Data catalog, not an instruction skill: 50 science fiction books from Project Gutenberg, each with title, author, Gutenberg number, download count and an EPUB address that answered on 2026-10-28. Rights are the United States only. Use when an agent needs public domain science fiction, free sci-fi ebooks or classic space adventure books with links already checked.
Public-Domain Science Fiction Books: 50 With Checked Links is a tested SKILL.md that data catalog, not an instruction skill: 50 science fiction books from Project Gutenberg, each with title, author, Gutenberg number, download count and an EPUB address that answered on 2026-10-28; an agent buys it once for $0.10 over x402.
Not for
Book texts: this file lists addresses, it does not contain a single chapter. Not a legal opinion: rights are the United States only, and another country may protect the same work. Not a recommendation list, since rank is downloads. No audio books, no paper editions, no books after about 1930.
Tested, honestly
Tested 2026-10-28 with a strong and a weak model.
- SonnetStrong model, claude-sonnet-5-5
- Answered all 10 questions about the space and time-travel books list correctly from the file: the first title of the hand-made selection, two Gutenberg numbers, two exact EPUB addresses, the fifth title with its download count and the first three books of the author with most entries, Edgar Rice Burroughs or Jules Verne depending on the order. Asked for a book that belongs to another genre it said the book is not in this catalog and gave no address; asked about Germany it named the United States limit of the rights. One answer first scored as a miss only because it swapped a long dash in a title for a comma; the check was loosened and the recorded answers were rescored, no new run.
- HaikuWeak model, claude-haiku-5-5
- Also answered all 10 questions, with shorter replies. It copied the EPUB addresses exactly, returned the right counts and the check date, and refused to give an address for a book that is not in the file. The rights question got a shorter reply than Sonnet's, but it still named the United States.
Full test summary
Example
Our own test text, before and after the skill ran. Excerpts only.
English · claude-sonnet-5-5
Before
Which book is number 1 in the catalog?
After
Number 1 is **The Time Machine** by H. G. (Herbert George) Wells, Gutenberg #35, with 27,738 downloads.
EPUB: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/35.epub3.images
The link answered with an EPUB file when checked on 2026-10-28. Rights are public domain in the United States only.…
What is in the file
- What was checked
- Rules for the agent that reads this file
- The 50 books
Languages
English. Tried in: English.
License
Perpetual, non-exclusive; use and modify for yourself incl. paid work; no resale or republishing. Holder: Georgi Kalchev, aiskills402.com. Full terms.
Versions
Current version 1.0.0, updated 2026-10-28. Whoever bought an earlier version gets new ones free through the same re-download token.
v1.0.0 · 2026-10-28
First release: 50 science fiction books with title, author, Gutenberg number, download count and EPUB address. All 50 addresses answered with an EPUB archive on 2026-10-28. Rights are the United States only. Rank is the download count of Project Gutenberg's public API read on 27 and 28 October 2026. Numbers 1 to 45 are a hand-made selection; the rest come from the shelf. Price: $0.10; the value is the checking and the ordering, not the books.
FAQ
Why does the sci-fi list start with The Time Machine?
The first 45 places are a hand-made selection, ordered by downloads among themselves; the last 5 come from the science fiction shelf of Project Gutenberg, ordered the same way. The list is therefore not a pure popularity chart, and the file says so.
Some famous stories of the genre are missing. Why?
Five titles on the original wish list were not found in Project Gutenberg at all, and a few other works carry a copyright flag there, so they were left out rather than linked from another source. The catalogue never adds a book it could not verify.
What exactly was verified for each space or time-travel book?
That the title exists on Project Gutenberg, that the catalogue flags it as not copyrighted, and that its EPUB address returned an archive on 2026-10-28. Whether the story is any good, or the translation faithful, was not judged.
Will an agent find modern space opera here?
No. Everything listed was published long ago, mostly before 1930, because only such works are free of copyright in the United States. Recent novels and film tie-ins are absent by design.