The Baen Free Library is one of the coolest ideas around. It’s an expirement in disapproving the “fact” that the internet is damaging artists, and that the solution is to clamp tighter and tighter regulations on all content. And that is exactly what it’s proved, writers who include their work in the library seem increased sales, particular of their older works which had by and large stopped selling. (see Janis Ian’s famous article on the subject) And they are so classy about it! Rather then the usual bondage and discipline one has come to expect they bend over backwards to make their books accessible; you want it with frames? without? download and read it later? Sure here is a zip file. In fact they bring that same approach to their for pay service Webscription as well. Lets see Oreilly provide zip files on Safari, hmmm?

The Catch

One small problem. Baen publishes pulp! More then any other SciFi publisher I can think of Baen is famous for garish covers, and formulaic genre writing. Still in the late hours of the night, when you can’t sleep, you can read On Basilisk Station to see if the Honor Harrington books are as bad as you always thought. (not quite) Or can discover, Louis McMaster Bujold, Baen’s rare exception who gets mixed up by seeming to be genre writing, while actually dicing and chopping the tropes of military scifi into a feminist inspection of the future, and multi-genre romp, as her wonderful short novella, Mountains of Mourning available. (doesn’t do me much good, I just recite it from memory, but you could read it.) I think if insomnia persists I might have to finally read Lackey’s The Lark and the Wren. ### Honor Harrington

The real problem with the Honor books (besides all the other problems) is I just can’t get past Weber’s politics which are as shallow as they are blatant. He does however think Earth First! will be around for another 1000 years or so, admittedly as misguided fools, but the vote of confidence is nice none the less. ### More on Harrington

So I blew through Queen’s Honor last night, and now having read 2 Honor books I can say I think Weber is not someone whom I would like to meet. His idea of a happy ending is gross. Both books end with thousands of people dead, and very little subsantially changed with the universe. However we know they are happy endings because our main characters is heavily rewarded with money, land, and titles. The sort of ending that makes you pine for “and they lived happily ever after.” (and I’ll confess, while I read fast, I was partially able to read these books so fast, by kicking over to autopilot on the indepth descriptions of space combats, which, while by all signs are insightful and well thought out do not, in my book, constitute story telling, to paraphrase Olivier, “Try writing, dear boy.”)