Just wanted to share some great findings in the free Gutenberg Project and the related but separate LibriVox.
Because of the requirements for the material to be in the Public Domain, you’re not going to find much in the way of modern or even ‘classic’ sci-fi (ala Clark, Azimov, or Heinlein). But, once I went looking, I was able to find some and it’s surprisingly good … albeit a bit dated.
The big find, was that most of the searching had been done for me, on the related wiki. Turns out that people had already compiled lists of G.P. material by category. Here’s the Science Fiction Bookshelf.
I can also recommend the work of these (among others):
[ol]
[li]Carroll M. Capps
[/li][li]Philip K. Dick
[/li][li]Everett B. Cole
[/li][li]John Wood Campbell
[/li][/ol]
A related project, is the Public Domain, read-by-volunteers, work of LibriVox. A few that caught my attention were:
[ol]
[li]The Coming Race
[/li][li]The King In Yellow
[/li][li]the works of Lord Dunsany
[/li][/ol]
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It always strikes be as … odd … that we live in a world with more free literature than it’s possible to read in a lifetime. More audio books, more podcasts, more possible communities and affinity groups than we’d ever actually be able to meaningfully participate in. While the Internet didn’t turn out to be the panacea many dot-com’ers hoped or promised, it did bring us a lot of good stuff. [Plus all of the weird stuff and the endless porn, too.]