Monthly Archives: August 2007

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Friday Free Fiction for August 31st

First, the old-school:

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Warlord of Mars is available as a free audiobook, or a free e-book at Manybooks.net, who also have The Players by Everett B. Cole.

I’ve always meant to read The Complete Works of H.G. Wells. I didn’t realise there’s nearly five thousand pages involved, but the PDF linked to there should be a little easier to carry around.

Now the new-school:

The website for John Joseph Adams’ Wastelands anthology has the full text of M. Rickert’s “Bread and Bombs” as well as stories by Cory Doctorow and Richard Kadrey

Some slightly sad news: after ten years, Infinity Plus is calling it a day. But the archives will stay available for some time yet, and there’s masses of good stuff in there – Bruce Sterling recommends Paul Di Filippo’s “What’s Up Tiger Lily?”

Non-fictional extra:

Michael Swanwick wrote an essay to present at a convention; Dinosaurs, Space Flight, and Science Fiction talks about three of the more recent literary movements on the genre fiction landscape, namely Interstitial Arts, The New Weird and Mundane Science Fiction. Infernokrusher appears to have been missed out …

Enjoy!

Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.

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Economics2.0 – bandwidth as currency?

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Ad-hoc wireless networkThe planned launch in January 2008 of Tribler, a variation on the BitTorrent protocol, is being hailed by the software’s creators as a way of sharing the burden of peer-to-peer networks more fairly, by treating bandwidth as a commodity to be traded on a global market. Which sounds great to me, especially as it’s open source … but isn’t it somewhat inevitable that someone will make a hacked version with the altruism overridden?

But leeching is hardly a new phenomenon, and by and large the web’s development as a resource for the average user can be largely ascribed to altruistic behavior by participants – Victor Keegan at The Guardian thinks the gift economy of the web actually promotes overall economic welfare. I’m inclined to agree, but I can think of a few counter-examples – how about you? [Image by Peter Kaminski]

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“At the tone,” AT&T Calls Time Out

The L.A. Times is reporting that AT&T will retire the “Time of Day” phone service which has provided accurate time information, read aloud to the caller in ten second intervals. The reason? There are now ubiquitous, alternate ways to get the same data:

“Times change,” said John Britton, an AT&T spokesman. “In today’s world, there are just too many other ways to get this information. You can look at your cellphone or your computer. You no longer have to pick up the telephone.”

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Online but off the grid – Japan’s internet café homeless

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Websurfers in an internet cafeIn an example of interstitial existence that sounds like it leaped straight from the pages of a William Gibson novel, the Japanese government has announced that there are over 5,000 “internet café refugees” eking out a living at the bottom of the social strata, taking what temporary work they can and dossing down in 24-hour internet cafés in the absence of a home of their own. Even in the shadow of our ubiquitous technologies, the same social issues that have existed for centuries are following us into the future … [Image by Kai Hendry]