Warren Ellis says that Tom Godwin’ Space Prison is now available for free at Project Gutenberg here. Godwin is arguably most well-known for his hard SF short story, “The Cold Equations.” If you haven’t read Space Prison, I can do no better at describing it than Warren Ellis:
Four thousand humans are dropped on a high-gravity planet, rejected by a slaving alien invasion force. One thousand one hundred of them die during the first night. And it really doesn’t get any more cheerful from there. Tom Godwin, on almost every page, says to the reader, “oh, you liked this character? He falls off a mountain now. That one? Dies of exposure. This one? Eaten by goats. That one? Stabbed into meaty chunks by psychotic unicorns.” And on and on. I must have read that book twenty times.
Any book with “psychotic unicorns” is okay by me.
