by by Erica Satifka.

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