The first eight chapters of Variable Star, the last Robert Heinlein novel, finished by Spider Robinson, are going online over the next few weeks. From the book’s related site:
In 1955, Robert Heinlein began work on Variable Star, a powerful and passionate science fiction book about two young lovers driven apart by pride, power and the vastness of interstellar time and space, only to set it aside to focus on other sci-fi novels.
The detailed outline and notes Heinlein created for the project lay forgotten for decades, only to be rediscovered almost half a century later.
Now the Heinlein estate has authorized Hugo and Nebula Award-winning science fiction author Spider Robinson to expand the outline into a full-length sci-fi novel
In the best of worlds, of course, the whole book would go online in a variety of formats via a Creative Commons license. Still, this is progress, given that Heinlein was among the biggest sci-fi stars, and I hope that generous online excerpts will rapidly become the norm for all new books. Often a chapter is not enough to get a true feel for a novel.
Even better, wouldn’t it be cool if a publisher could release the preview files in a format that allowed fan communities to arise via annotations?
Question: How many other people are like me and prefer dark letters against light backgrounds? I find the dark background on the preview page to be tough going. Yes, I know: this is sci-fi, and the dark makes you think of space. Even so, I’ve got this bizarre preference for readability over mood-setting, and the real show is in the words, not the Web graphics. Perhaps this is an Age Thing. I’ve noted that many Web pages directed at the young use a white-on-black approach.
Also related to readability issues: Robert Nagle’s Best design/layout/content for ebooks?
(Via Slashdot.)
Wouldn’t it be cool if the Heinlein estate just put up what Heinlein had done, and then invited other s/f writers, and fans, to submit the work as they would complete it? Many different versions, posted online, and we could vote on which one we liked best as well as which one we thought came closest to the way the ol’ curmudgeon and libertarian himself would have finished it?
re: light text/dark background, i agree, and recently saw a blog complaining about it. I believe it was a blog that addressed readability issues. You are not alone.
Use Firefox (why wouldn’t you be doing that already?), and under the “View” menu, select “Page Style” to be “No Style”. You should get black text on white background.