Tag Archives: download

Holiday time

OK, folks; for those of you who haven’t already done the same or similar, yours truly is trundling off to do the family thing for a few days, so Futurismic will be going into a short hibernation as a result. I’ll probably be popping in briefly between Xmas and New Year’s, but please don’t be surprised if content is minimal – I have some work projects to finish up, for a start, and I could do with a bit of brain-downtime. Hell, I think we all could, AMIRITEZ?

So have a great holiday, of whatever denominational flavour (or lack thereof) you prefer. But just before I go, here’s a note in my inbox from from new UK indie publisher called Fingerpress:

[We]  recently published Smallworld by Hugo-nominated author Dominic Green. The book’s available in paperback, and also can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license from here: http://genres.fingerpress.co.uk/smallworld.html

And the blurb from that page reads as follows:

Mount Ararat, a world the size of an asteroid yet with Earth-standard gravity, plays host to a strangely confident family whose children are protected by the Devil, a mechanical killing machine, from such passers-by as Mr von Trapp (an escapee from a penal colony), the Made (manufactured humans being hunted by the State), and the super-rich clients of a gravitational health spa established at Mount Ararat’s South Pole.

But as more and more visitors to the tiny rock are dispatched with cold efficiency by the faster-than-sight robot, the children (and their secretive parents) start to wonder who put the robot there, and who – or what – is really in need of protection.

Sounds like it has a Robert Sheckley kind of vibe to it… so if you fancy a free read, go download it, why don’t you?

Happy holidays, folks, and thanks for reading. 🙂

Rudy Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy available as a free download

The Ware Tetralogy - Rudy RuckerRegular readers will be aware that I’m a Rudy Rucker fan, and hence will understand how stoked I am that his Ware Tetralogy – heretofore hard to find in decent condition – is being republished as a single (immense) volume. It’s now sat on my wishlist, awaiting a moment when I have the money spare to buy a copy… but until then, there’s a free-to-download PDF version of the Ware Tetralogy available on Rucker’s website. There are commercial ebook versions in the pipeline, apparently, so that download may not be there forever – scoop it up now, and feel the gnarl!

(That said, the PDF and RTF versions are Creative Commons licensed, so they can be passed around with impunity. Send one to a friend!)

How to download whole books from Google

Just in case it isn’t obvious: the following is not an incitement to (or endorsement of) copyright infringement; I have decided to publish this link because I know a number of readers here are interested in the legal and commercial future of books in a digital age (as am I), and because the Author’s Guild settlement is a current topic on which it has bearing… and because few things give me more satisfaction than pointing out that Everything Can And Will Be Hacked.

To reiterate: this link is for information purposes only, folks.

How to download full books from Google Books and save them as PDF files

Torture manuals available online

psychological tortureIt’s amazing what you can find on the internet – should you have a use for it, a ‘classic’ handbook manual of psychological torture techniques, written by leading shrinks and psychologists in the early sixties, is just waiting for you to download it. I have yet to check through and see whether soap operas and bureaucracy made the cut … but given the age of the document, I think we can assume that YouTube lip-sync videos aren’t mentioned. [Image by lunchtimemama]