Bag o' LINKS! PKD at PG, Author v Author written slaps, HPLHS's Whisperer trailer, and old DW novels for free

(12:52:10 CDT)

Bag o' LINKS! PKD at PG, Author v Author written slaps, HPLHS's Whisperer trailer, and old DW novels for free

It has been a while since I have had a Bag O' Links post, so I should get around to it. Just as a reminder, by the way, if you like the sort of things I link, I am about ten times more likely to post them on my Delicious feed than anywhere else.

First up, let's show some public domain love for one of my favorite authors: Philip K Dick. Not only does Project Gutenberg have a small collection of his short stories, but one of them now includes "Second Variety", one of my favorites and the basis for the movie Screamers as well one of those stories of paranoia that PKD became best known for (for better or worse). What's more, the PG copy has a couple (literally) of original illustrations including this bit of techno-fetishism:

Once you tear your eyes away from that (you know who you are), head over to Examiner.com to read Michelle Kerns' collection of The 50 best author vs. author put-downs of all time. You get such funsies as Mark Twain, on Jane Austen, "Every time I read Pride and Prejudice, I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."; and George Meredith, on Dickens, "Not much of Dickens will live, because it has so little correspondence to life...If his novels are read at all in the future, people will wonder what we saw in them, save some possible element of fun meaningless to them." Ok, I posted that last one because I had to look up who George Meredith was. When I did, I went "Oh, the The Egotist" and it made a little bit of sense.*

Just do me a favor, if you do go and read that, don't take something that one of them said as proof that you were right in ninth grade to hate this or that book that was assigned to you. You were wrong. About everything. In the ninth grade. Reading the first sentence of every paragraph of a novel the weekend before it is due does not give you a lifelong ticket to keep moaning about how bad Wuthering Heights was. Get over it. In the time it took me to write this paragraph, James Patterson has had nine books released. You have plenty of other things to read.

Keeping on the books, theme, and heading back to free: BBC has released small handful of free-to-read Doctor Who ebooks. You have to read them on the website, and it is not perfect, but you can finally see an early Mark Gatiss entry in the Whoniverse (Nightshade, which includes download links, actually) and the novel that was meant to sort of tie together all the Who mythos back in the day (Lungbarrow, in which the Doctor's identity is revealed, sort of).

And now, dashing away from books to short stories being adapted for the screen by fans for fans, I give you the trailer to what is likely my most anticipated movie right now: The HP Lovecraft Historical Society's The Whisperer in Darkness.

Si Vales, Valeo

*: From what I know of him, Meredith was more in the line of more exacting writing as opposed to popular writing.

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