Futurismic

A nice confluence of Clarkian techno-positivism and 21st century orbital solar power in this post on Short Sharp Science:

There’s another slight problem: the elevator doesn’t exist.

And neither do the supermaterials that could make it a reality. The elevator community’s oft-quoted carbon nanotube fibres languish in labs unable to stretch more than a few tens of centimetres without breaking.

All the more reason, says Swan, to get serious research into elevator technology underway. “We should initiate the space elevator project now and have the space solar power people buy into the concept that we’ll have one by 2030 and start planning for it. Instead of a 50-year horizon, let’s have a 20-year one.”

Stirring stuff. The space elevator is in the class of things I definitely hope to see within my lifetime.

[from Short Sharp Science][image from tanakawho on flickr]

Related posts

• Is Solar feasible - absolutely! (0)
• Wish Sir Arthur C Clarke a happy birthday (2)
• What can your ink-jet do? (5)
• Using nanotechnology for brighter lights and better solar power (1)
• Turning windows into solar panels (2)

We’re all fairly accustomed to the idea of counterfeit goods made in the far East being passed off as the real thing in Western countries, but we tend to think of them as being things like designer clothing brands or consumer electronics.

The trouble with those items is that they’re bulky, still moderately expensive to produce, and easily spotted as fakes by someone with a sharp eye… which may explain why the new fakes of choice for criminal cartels shipping to the UK are pharmaceuticals. [image by amayzun]

The drugs in question have been so well cloned that they’ve even found their way into chemists and doctor’s surgeries, and their high price-tags in the UK market ensure there’s a good profit to be made - which suggests the problem will spread to other countries, too. Will the counterfeit drugs market ever eclipse the illegal drugs market?

Related posts

• Unlicensed tanning pills circumventing regulation (1)
• This post will make you 75% more likely to make the right decision on medicines! (3)
• Testing Drugs on Troubled Veterans (0)
• Strange sources for marvellous medicines (0)
• Patents revoked on AIDS drugs (6)

Futurismic fiction hits the ground running for the new year with “Roots” by Mark Ward.

Super-enhanced transhuman troubleshooters; augmented and virtual realities; griefers and grifters and ex-girlfriends… when Chris East sent this one over from the slush pile, I took a look at the first few paragraphs and was sucked inexorably right through to the end before I knew what hit me. I hope you enjoy it as much as we did - be sure to let us know in the comments box at the bottom!

Roots

by Mark Ward

The first Hitler was seen by a jogger chasing the morning light through the remains of San Francisco. He stood in the grassy clearing once known as Ghirardelli Square declaiming to an invisible audience.

The runner hesitated when she saw him, sneakers tapping time on a strip of sidewalk missed by the robot reclamation teams. He looked crazy but she did not know if he was the pervert or harmless kind.

The countdown in the corner of her vision went pink so she pushed off the kerb and out across the springy turf. She relaxed when she saw its shadow pointed toward the sun. It was only a shade. Good work too. The uniform draped well and even the toothbrush moustache looked the right side of ridiculous. She shot some footage then wiggled her fingers to file it to the news channels. Another Hitler popped into view before she dipped under the tree line.

Hitlers were rampant by the time she was leaning on her thighs on Pier 39, sucking in lungfuls of air and fighting the urge to puke.

A thick drift of them, their jerking salutes as choreographed as a chorus line, had formed around the Fountain of Light in Montgomery Park. Continue reading “NEW FICTION: ROOTS by Mark Ward”

Related posts

• REAL DEATH by Terry Hayman (0)
• NEW FICTION: WILLPOWER by Jason Stoddard (9)
• HOOKING UP by Tom Doyle (9)
• CYCLE THIEVES by Mark Ward (12)
• Yet more free fiction (0)

One of the most curious aspects of the United States for an outsider like myself is the way that different states - and even counties, so I believe - can have their own legal framework in supplement to the one that governs the whole country. It makes a lot of sense from a sociological point of view, though; different regions will inevitably have different political characters, and the law should logically accommodate that.

But it’s got to be a two-way exchange, I guess - in other words, changes in the law may well change the demographic make-up of a region, as well as vice versa. So perhaps Massachusetts will see an influx of bohemians, artists and slackers in the wake of passing its new marijuana decriminalisation laws?

Maybe we’ll see a lot of weird new writers emerging from the local scene over there… after all, Boston apparently ranks as one of the eleven most literate cities in the United States. [image by Eric Caballero]

Related posts

• Unlicensed tanning pills circumventing regulation (1)
• Time to end prohibition? (4)
• Switzerland approves legal heroin program but keeps marijuana under control (3)
• Cannabis is less harmful than alcohol and tobacco (8)
• This post will make you 75% more likely to make the right decision on medicines! (3)

Struggling with that new year’s resolution to write more every day? Sat staring at a blank screen that mocks you with its existential emptiness?

Maybe One-Two-Fiver can help; it’s designed as a warm-up exercise to get the writing muscles stretched up and ready to run. The instructions are pretty simple:

Start with a single word.

Type it like you mean it.

Now write two words.

Move on to five…

Keep typing until you are writing.

One-Two-Fiver can even email your output back to you! No ads, no gimmicks; give it a spin. [via MetaFilter]

Related posts

• Friday Free Fiction for 24th August (2)
• Yanking on the Long Tail (4)
• Writing tips round-up (1)
• Writing and piracy - Stoddard pops Pogue’s balloon (8)
• Writing advice from Matthew Cheney (0)

The title says it all, fictioneers - hard-workin’ fiction editor Chris East’s batteries are fully recharged, and so Futurismic is open to fiction submissions once again. Don’t forget to give the guidelines a thorough read before you submit - good luck!

Related posts

• Futurismic re-opens to fiction submissions! (0)
• Get Your Futurismic Stories Ready (0)
• JACK’S GIFT by Jason Stoddard (24)
• HOOKING UP by Tom Doyle (9)
• Futurismic readers ate all Tom Doyle’s bandwidth! (0)

From What’s Next Trend Maps we have a trend map for 2009. In the words of the creator:

I’ve been tearing interesting articles out of newspapers and magazines for over twenty years. And for over twenty years I’ve regularly lost them or put them somewhere I can’t find them. So eventually I had an idea. Why not re-write these articles to highlight the key points and connections and then archive them online where they would be easy to find? Better still, why not create a website so that other people could find them too?

Also check out the key innovations timeline. Or read the book.

[via Charles Stross][image from cambodia4kidsorg on flickr]

Related posts

• Predictions in Chinese Futurism (3)
• Big blue publishes big five innovations list (0)
• Why Nancy Kress has gone to the Dogs (1)
• When 3D spam got old (10)
• vMeat with a Soul (0)

Researchers at MOBVIS project are working on a pattern-recognition system that allows you to take a picture of a building on your mobile and have the software identify where you are and what you’re looking at:

…the genius of the system boils down to a higher-dimension, feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. It can very accurately detect minute but telling differences between similar objects, such as buildings or monuments, both by the appearance of the buildings themselves and their context in the streetscape.

Apparently the system gets it right about 80% of the time.

[from Physorg][from Unhindered by Talent on flickr]

Related posts

• Where in the World? (0)
• Urban mapping - prepare for the cartographolution! (3)
• Up To The Minute Cartography (0)
• Tour de Earth (0)
• The perils of “thinkism” (5)

Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals - check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.

Related posts

• Transparent (1)
• The Technology Rescuer (1)
• V for Viral (1)
• Truth in clip-art (0)
• Tortoises All The Way Down (1)

Chris “Long Tail” Anderson has an interesting guest post from Adam Gurri that discusses non-monetary economies, like the acting profession:

The thing about acting is that the labor force (actors) actually value the ability to do work in that field that they are willing to take on work for nothing and take on other jobs as a sort of cross-subsidy.  There is a sort of demand for employment in theater, which makes competition among actors so fierce as to actually drive down wages (at time of entry at least) to zero or near zero.

His argument continues that many content-creation jobs (like blogging about your profession, for example) have such low overheads that they’re cutting the feet out from under journalists, who were paid to have the time to research topics they probably didn’t know much about to start with. There’s still ‘room at the top’ for good writers with deep knowledge (whether they started as journalists or experts), but the old career path from copyboy upwards seems to be gone for good.

Whether you see that as a good thing or a bad thing probably depends on what sort of work you do, but I think we can all agree it’s happening. The question is - after journalism, what will be the next to fall? And might the flow of money be supplemented by some sort of reputational currency, like whuffie?

Related posts

• Publishers suddenly bullish on ebooks (3)
• Investigative journalism 2.0 (3)
• Book publishing implosion - how can you help? (0)
• 2009 - the year the physical bookstore lays down and dies? (5)
• Yanking on the Long Tail (4)

Well, here we are in a brand new year - how did that happen so quickly?

Some of you will have been back at work today, while some of you are probably still trying to shake off hangovers from the last few days, (and some of us are caught between the two)… but you can all rest easy in the knowledge that I’ve been collecting free science fiction links for the last two weeks!

Your weekend reading starts here, ladies and gents:

***

Here’s a bunch from Feedbooks:

• “Eight Keys to Eden” by Mark Irvin Clifton
• “The Jupiter Weapon” by Charles Louis Fontenay
• “Dead World” by Jack Douglas
• “Test Rocket!” by Jack Douglas
• “The Curse of Yig” by H P Lovecraft

***

A couple at Manybooks:

• “The Undersea Tube” by L Taylor Hansen
• “The Beginning” by Henry Hasse

***

And a singleton at Project Gutenberg:

• “Junior Achievement” by William Lee

***

Here’s another freebie from Jay Lake: “Lux Fiat”

***

Strange Horizons presents “Engines of Survival” by Larissa Kelly

***

Hub Magazine presents “The Watchers at the Window” by Marie Faye Prior

***

Clarkesworld presents:

• “Celadon” by Desirina Boskovich
• “Teaching Bigfoot to Read” by Geoffrey W Cole

***

Via the SF Signal gang:

The good folks over at Snowbooks have posted a free short story from George Mann called “The Shattered Teacup”. It’s subtitled “A Maurice Newbury Investigation” which means it’s set in the Steampunk/Doctor Who world of his awesome novel The Affinity Bridge. Snowbooks has made the story available in both PDF and audio formats for your choice of reading and/or listening enjoyment.

***

Madeline Ashby has a five-part speculative story over at the excellent Worldchanging site: “βoyfriend” follows a high-school girl of the near future in the run-up to Prom night, and is well worth a look.

***

Some new titles have cropped up in Baen Books‘ free library

• Earthweb by Marc Stiegler
• Starliner by David Drake
• The Shadow of Saganami by David Weber

***

Among a trio of new poems at Polu Texni is a subtly sf-nal piece called “Unruly Harvest” by friend-of-Futurismic Shira Lipkin.

***

A note from Jake Freivald:

New free flash is up on Flash Fiction Online: “The Fallen Angel” by Mike Resnick and “As Their Eyes Touched God” by Robin Gillespie are the speculative fiction pieces for the month.

Cheers, Jake!

***

Via the newly-revived Genre Files:

Stumbled across a new webzine the other day that looks rather interesting. It’s called Three Crow Press and it’s produced by relatively new independent genre publisher Morrigan Books.

Predominantly dark fantasy and horror according to the strapline, so not really prime Futurismic fodder… but it certainly deserves a place in the Free Fiction Sidebar of Justice.

***

If you want to catch up with the latest fiction publications over at Book View Cafe, you can check out the lists of short stories, novellas and novel excerpts, which are updated on a weekly basis.

By the way, there’ll be more news to come regarding Futurismic and Book View Cafe - watch this space!

***

And here’s the inevitable collection of goodies that SF Signal caught:

• Mindflights presents “Gaming Real Life” by K C Shaw and “Santa Is My Homeboy” by Rachel V Olivier
• Afterburn SF presents “Ismay’s Run” by Joanne Hall
• “Kat and Mouse: Guns for Hire” is a new, weekly web serial by Abner Senires about a pair of guns-for-hire trying to eke out a living in the 2042 in the California Free State metroplex of Bay City.
• Grantbridge Street & other misadventures presents: The Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction comic book adaptation of Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man [editor's note - I'm not entirely sure this work is out of copyright; also, the page features a rather annoying autoplaying flash music gizmo which you'll probably want to scroll down and deactivate right away. Why anyone would choose to make their site *more* like MySpace is quite beyond me, but there you go; it takes all sorts.]
• The latest issue of Ray Gun Revival has fiction from Clinton Lawrence, Alice M Roelke, Drew Arrants, Richard S Levine, Timothy A Sayell, Martin Turton, M Keaton, Keanan Brand, and Sean T M Stiennon
• AntipodeanSF has its latest issue up with short speculative fiction stories by David McVeigh, Richard Kerslake, Mark Farrugia, Mark Tremble, Marian Stone, Shaun A Saunders, Anna Potts, KJ Hannah Greenberg, David Such, and Simon Petrie
• Issue #14 of The Future Fire presents stories by John Kratman, Rick Novy, and Richard Thieme
• The Scientific Indian presents: “Live and Exclusive” by Aditya Sudarshan

***

And finally, some Friday Flash: since the last round-up, Neil Beynon has published “Beats” and “New Space“, while Gareth D Jones has delivered - appropriately enough - “Another Year“, and Shaun C Green - even more appropriately - brings us “Two Thousand and Eight“.

***

And that’s the lot - more than enough to keep you busy there, I’m thinking. Don’t forget we’re always open for your tip-offs and plugs, so keep ‘em coming… but for now, Happy New Year to you all!

Related posts

• Futurismic readers ate all Tom Doyle’s bandwidth! (0)
• Friday Free Fiction for 5th December (0)
• Friday Free Fiction for 28th November (0)
• Friday Free Fiction for 21st November (0)
• Friday Free Fiction for 19th December (0)

Imagine, if you will, what it might be like to have a kind of switch wired into yourself that triggered tiny electrical shocks in your orbitofrontal cortex, giving you what would effectively be an “orgasm button”. Well, this isn’t science fiction any more. [image by bbaunach]

Transhumanist thinker George Dvorsky takes a look at the history of pleasure-centre brain-tweaking, and considers the implications of the technology becoming affordable and readily available:

So, should these devices be banned?

Yes and no.

Like the current prohibition on both soft and hard drugs, there’s a certain efficacy to a patriarchal imperative that works to protect citizens from themselves. Sex chip junkies wouldn’t be unlike other kinds of junkies. Highly addicted and dysfunctional persons would find themselves outside the social contract and completely dependent on the state.

But what about the pursuit of happiness and other freedoms? And our cognitive liberties? A strong case can be made that we all have a vested interest in the quality of our own minds and the nature of our subjective experiences. Ensuring access to these sorts of technologies may prove to be a very important part of struggle for psychological autonomy.

Is the best society the one that protects its citizens from all potential pitfalls, or the one that educates them as best it can and lets them take care of themselves?

Related posts

• Why Oscar ‘Bladerunner’ Pistorius shouldn’t compete in the Olympics (13)
• Why do people vote Republican? (10)
• What we heard/saw/smelled about synesthesia (2)
• Virgin Galactic declines to take Rule 34 to space - suborbital sex movies delayed (2)
• Transhuman Ufology (10)

Maverick mathematician Rudy Rucker is thinking about topics for his next novel, and it looks like UFOs might get a look-in. Partly in response to a recent Loving the Alien column by our very own Mac Tonnies, Rucker is at pains to define the subgenre carefully:

I think we should distinguish between, on the one hand, SF UFO novels and, on the other hand, alien invasion novels along the lines of, say, Greg Bear or Larry Niven. I think, for instance, Neal Stephenson’s recent Anathem, is more of an alien invasion novel, although it’s close to being an SF UFO novel as well.

So, with that distinction made, what should an SF UFO novel contain?

I’d say the essence of an SF UFO novel is point (a) below. Points (b) through (f) all follow from (a).

(a) The novel includes flying saucer alien encounters similar to those described in lowbrow tabloid newspapers, but is neither ignorantly credulous nor mockingly parodistic.
(b) The aliens use a fuzzy technology that might amount to psychic powers. The saucers, in other words, aren’t machines.
(c) The aliens are surreptitiously observing or infiltrating Earth rather than overtly invading—at least for now.
(d) We have some creepy human/alien sex acts.
(e) The aliens aren’t necessarily evil, they may be bringing enlightenment and transcendence.
(f) The aliens might be from somewhere other than a distant planet, that is, they might come from small size scales, from a parallel world, or might be made of some impalpable substance like dark matter.

Part of the game in writing an SF UFO novel is making up scientific reasons why the tabloid-level UFO phenomenon could in fact relate to something real…

As Mac’s essay pointed out, there is a distinct paucity of novels that deal with the UFO phenomenon - maybe 2009 could be the year for a UFO renaissance? [image by sabertasche2]

Hell knows it would make a refreshing change from sexy vampires.

Related posts

• Why near-future science fiction is difficult (5)
• Why Nancy Kress has gone to the Dogs (1)
• Should science fiction short stories be more optimistic? (7)
• Shira’s spontaneous free fiction blogathon for charity (1)
• Rudy Rucker disassembles the Singularity (4)

Move over, New Mexico! Members of the Scottish National Party are calling for a military airbase at Lossiemouth to become a space tourism launch site… insert your own “highland fling” gag here. [tip o' the topper to Darren Turpin]

Related posts

• Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo images released (0)
• Virgin Galactic declines to take Rule 34 to space - suborbital sex movies delayed (2)
• Virgin astronauts to undergo centrifuge training (0)
• Arthur C. Clarke on Sputnik, space elevators and more (0)
• Your monthly serving of ‘wet Mars’ waffle (0)

One last item from the Futurismic mail-room before the year closes: Sean Stubblefield writes to inform us about But the Owl Knows, an anthology of stories and art which he has edited, and from which all proceeds will go to Save The Children. Provided you’re willing to brave MySpace, you can find out more on Sean’s page.

Related posts

• Shira’s spontaneous free fiction blogathon for charity (1)
• SHINE - Jetse de Vries and Solaris Books to produce a positive science anthology (0)
• ILLUMINATIONS - Creative Commons charity flash fiction anthology announced (1)
• Free ‘virtual anthology’ of Philippine speculative fiction (1)
• BOOK REVIEW: Fast Forward 2, edited by Lou Anders (6)

It’s well worth listening to Andrew Marr’s latest edition of Start the Week in which he goes back over some of the best interviews and guests of the year.

He chooses to focus on “anti-news” - developments and trends that don’t make the headlines but nevertheless have a huge long term impact on the way we live our lives. Futurismic stuff, in fact.

Topics include human identity, bioscience, genetic predetermination, information technology, black swans, and the morality of nanotechnology.

Listen to the podcast here or on BBC iPlayer (available for the next six days).

Related posts

• Homebrew genetic engineering (1)
• Using nanotechnology for brighter lights and better solar power (1)
• UCLA researchers design nanomachine that kills cancer cells (0)
• Translating genetic information into music to diagnose disease (3)
• The Wire (0)

Watch as a reporter from the BBC explores a hi-tech “hotel room of the future” in Germany.

Is it me or does the smooth edges + white fascia look a little retro-futuristic, rather than futuristic? It looks like something from A Clockwork Orange or 2001: A Space Odyssey.

[image from the video]

Related posts

• Designing for the Apocalypse (2)
• Design as a Serious Reality Game (0)
• Christopher East - Defining Futurismic Fiction (3)
• Bruce Sterling’s Last Viridian Note (5)
• Big blue publishes big five innovations list (0)

Following on from the ULTra transit post, here’s a question about urban transport: what’s the best way to solve sluggish traffic flow around a busy street? Well, you could try shutting the street down entirely…

To mathematicians, this may be a real-world example of Braess’s paradox, a statistical theorem that holds that when a network of streets is already jammed with vehicles, adding a new street can make traffic flow even more slowly.

The reason is that in crowded conditions, drivers will pile into a new street, clogging both it and the streets that provide access to it. By the same token, removing a major thoroughfare may actually ease congestion on the streets that normally provide access to it. And because other major streets are already overcrowded, diverting still more traffic to them may not make much difference.

There are links to some research papers and reports on traffic flow studies over at MetaFilter, but you might want to start with the more accessible Wikipedia article on Braess’s paradox. I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it strangely comforting to realise that the world doesn’t always work the way we expect it to… though that could be because I don’t drive.

Related posts

• ULTra - Urban Light Transit concept (3)
• Welcome to Policetown, UK (2)
• Urban redevelopment: building demolition, Tokyo style (2)
• Urban mapping - prepare for the cartographolution! (3)
• Urban cyclists and the participatory panopticon (1)

We already know there’s trouble in the world of publishing, and according to the New York Times there’s just as much grief in the domain of the bricks-and-mortar bookstores… and it’s all the fault of us dedicated readers who buy second-hand novels online or swap between circles of friends, not to mention students cutting costs by picking up pre-owned titles that would normally swell the backlist sales figures. Is publishing having its Napster moment? Is this the beginning of the end? [image by jayniebell]

Well, as with all things, it depends who you ask. Mike Masnick at Techdirt suggests that the death of bookstores doesn’t have to be the death of books:

Past studies have shown that an active second hand market helps to boost the sales of new goods, because it makes those goods more valuable to folks who recognize they’ll be able to resell them on the second hand market later. That may not be helpful to physical bookstore retailers, but those retailers have to learn to adjust with the times as well. Obviously, just selling books is going to make less and less sense, but we’ve seen retailers that have worked hard to turn their stores into destinations, where there were good reasons to go and buy