Happy International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day

Today is Shakespeare's birthday AND absolut3destiny's birthday. Wow. Good day! Ian, a very happy birthday, and a belated but very sincere THANK YOU for finding me a boatload of Sherlock Holmes radio play mp3's on Usenet. You rock.

Today is also, fittingly, International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

If you want to know where this comes from, the long version is here, with a followup here. The short version is that Howard Hendrix, a writer and vice president of Science Fiction Writers of America, posted an ill-thought-out rant about SF&F authors publishing their work for free on the internet.

He called this development "the downward spiral that is converting the noble calling of Writer into the life of Pixel-stained Technopeasant Wretch" and writers who publish their stuff online "webscabs", who "claim they're just posting their books for free in an attempt to market and publicize them, but to my mind they're undercutting those of us who aren't giving it away for free and are trying to get publishers to pay a better wage for our hard work. "

Naturally this didn't go over well with ... just about everybody, and in response Jo Walton has proclaimed today International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, "when pixel-stained technopeasants everywhere are stretching and smiling and putting down their technotools to celebrate their existence by releasing their works into the wild, or at least the web."

She links to a number of SF&F authors who have put new works online for this day, including herself ("The Prize in the Game"), Diane Duane, Dave Langford and Sean Williams. And there's an entire community for more free reads from pro authors: ipstp

And there's a suggestion that non-writers could post about writers they've discovered online, which I really like.

So. Whose books have I bought because I discovered them online? Probably more than I can think of right now, but here are a few names:

marthawells, who has put her excellent first novel "The Element of Fire" online for free, along with chapters from her other books and several complete short stories. The Element of Fire is a must-read if you like intelligent, witty sword & sorcery. I have a longer review of it here and of a later book, "The Wizard Hunters" here. She also writes SGA tie-in books, o lucky SGA fans.

naominovik, who has excerpts of her Temeraire series and two short stories online for free. I think pretty much everyone in fandom has already read the Temeraire novels, but if you haven't, you're missing out. Dragons and 18th century sailing ships! It's a fantastic idea, and the books are well written and hugely entertaining. Peter Jackson has optioned them, and I really hope something comes of it.

papersky (Jo Walton), whose posts on the writing newsgroup rec.arts.sf.composition were always so thoughtful and entertaining that I knew I wanted to buy her first book when it came out, and I was glad I did; it's now online for free here. The story goes that Patrick Nielsen Hayden, a senior editor at Tor, liked her Usenet posts too and asked her to send him her novel when she was done. So it goes.

Patricia C. Wrede, who doesn't have any work online that I can find right now, but I bought several of her Dragons books for young adults purely because her writing advice on rec.arts.sf.composition was so excellent, well-written and often funny. Her Regency fantasy-of-manners book "Sorcery and Cecelia, or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot" (with Caroline Stevermer) is a big favorite of mine, and was recommended so many times on r.a.s.c. that I bought it the moment I found it in a secondhand bookshop. It was rare then, but has since been republished.