Recommendations

We’re gonna party like it’s 2000. This website contains a blogroll now.

Blogs

Gurney Journey
Art blog of award-winning author and illustrator James Gurney, who you may recognize from the Dinotopia books or his paleoart.
Zeonic Republic
The premiere poster of Gundam translations.
You can subscribe to the blog’s RSS, but updates are more frequently posted to Deacon Blues’ Reddit and Patreon.
Pedestrian Observations
Transit planner Alon Levy writes about how the US sucks in comparison to the rest of the world, and how it can do better.
Antipope.org: Charlie’s Diary
Scifi/Fantasy author Charles Stross’ blog, with occasional interludes from other people, and political commentary from the mind of an author who writes Cthulhu Mythos fiction. See also some fiction he’s published online
Casey Handmer’s Blog
Astrophysicist, rocket scientist, and entrepreneur focusing on using solar energy.
Ex Urbe: History, Philosophy, Books, Food, and Fandom
Historian and author Dr. Ada Palmer writes mainly about the Renaissance and censorship, but the good doctor also has posts about chronic illness, science fiction, and even some podcasting. Oh, and she’s part of a choral band.
Check out her science fiction series Terra Ignota, starting with Too Like the Lightning.

Websites

Atomic Rockets, a.k.a. Project Rho
The resource for hard-science fiction writers.
Baen Free Library
Free science fiction books from the publishing house Baen Books, including books that you may have heard of!
Project Gutenberg
Free ebooks, mostly of old public-domain works. Formatting quality varies, but oh, what an archive!
The Internet Archive
Contains many things that have been uploaded to the Internet: webpages, data, books, films, movies — including an extensive collection of public-domain audio and movies.
The Index
An index of various ways to watch anime and read manga, for those who live in countries where those items are not yet available.
Craphound
Science fiction and political-thriller fiction by notable Internet personality Cory Doctorow, with free downloads of most books as ebooks under Creative Commons licenses.
Man and Atom
A historical archive of a lot of atomic energy resources. Also a project actively promoting nuclear energy.
Is Germany Clean Today?
Compare France to Germany: whose grid is lower-CO2? Every day so far, it’s been France. German energy policy sucks.

Music

Tom Lehrer’s Music
An excellent glimpse into Cold War gallows humor and political satire.
Leslie Fish
Find her filk music for some real tunes.
Mili
Delicate Japanese/English vocals over music somewhere between chiptune and Renaissance pocket parlour bands.
Kamijo
Japanese power metal, with impeccable aesthetics.

Comics

Chiasmata
Fantasy webcomic with very good illustrations. Ambitious project. Recommended to fans of early Homestuck.
Foreach
Four video games, four game players: four holes in the world. Not not furry. For fans of Ace Attorney, dating sims, precision platformers, and first-person shooters.
Girl Genius
Steampunk-ish fantasy with a strong female protagonist, canon love triangle, weasels, a talking cat, a talking train, mad scientists, mad scientists, blimps, a castle, —
and Othar Tryggvassen Gentleman Adventurer
Awards-winning; nearly awards-breaking. full-color updates three times weekly. Prone to taking a short break to work out the main story, with a short holiday interlude comic that lasts several months, still updating three times weekly in full color.
Schlock Mercenary
A gag-a-day scifi strip about an ambulatory dungheap and a team of mercenaries that manage to become the most-important people in the galaxy. Lots of hijinks, lots of cool aliens, lots of headscratching physics.
Daily color updates for more than 20 years. The story wrapped up just in time; a short while afterwards, the author to get hit with Long COVID, and has not much recovered.
Replaceable Parts
NSFW. For fans of TF2 game mechanics and gender. By the same author, check out Parhelion for more of a traditional space-opera comic.
Freefall
An artificially-intelligent anthropomorphic wolf is assigned as spaceship engineer to a rogueish alien. Hijinks ensue. Lots of robots and robot-human interactions. Can AI find true love? Not that kind of story. A gag-a-day newspaper strip updating 3x weekly since 1998.
Megatokyo
One of the earliest webcomics, still lovingly illustrated by hand with pencil on paper. The story has grown and changed over time, but it started as a weeb and a doofus getting stuck in Japan. Still updating!
Dresden Codak
Beautiful art and irregular update schedule. If you want a complete story, read Hob. If you want more hot cyborg girls, read Dark Science. If you want philosophy, check out the one-shots.
Runaway to the Stars
An extremely comprehensively worldbuilt science fiction story with all varieties of human and alien, living and working together to do …. something. Spoilers.
Mare Internum
Depressed astronaut stranded in a tunnel on Mars is … somehow okay with all this. He meets an alien and has several adventures.
Cucumber Quest
An incomplete fantasy comic about saving the kingdom through the power of music and friendship.
Check Please!
College mens’ hockey, as told from the point of view of an anxious gay figure skater. Very heartwarming. Might come with baking recommendations.
Recommended for fans of B. Dylan Hollis’ baking videos.
Dolmistaska
An unemployed cat person has exciting experiences while squatting in a metastasized mega mall somwhere near the former US-Canada border. Hockey teams, mall cops, the US Army, and clowns are present.

Fiction

Worm
Teenage girl gets bullied in high school; wakes up in the hospital with the ability to control all bugs in a couple blocks’ radius. All bugs. She wants to save her city, and ends up saving the world. She cannot deescalate a situation to save her life.
Most content warnings apply here; Taylor shoots a baby at one point and most fans are agreed that that was the correct decision. This is a story which people say is a “deconstruction” or “grimdark realism” regarding superpowers.
Has a sequel of questionable goodness, and some other works by the same author. Notable for kicking off one metric shitton of fanfiction, often written by people who haven’t read the source works.
Redwall
Mice and other forest creatures, living out a pastoral fantasy as they resist the hordes of evil vermin. Good solid YA books.
Yokohama Shopping Log
A robot in a cosy pastel postapocalypse. The gentle decline of humanity.
Kitty Cat Kill Sat
A cat controls a giant spaceborne weapons platform. The cat is becoming increasingly sentient. The cat is aware that it has a job to do, and that it’s not doing enough. The cat is alone — or is it?
A very depressed, very fucked-up cat. And friends!
Tiraas: The Gods Are Bastards
Your standard sword-and-sorcery story about a bunch of kids attending a magic school, teaming up to save the world through various acts of shenaniganry. Except it’s got a huge backlog, well-written, and the magic/divinity system has some interesting quirks. Lots of local politics.
Gundam
Broadly speaking: all of it is worth watching or reading, except Gundam SEED and its spinoffs. Gundam Wing isn’t bad, it’s just not good. Mobile Fighter G Gundam should be watched in the English dub for maximum hilarity.
Worth the Candle
A very depressed college-age TTRPG gamer finds himself in a magical world, which reveals itself to have every magic he’s ever thought of, in all their fucked-up combinations. Technically a story about an author fighting his inner demons. At times very dark and gruesome.
The original story has been “stubbed” while the author prepares it for professional publication, but you can still find copies online. Now posting as a webcomic!. Check out the Christmas Special and the crackfic.
Thresholder
A jumpchain protagonist (explained elsewhere on this page) moves through several worlds, learning new magic systems, gaining allies, and struggling against the seemingly-inexorable fates which bring him, and others like him, to meet and fight in new worlds.
Astielle
The hero of ages fights against the Demon King with the assistance of the blessed prince — nah, they just flirt, romance, and fuck. Porn With Plot and really good at it.
Technically fanfiction of the Legend of Zelda games, but so divergent that it’s either an homage or nothing.
Poul Anderson
The Falkayn, Flandry, Polesotechnic League, and Long Night stories are good. See also Tau Zero and The High Crusade
Isaac Asimov
He wrote in every section of the Dewey Decimal system, but his fiction is almost all good.
Evan Dahm’s comics
I recommend all of these, particularly Rice Boy, Vattu and the ongoing 3rd Voice.

Fanfiction

Lists too small to warrant their own section

To the Stars
An ambitious hard-scifi continuation of classic magical girl anime Puella Magi Madoka Magicka. Fanlore. Wiki. TVTropes.
Mission of Honor: Retold
A rewrite of David Weber’s Honor Harrington novel Mission of Honor, by a certain established science fiction author, focusing on a slightly different take on the story.

J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter

She wrote some good stories and then became a transphobic bigot. Don’t give her money.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality
What if Harry were raised by a loving couple of Muggle science professors, and also Voldemort were competent?
Once you’ve read that, check out the continuation fic Significant Digits, A Crack/Slash Epilogue, and this one specific solution to the Final Exam.
This is the fic which Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote as a recruiting pamphlet for his “rationalism” project, which, well, hm.
This is also the fic which kicked off Luminous Alicorn’s rewrite of Twilight, Luminosity, which went on to spawn the Glowfic community.

Specifically Worm

Loaf
Worm: Contessa goes to bake some bread. Only makes sense if you’ve read Worm, and may require knowledge of parts of the sequel, Ward.
Tank
Taylor can turn into Soviet tanks. Either a mockery or recommendation of communism; you decide. Incomprehensible without having read Worm.
Tilt
Taylor has no powers, but decides to fake having powers. This causes no problems.
Trailblazer (Worm/Gundam AU)
Wildbow’s Worm meets the Gundam metaverse in this ambitions, complete, and actually good alt-power!Taylor story. Draws significantly from Gundam 00 and Gundam SEED, but all the stories are represented.
Dire Worm!
A Mad Scientist from a high-technology setting is accidentally sent to Brockton Bay, and decides that the caliber of crime in Earth Bet is below her standards. She takes over the world for its own good. There is much hilarity, of the Girl Genius sort.
Brockton’s Celestial Forge
A random nobody has a bad day and starts getting superhero mechanic powers. And then he keeps getting them. And keeps getting them. And keeps getting them. They keep getting stronger. The author ran out of thesaurus several chapters in. Great if you like theorycrafting about superpower interactions, or crowning moments of awesome. Bad if you want the story to get anywhere fast.
This is a Jumpchain story, inverted: instead of having a list of powers that a character buys from before inserting into a world, this is a story where a giant list of powers get rolled on arbitrarily, and are inserted into a character in the world. The author had to change the power-granting mechanic because it was giving Joe powers too often and as a result Joe couldn’t actually do anything.