I ran across quite a few interesting or cool links this past week. Here they are for your viewing pleasure. Have a good weekend.

Did Tor’s free ebooks affect sales?
A few months ago Tobias Buckell noticed a trend in his book sales that most midlist novelists don’t typically see. His book Crystal Rain, which had been released in mass market paperback a year before, experienced a sudden spike in sales, more than doubling from the previous week. Perhaps even more noticeable was the jump in sales of the sequel to that novel, Ragamuffin, which saw an even more dramatic increase.

NOTE: To see the complete index of all of Tor's free e-book giveaways, go here.

That's for girls, he said scornfully . . .
The feminists are mad because I said SF isn't girly. I think SF is girly, because I'm a girl, and my father gave me my first 3 SF books for my eighth birthday (Tunnel in the Sky, Sargasso of Space, and the third one escapes me). I spent one summer in Bantam Doubleday Dell's science fiction department, which was all female. I have an entire elaborate space opera planned out in my head which I may someday write, if my fiction writing stops being terrible.

The Moon Rocket Project NASA Doesn't Want You to Know About
A group of secretive rocket designers have defected from NASA's rocket-building team to spearhead their own forbidden project. They spend their evenings designing Jupiter (pictured), a moon rocket they think will work far better for less money then NASA's current moon rocket, Ares, set to bring some people to the moon in 2020. With all its plans available on a site called Direct 2.0, and nearly 100 engineers working, its possible Jupiter could zoom to the moon before Ares — if it can get some funding.

An Anti-Stress Pill that Prevents Your Body from Aging
Stress runs down the body's immune system, which is why people with high-stress jobs or events in their lives are vulnerable to illness. Now a researcher at UCLA has discovered the link between emotional stress and physical damage — and she's going to develop a pill that will allow you to endure stress without the nasty side-effects. And there may also be one good side-effect: Extreme longevity.

Brightest Supernova In History Has Turned To Velvety Goodness
This supernova dominated our skies for weeks, a thousand years ago. It was brighter than Venus and visible during the day, and observers documented it in China, Japan, Europe and the Arab world. We now know that the brightest supernova on record, SN 1006c, was caused by a white dwarf star that gained mass from a companion star until it gorged itself and exploded.

10 Best Science Fiction Movie Endings
If you saw my list of underrated science fiction movies, you’ll know that I love a good ending. For me a great ending is when the movie really uses those last seconds to add something to the storyline (or even transform your perception of the whole movie), so that you sit watching the credits trying to digest what just happened. (I’ve nothing against epilogue-style endings–I’m looking at you, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King–but they’re not great in and of themselves.)

Hard fantasy
I think it’s been about two years since the Internet spawned a new iteration of an old debate (like it tends to do), in this case the notion of “hard fantasy.” These thoughts coalesced in my head then, but what with one thing and another I was too busy to ever post them, so here I am: well and truly behind the bandwagon. And I’ve lost all my links from that old debate to boot. But it’s a notion I happen to like, so let me toss in my two cents’ worth, however late they may be.

The Apocalypse Is Coming: An Interview with Terry Brooks
Terry Brooks' Shannara books have been entertaining readers for over 30 years with tales of elves and demons, evil deeds and heroic rescues. It's a richly detailed milieu he has created and now he's exploring the origins of his world in his current series, The Genesis of Shannara, an exciting mix of Shannara history and Brooks' Word & Void characters. The new series follows Knight of the Word Logan Tom as he battles across a post-apocalyptic countryside with a group of street kids, fighting to reach the rendezvous with the mysterious and magical Gypsy Morph; meanwhile elf Kirisin must find the blue Elfstones and lead his own reluctant race out of the Cintra Forest; and street kid Hawk embarks on his own voyage of discovery -- about himself.