New Science Fiction eBook site

I bought a kindle about a month ago and have been experiencing a bank-busting eBook buying frenzy. I love books and will always buy them. Especially second hand science fiction paperbacks with the sorts of cool covers people don’t seem to do anymore. I do love the convenience of having hundreds of books in my pocket though. It’s a bit like someone who still collects vinyl but has an iPod.

Most of my old collectable books are currently in a load of boxes in my parent’s attic. Where they will stay until I have a huge house and can display them with pride. But the thing is, I still want to read the books. So I went to the kindle store, all excited, and prepared to buy some classic sci fi.

For some reason I had a hankering for adventurous science fiction. None of your deep soul searching novels just cool ideas with great characters – I wanted fun and exciting premises. Space pistols and daring adventure on dangerous planets. Cities in flight or planets of death. Killer robots and meddling aliens. Visions of the future where you could smoke a pipe on a spaceship’s bridge. And so forth. In particular I wanted two authors that have always satisfied this need: Edmund Cooper and Harry Harrison. There are obviously lots of others but these two were among my favourites when I was a teen. To my surprise they weren’t available until the end of September and they both had the same publisher – Gateway.

On the 11th October I got an email from this publisher informing me that their website SF Gateway is up and running. And I’m well impressed. It has only just started but they have a lot of old scifi books and authors on there already. Golden age maestros like James Blish, E.E. Doc Smith, Jack Vance, Joe Haldeman, Cooper, Harrison and more.

Before I sound like an advert I will stop. I’m just excited that someone is finally addressing this gap in the kindle market. Set lasers to die, charge up the rockets, get the women in spandex and lets get those evil aliens.

The website is here: http://www.sfgateway.com/