Why wouldn't those count? Some can even be quite good.

yes, some of them are but i don't recall the names :(

Shouldn't they be in your account?

Yesss.but i've been collecting many of the freebies (that seem interesting) for the last 2 years and i have over 20,000 titles, mostly unread. :O

and deleting titles off my kindle as i read them.

Amazing Stories, April 1942.

Cover story is Adam Link Saves the World, by Eando (Earl and Otto) Binder. I vaguely remember reading one or two of the Adam Link stories, and I think I saw one of the Outer Limits adaptations. He was kind of a thing for a while but he doesn't seem to have significantly outlived his creators, and Asimov's robot stories have since basically sucked the remaining oxygen out of the room for everyone else's robot concepts. Anyway, this is apparently the final Adam story, in which he and his robot wife Eve are contacted by the military to investigate a strange, impregnable fortress on an island. They think it's some new experiment from "the European dictators" but it's actually a scouting mission by alien invaders. So Adam and Eve go out to save a world that hates and fears them. It's an entertaining action story, and actually quite grim in parts as Adam has to make some rough choices along the way. As a character he seems entirely human, although it's interesting to read how his robot body affects how he perceives the world.

Tiger Girl, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The final portion of ERB's final Pellucidar novel. Fun but it feels like it's a lot of tying up loose ends rather than bringing the story to a true climax.

The Secret of Lucky Logan, by Nelson S. Bond. "Lucky" Logan is a new crewman aboard a space liner, and it's immediately clear that he's a physical specimen and the reason they call him "lucky" is because he always seems to guess just right in gambling situations. Then there's a crisis that happens in which a comet is going to collide with the sun and set off a chain reaction that will engulf the solar system, but Logan has a plan that might save the day. This was better than I was expecting, although with so much hindsight to draw on it isn't hard to guess the secret of why Logan is the way he is. Reading about how his father did bizarre experiments on him as a child in pursuit of raising a more evolved human is a total giveaway.

Disciples of Destiny part 2, by Don Wilcox. I liked the first part and this was a reasonable conclusion, although I think some of the balls he was juggling got away from Wilcox in the end. It's more of a "weird adventure" than a pure sci-fi story, though. I kept thinking about stuff like Seven Footprints to Satan as a comparison, where it's just sort of outlandish and, uh, pulpy.

Devil-Birds of Deimos, by Festus Pragnell. Another one of Pragnell's farcical Baroom parodies. I didn't like the last one of this series I read and this one is no different. Just a lot of limp comedy.

Treasure on Thunder Moon, by Edmond Hamilton. This is the best story of the issue. Classic space opera from one of the foundational writers of the genre. The heroes are a crew of over-the-hill explorers who pioneered the solar system and then got thrown out to pasture by the Company that took over and monopolized everything they discovered, but now they've got a chance to get back into space because the grand-daughter of one of their old mates has a map to a very rich mineral deposit on Uranus's moon of Oberon. Of course, this is the classic pulp era version of the solar system, so the planets all have crazy stuff like jungles and native inhabitants. It's tightly plotted, not a lot of characterization for any but the main characters (one guy is "stolid" - that's it, that all we know about him) but has a great mood and draws a lot on westerns while somehow still feeling distinctly like a space adventure. It does get a little sloppy in the last couple of chapters (how can you tell someone is smiling when they're in a space suit that only has a tiny eye-slit?). If you want to know where Star Wars comes from, you could do worse than this story. Not the fluttery Jedi crap, but all the other stuff like the beaten down technology that "has it where it counts", remote worlds beyond the law's authority, grungy bars with shady smugglers and gamblers, etc.

Retief by Keith Laumer (part of this massive project: http://baencd.freedoors.org/ )

Jim Baen published a CD of free sci-fi with (I guess) every major new hardcover release. Their statement in 2005 regarding these CDs: https://web.archive.org/web/20100109013114/http://www.baen.com/library/
And another statement from Baen and David Drake Wikipedia: So, having discovered this delightful truth, and having spent far too much time waiting in doctors offices/hospital waiting rooms/etc waiting on or for family members, and now having a smartphone, I've been reading CD1. (Slowly, yes, but it has a lot on it.)

+++++

Retief was an absolutely hilarious scream, for the most part. Our hero is a man of immense strength, yet of slim build, who studies local customs and tries to do what is best for the locals instead of blindly following the dictates of bureaucracy, incompetent bosses, and red-tape. The book is a (long) collection of everything Kieth wrote about Retief--a collection of "long short stories and short novels", arranged in such a way that one is introduced to the MC, theres, a few stories about him, then this character is added and theres a bunch of stories that feature him, than that group, with a bunch of stories that feature them, and so on.

Somehow Retief makes things turn out better than they would have otherwise, make his incompetent and/or ignorant bosses look good, protects the underdog, is a gentleman even when opportunities occur for him to not be one, and delivers laughs all over the place. (wiki)

The prose is a major delight to read, and I thoroughly enjoyed nearly every minute of it.
I think it would perhaps be termed "space opera", as there is no real deep discussion of the science behind the stories, though I'm not sure.

I HIGHLY recommend it. 9/10 (and it's free!)

Tif-Tif the dipplemat.... :-) Fond memories even if they were not quite 100 to my taste.

Seems like you are worse than me.

I get a daily email from BookBub, that lists about 20 ebooks in the genres I specified, that are discounted or free, at Amazon or Kobo or Google Books etc.

Mostly I only grab the free ones, and probably get one or two from each email, mostly from Amazon, but sometimes I get none and sometimes I get more than two, and it used to be that what I did get often led to other free ones. In the past I have had days where I spent many hours going from one free ebook to the next one listed on those ebook Amazon pages.

I have amassed over 6,000 free ebooks from doing that now, in a few years, and I have been very discriminating, but there is just so much available, overwhelming at times, but at least doing it the way I am, I am filtering a lot of possibles out.

As with you, the huge majority remains unread by me, but I have gotten some really good ones this way, been exposed to some great authors I would not have been, and even spent money buying their other books. I have an amazing resource now, and even complete series for free from some authors or nearly complete ... and we are not just talking Indie authors either, as many are not.

Luckily I am not getting quite as many now, as often those listed in the emails I already have.

I keep telling myself I need to stop soon. LOL

P.S. It is rather addictive though, especially when fulfilling series bit by bit for free.

Goodo.

I have enough trouble just dealing with ebooks via BookBub.

Glad to help your backlog. :) But seriously I've found a lot of gems from freebooksy (specific categories only!)and some from heyitsfree.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future

Some parts from the beginning are good enough, spelling out that Capitalism needs to be replaced urgently and not by going back to other failed systems like Socialism, but by coming up with a new one, making full use of humanity's level of development, technology and knowledge. However, anyone looking for a vision of a Postcapitalist system and the steps to get there will need to wait until the tenth and final chapter. Or, all right, it can be said that chapter eight includes some good ideas from the past that got lost along the way and at the end of it the author finally, albeit vaguely, gets to what should actually happen, before moving on to some more reasons why the system needs to change in chapter nine.
In between, the book is firmly focused on the past, at best being somewhat interesting from a historical perspective. The pattern is usually to correctly but pointlessly refute some flawed theories from the past before switching to an awfully optimistic view of some current developments, the author occasionally admitting that the change will need to be planned but usually falling into the same trap of wishful thinking as those he points out were so wrong before, being too quick to dismiss the system's capacity to defend itself and, mainly, having a far too good opinion of the general public, supposedly fighting a small elite that actively works towards causing great harm for their personal gain, when the problems are at all levels of society, if not even worse when it comes to "the people", as Pratchett was pointing out. In addition, the level of anthropocentrism is terrifying and, while they tend to go in the right direction, even some of the general end goals of that vision of a Postcapitalist system don't quite go far enough and, either way, the provided details paint a picture of a world that's halfway there at best, still too anchored in the current system, even presenting some awful aspects as desirable, and maintaining the unfounded belief that most people will just make the right choices.

Rating: 2/5

these philosophers are always so sure about themselves and they all fail at seeing how humans actually act

Deathwing 2nd Edition (2001) by various

I've never been a big fan of Warhammer but recently I decided to try reading some of the stories from the Black Library, and what better place to start than at the very beginning. First of many anthologies from the world of Warhammer 40,000, "Deathwing" exceeded my expectations which were actually quite low, this being a rather niche reading after all.

The book starts with the titular story - "Deathwing", which I actually consider to be the best in the entire book. Without going into too much detail, it follows a band of space marine terminators as they land on their home planet and find things not quite as they left it. It has all the makings of a great story, with good pacing, interesting characters and plot and clear signs of a lot of work which went into world building itself.

What follows is a rather mixed bag, with some of the stories far better than the others both in term of the plot and quality of writing. Besides the first one, I especially liked the stories by Dan Abnett and Gav Thorpe - "Pestilence" and "Suffer not the Unclean to Live" - both of which were actually added in second edition in 2001, with both authors being clearly more experienced than the rest. I consider "Lacrymata" and "The Alien Beast Within" to be the weakest points in the chain, so to speak, not to the point of being unreadable though.

All in all I consider "Deathwing" to be a good entry point into the world of Warhammer 40,000 literature and a solid sci-fi read in general.

A Plague of Pythons (1962) by Frederik Pohl : 4/5

Originally serialized in the October and December 1962 issues of Galaxy magazine (which was the version I read), published in book form in 1965, and heavily revised for the 1984 edition which was renamed Demon in the Skull, which I think is a more fitting title, unless "plague of pythons" is an actual expression.

Pohl was also the relatively fresh editor of Galaxy at the time, and this is far more brutal and violent than anything his predecessor H. L. Gold would have published. In fact I think it is the most brutal SF novel so far on my chronological reading list. Surprising that it would come from Pohl who kind of embodied the Galaxy style of satire, irony and social commentary. This book is less subtle than Pohl's collaborations with C M Kornbluth, but it is well told, moves rapidly and is never boring. It's more like The Long Loud Silence by Wilson A. Tucker and Wasp by Eric Frank Russell.

As in those books it's one man against the system, in this case the system being aliens?/demons?/imps?/pythons?/Russians? wreaking havoc on the world by possessing people and having them kill each other, in any possible way including firing off parts of the world's nuclear arsenal. It's almost shockingly brutal at first, but just like the protagonist - the somewhat unfortunately named Chandler - the reader (or at least I did) gets kind of desensitized with all the casual killing. The protagonist doesn't have much of a personality or temperament, not even towards the man who killed his wife. He was possessed, of course, but still...

The actual nature of the possessing, and the motive behind the mass killings (or cullings) are not totally convincing, but the actual plot is resolved in a very logical manner. So a quick, exciting read, and perfect reading on the beach.