Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
It’s Friday afternoon here in the UK, which can only mean one thing – it’s free fiction round-up time here at Futurismic!
But it should be noted that nothing is permanent in this universe – indeed, this is going to be the last ever Friday Free Fiction at Futurismic. Not because there’s any less good science fictional stuff to read on the internet – quite the opposite, in fact, as regular readers are doubtless well aware – but because it’s becoming increasingly hard for me to keep up with it all and paste it all together.
And when I can see someone else doing a far more complete job elsewhere (namely the doubtless pseudonymical Quasar Dragon over at SF Signal), I think it’s only fair to send them the kudos and the traffic they deserve. Getting back three or four hours of my working week is an added bonus, of course… 😉
So, in short: if you’ve been a loyal follower of Friday Free Fiction here at Futurismic, you should immediately subscribe to SF Signal‘s RSS feed, assuming you’re not subscribed already. Their daily free fiction posts cover fantasy and horror as well as science fiction, so you can pick and choose from the best of the genre writing available on the intertubes. You’ll also get all the other SF Signal posts, which are great stuff for genre heads of every stripe, and it’ll cost you nothing at all. Makes sense, doesn’t it? So make with the clicky.
(I also recommend our regular tipsters to send future notifications to SF Signal for inclusion in their round-ups; I’m sure they’ll be just as grateful for your input as I’ve always been!)
But let’s just tie up this week’s batch before we sign off for the last time, eh?
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A big bunch from ManyBooks:
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And a load more from FeedBooks:
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Issue #90 of HUB Magazine features an extract from nerw Angry Robot-published novel Moxyland by Lauren Beukes
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Strange Horizons presents “Another End of the Empire” by Futurismic fictioneer Tim Pratt.
Tim’s also starting a free-to-read donation-supported serial novella:
Bone Shop is a serialized, donation-funded urban fantasy novella, available for anyone to read for free. New chapters will go up every Monday. The Bone Shop website is here, though there’s not a lot there at the moment. I’ll post the first chapter on June 29.
Times are tough in the Pratt household, so if you can part with a few dollars a week to help out a very talented writer in exchange for him giving away some of his work, please do so.
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Tor.com presents “The House That George Built” by Harry Turtledove
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The ongoing serialisation of Jason Stoddard‘s Eternal Franchise continues with chapter 9.2
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Some dreamscape weirdness from Captain VanderMeer: “Three Dreams and a Fabrication”
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Angry Robot Books has a sample extract from Chris Roberson‘s Book Of Secrets (as well as from some UrbFant zombie/detective mash-up which didn’t much appeal to me, but which might flick your switches).
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Sumit Dam chips in with “The Heroism of Colonel Pussy“
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And as mentioned above, here are those incomparably complete free fiction round-ups from SF Signal over the last week: Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and today. That’s the way the professionals do it. 🙂
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And that’s that, ladies and gentlemen; thank you all for reading along and sending in your tip-offs. I’ve discovered a lot of new writers and webzines through doing these round-ups, and I’m sure there’ll be more to come yet – so keeping watching your feeds! Meanwhile, it’s fiction and futurism business as usual at Futurismic from here on in.
Have a great weekend. 🙂
This week’s inescapable big science story is that of Brooke Greenberg, the teenage girl whose physical and mental development has seemingly stalled at the stage of an 11 month old infant. In addition to the lamentable tabloid freak-show component to the story, however, is the claim from a researcher that Brooke’s genetic make-up may hold the key to arresting the ageing process.
Walker thinks that Brooke is the first recorded case of what he describes as “developmental disorganization”. His hypothesis is that the cause is disruption of an as-yet unidentified gene, or genes, that hold the key to ageing by orchestrating how an organism matures to adulthood, reproduces, then gradually ages and dies.
Walker believes that Brooke lacks this “regulator” of development – first proposed in 1932 by British marine biologist, George Parker Bidder. Like Bidder, Walker believes that the regulator guides organisms through to adulthood, but also works beyond then to orchestrate ageing and, eventually, death.
It bears repeating that this is one man’s hypothesis rather than a species-wide day-pass to the fountain of youth, but let’s assume for a moment he’s right. The first ethical question here is whether Brooke should be treated as a potential source of human immortality rather than simply as an unfortunate girl in need of a lifetime of care. Personally I don’t see a problem with researching the implications of a condition alongside giving palliative care for it, as discussed in the neo-eugenics post the other day.
The second ethical question – and, to my mind, the much more important one – is whether we’re right to be chasing after human immortality as a goal. It’s a much fuzzier line; while I don’t see any problem with wanting to extend the human lifespan and eradicate the negative aspects of the physical ageing process (a matter on which I am somewhat on-side with the transhumanists), I’m not sure that we’re yet in a geopolitical state as a species where we could cope with radically extended lifespans.
Most of our modern wars revolve around resources, and resources are becoming scarcer because people already live much longer than they did a century or two ago; how much more of an issue will energy supply be in developed nations when the average life expectancy has an extra handful of decades tacked onto it? Will birth rates decline in proportion to increased lifespan, and if not, how will we cope with a population that is both expanding and greying?
Regular readers will be aware that technological marketing is one of my perennial topics here at Futurismic; it never ceases to amaze me how far companies will go to find new ways of selling us stuff more effectively. Neurological research is the cutting edge of the field these days, with Honda kitting out test customers with clothing that reports on their physiological status as they’re given the latest pitch in a gussied-up showroom:
Honda found the results so persuasive that it is remodelling showrooms and retraining staff to tailor pitches according to a potential buyer’s state of mind. “The hypothesis is that if you get the [sales] experience right, you may not need that price promotion to sell a product,” explains Ian Armstrong, manager of customer communications for Honda UK. “Conventional research only gets you so far because it’s rationalisation after the event, and most decision-making is done subconsciously. We set out to measure physical changes people cannot consciously control.”
Honda is not alone in believing brain science can boost the bottom line. A growing number of businesses say that traditional ways of understanding consumers – direct questioning, observing our behaviour – don’t explain why we buy one product over another. And they are turning to neuroscience for the answers.
All well and good for Honda, I guess – though I’d be immensely amused if at the end of it all it was discovered that purchasing choices are largely sub-rational and random. For now, though, I’m inclined to see the sales floor as the battleground of an arms race. After all, the technologies Honda are using are comparatively lo-fi, the sort of thing that a smart independent researcher could knock up on a budget. So maybe consumer advocacy groups will start their own counter-research programs, offering tactics and training to enable shoppers to spot when they’re being manipulated by environmental factors or neurolinguistic programming techniques, and ways of turning the tables on the salesmen. Knowledge is power, right? [image by mrflip]
Of course it’ll be a while before grass-roots research can match the sort of data that fMRI scans can gather, but if there’s one up-side to the economic slump it’s that people already seem to be thinking far more carefully about what they buy; all the crafty persuasion techniques in the world won’t do you any good in an empty showroom, after all. And just to go all the way with the blue-sky thinking, perhaps we’ll eventually end up in a world where manufacturers realise the best way to sell us something is to have a robust and functional product that people actually need…
… hey, a guy can dream big on a Friday, can’t he?
A powerfully engaging essay on the nature of mind and the perception of time over on Edge by David M. Eagleman:
Try this exercise: Put this book down [or just stop reading the screen] and go look in a mirror. Now move your eyes back and forth, so that you’re looking at your left eye, then at your right eye, then at your left eye again. When your eyes shift from one position to the other, they take time to move and land on the other location. But here’s the kicker: you never see your eyes move. What is happening to the time gaps during which your eyes are moving? Why do you feel as though there is no break in time while you’re changing your eye position? (Remember that it’s easy to detect someone else’s eyes moving, so the answer cannot be that eye movements are too fast to see.)
Not only does our perception of time vary under different conditions, different sensory inputs do not slow down to the same subjective time:
Duration distortions are not the same as a unified time slowing down, as it does in movies. Like vision, time perception is underpinned by a collaboration of separate neural mechanisms that usually work in concert but can be teased apart under the right circumstances.
This is a fascinating and SF-mineworthy area of research.