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Book download page: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20230236

Before he wrote his most famous book, The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham was writing wonderfully strange pulp science fiction under the name John Beynon Harris, and in 1932 he decided to send humanity to Venus.

Hundreds of years after an earlier expedition disappeared, the spaceship Fyra reaches Venus and discovers something nobody expected.

Somehow the descendants of that lost expedition survived, but after centuries on Venus they've developed into very different societies. And they aren't exactly getting along. Throw in the planet's intelligent native inhabitants, strange aircraft, an alien wilderness and a new group of Earth explorers suddenly dropped into the middle of everything, and you've got a proper old-school planetary adventure.

This is a 1932 pulp story, so some of its ideas about race, "civilization," human development and colonialism have aged pretty badly. But still an interesting bit of science fiction.

Book download page: https://craphound.com/news/2012/09/17/free-creative-commons-licensed-downloads-of-rapture-of-the-nerds/

It's the late 21st century, and the Singularity has already happened. Huge numbers of people have abandoned biological bodies and uploaded themselves into vast posthuman computational civilizations spread throughout the solar system. About a billion stubborn old-fashioned humans remain on Earth.

Unfortunately, the uploaded superintelligences keep sending Earth technological ideas. Potentially civilization-destroying inventions capable of wrecking industries, cultures or society itself.

So Earth has created Tech Jury Service. Ordinary people get drafted to examine these technologies and decide whether humanity should actually be allowed to use them.

Our protagonist, Huw Jones, is hilariously inappropriate for the job. He's a cranky Welsh potter and something of a technophobe living in a world overflowing with posthuman technology. Then he gets selected for jury duty.

We're talking about uploaded humans, molecular machinery, artificial superintelligences, intelligent anarchist ants, body modification, gender changes, bizarre religions, courtroom insanity, conspiracies, technological viruses, simulated realities and eventually contact with something much larger than humanity's own posthuman civilization.

Everything is satirical, vulgar, extremely geeky and intentionally absurd. Doctorow himself described it as a comic novel about the Singularity that was partly a celebration of technophilia and partly an indictment of it.

.epub downloage page: https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Names%20in%20the%20Black%20Book%20-%20Robert%20E.%20Howard.epub

.mobi downloage page (for older ereaders): https://hub.hubzilla.de/cloud/grundy/Epub%20Files/Names%20in%20the%20Black%20Book%20-%20Robert%20E.%20Howard.mobi

HTML page to read online: https://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks06/0601701h.html

Before Robert E. Howard was sending Conan into temples full of monsters and lunatic sorcerers, he wrote some weird-ass occult detective stories.

And in this story, Howard goes nuts with the weird-menace formula: poison cigarettes, cobras, assassins, opium dens, secret passages, hallucinogenic drugs, knife fights, torture chambers, a sacrificial altar, a supposedly dead criminal mastermind, and a dude running around with a freaking spiked mace.

Steve Harrison is investigating a string of bizarre murders when Joan La Tour shows him something very uncool: a page from the Black Book of the Dead.

Books with that title are never awesome in pulp stories. Five names are written on it. Three have already been crossed out.

The remaining two are Joan La Tour and Steve Harrison!

It gets worse, the man apparently responsible is Erlik Khan, the Lord of the Dead, a criminal mastermind Harrison had previously watched get stabbed and apparently burned to death.

Apparently that didn't take. Some people are just hard to kill, man.

Published in Super-Detective Stories in May 1934, and reads as if Conan accidentally got a job as a detective.

WARNING: this is a 1934 weird-menace story and contains some very dated racial language and stereotypes.

Book page: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79595

Before author Erle Stanley Gardner created Perry Mason, he was writing fast, ridiculous, violent pulp stories for Black Mask, and this story is a great example of just how wild his early stuff could get.

Black Barr is an infamous gunfighter dressed head to toe in black, riding a black horse, because apparently subtlety wasn't much of a concern in 1928. He takes the wrong fork in a trail and rides straight into a mess of crooked ranchers, hired killers, stolen land, and a woman trapped in a vicious scheme.

Barr could probably just turn around and continue on his way. But nah, that's not the pulp way. Instead, his solution involves six-shooters, night riding, getting shot, shooting other people, shooting still more people, and generally leaving the town of Caliente Flats with a smaller population than when he arrived.

And then there's Wing Lee, the mysterious stranger who calls himself the Devil's Deputy.

It's decent pulp, but it's very much 1928 pulp. Gardner knows how to keep a story moving. Some pretty good action and fun storytelling. Some of it's aged really badly though. Uses some pretty bad racial stereotypes and slurs that were common in fiction of the period.

Sample of writing style:

A white signboard hung at an angle from a small tree, fastened by a rusty nail, bleached by sun and wind, cracked and checked, and yet it still bore its message “Caliente Flats 10 M.” It was a sign such as is used by the Forestry Service to mark mountain fire trails. Yet the printing was not that of a government stencil. It was crude hand-lettering.

Another mile and a rider approached, coming up the trail, pressing his horse.

I stopped, swung to one side, and waited, hands ready, poised over my pistols. In the mountains of the West, particularly in those communities where the main means of communication are over horseback trails, it is well to be prepared for trouble when one meets another on the trail.

He saw me, scowled, averted his glance and passed in sullen silence. That, of itself, was unusual. The code of the West calls for a brief exchange of courtesies when two riders meet. More, there was a blood-stained bandage on his shoulder, and the blood was a bright scarlet, not the rusty red of dried blood. The man had been wounded, and the wound was bleeding even as he urged his mount up that trail, away from Caliente Flats.

I shrugged my shoulders and rode on.