Bill sez, "E. E. 'Doc' Smith's classic space opera TRIPLANETARY is now online as a great HTML book, thanks to Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders, complete with 1934 Amazing Stories covers and inside illustrations."

The ISFDB is a community effort to catalog works of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. It links together various types of bibliographic data: author bibliographies, publication bibliographies, award listings, magazine content listings, anthology and collection content listings, and forthcoming books.

At the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) conference, held in Washington, DC, last month, Vernor Vinge, a retired computer scientist and the author of Rainbows End, provided a compelling explanation of how developing technology and powerful interests could create a society far more invasive and controlled than anything Orwell dreamed of.

Wendy Grossman reports in the Guardian from the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, describing Vernor Vinge's presentation of his incredible new novel Rainbows End and its relation to Orwellian notions of control. Rainbows End is probably the most mind-blowing work of science fiction I've read all year: it manages to touch on the future of fandom, consensus reality, copyright, DRM, scholarship, aging, generation gaps, and global politics, while telling a technothriller adventure story that I couldn't help but devour. In fact, the excellent plot pissed me off, because it kept me turning the pages so fast I could barely pause to appreciate the wild ideas in Vinge's worldbuilding.

Heinlein-inspired tesseract house in Second Life James sez, "A Stanford math student just created a working version of a hypercube house, inspired by Robert A. Heinlein's classic "-- And He Built A Crooked House" short story.