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Nevertheless She Persisted is a sci-fi/fantasy flash fiction collection featuring unique visions of women inventing, playing, loving, surviving, and – of course – dreaming of themselves beyond their circumstances, according to the event’s page at Tor. It was the reaction of some world-class authors to the statement made when Senator Elizabeth Warren was silenced on the floor of the United States Senate for reading the words of Coretta Scott King last month:

She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.

Yesterday, on International Women’s Day, a number of those authors ran with it, turning an attempt at subjugation into the inspiration behind a collection of stories you absolutely need to read. And you don’t have to pay a penny to do so; they are posted online at Tor, free and accessible to all. Enjoy, and perhaps even be inspired; I certainly was.

As I am sure most of the folks who visit this blog know, for the first week of every month, TOR Books makes an ebook available as a free download. It is always an excellent book by a very good author, and this time they chose the first two volumes of The Merchant Princes series, The Bloodline Feud by Charles Stross. This is a Paratime story about 3 different timelines and the families that can teleport between them, with criminal activities, social injustice, treachery, and revolution in the mix. The protagonist is smart and quick on the uptake as she literally falls into the middle of this while trying to learn a bit more about her birth mother. I couldn’t stop rooting for her through the entire series, and I really hope the author returns to that universe with more tales soon. The link at the top of the Tor page takes you to a place to buy the paperback version, so instead scroll down the page to get the link to sign up for the newsletter and claim your free ebook version.

Ghost in the Shell Manga is how that whole universe started, when Masamune Shirow’s original graphic novel came out. But until this month, it has never been released digitally. Now it has, with the folks at Kodansha Comics offering up Ghost in the Shell in English digital format for the first time. While you can get that today, the The Ghost in the Shell Deluxe Edition won’t be coming out until January 31st, to help us all gear up for the new movie. This will be the hardcover definitive new edition supervised by Shirow himself, in the original right-to-left format with Japanese sound effects and with a ton of brand new bonus content.

Humble Bundle is a great way to get some amazing deals on nerd-centric stuff and support charity at the same time. As an example, right at the moment their home page actually redirects you to their current Game Maker Bundle, with over $1,880 worth of software to let you create your own games and distribute them online, which you can pick up for less than $13. They don’t normally do that, but I think they got excited when even at such a low price they crossed the 2 million dollars in sales mark. That one is still going on for a day or two, but there is another deal you ought to check out: Sci-Fi by Real Scientists, with the charity being the Sci-Fi Givers Fund. That charity fund is one of several being run by the SFWA, and supports all the other funds, including the legal and health care funds, and their educational and grant system. If you are as addicted to reading as I am, this is an excellent way to help the independently employed authors (what, you never heard the expression “don’t quite your day job”?) keep doing what they are doing. The deal only runs for another week yet, until the morning of the 28th, and the e-books download to all the standard formats, so whatever computer or tablet you are running they will read just fine.

The MIT Technology Review just published it’s annual Sci-Fi collection 12 Tomorrows, based on stories in the Review of the latest scientific breakthroughs. The authors this year include Charles Stross, John Kessel, Nick Harkaway, Bruce Sterling, and an assortment of emerging writers, and you can get the publication as eZines or in limited edition hardcopy. Over the years this collection has achieved critical acclaim, both from genre publishing prozines like Locus Magazine and by having stories included in various Best Science Fiction Of The Year anthologies.

The title says the important bit, but it is not the full story. Worldbuilders let people who donated money vote on what would be read. In this instance, the author/reader was Neil Gaiman, and Jabberwocky won the toss (the also-rans included Goodnight Moon, Fox in Socks, and Where the Wild Things Are). Thanks to everyone who contributed, we got this excellent rendition of a master writer reciting a masterpiece. This particular contribution took place back in 2014, but the work continues; be sure to visit Worldbuilders and see if you can’t find a current project worth your own contribution.