Monthly Archives: August 2007

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Friday Free Fiction for 10th August

A slow week for free fiction, it appears … though I’m sure there was more that I didn’t hear about. Keep us posted, folks.

Strange Horizons has a new Tim Pratt story, “Artifice and Intelligence”.

Baen Books are making some of the stories from their delayed Libertarian anthology, Visions of Liberty, available for free; featured authors include the ubiquitous Robert Sawyer (“The Right’s Tough“), and Futurismic’s own Tobias Buckell in collaboration with Mike Resnick (“The Shackles of Freedom“).

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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Testing panspermia

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Panspermia is the theory that life on Earth may have arrived in a nascent form from outer space, carried through the void as bacteria in comets or asteroids. It’s controversial, certainly, but persistent too (as well as being a classic science fiction trope). A Scottish scientist has decided to test the theory for plausibility by sending a chunk of rock into orbit and back on an ESA spacecraft, to determine whether microbes can survive not just the cold and vacuum of space, but also the violent physics of atmospheric reentry.

Update! This just in: Centauri Dreams pours water, or rather radiation, on the plausibility of panspermia.

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The facts of the (anti)matter

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Antimatter has powered countless science fictional starships, but has yet to be used as a propulsion method in reality. Reasons are manifold: firstly, it’s very difficult and expensive to make even the tiniest amount of it; and second, we’re still not entirely sure what it is or how it works. Centauri Dreams reports on the state of antimatter research, and hopes that someday we’ll be able to use it to move between the stars.

That said, successful Space Shuttle launches aside, we’re still short of a simple and affordable route to orbit, let alone our nearest stellar neighbours. JP Aerospace reckons it has an answer to getting us at least half-way there – namely making lighter-than-air flyers to ascend to a sub-orbital space station, from which super-light orbiters could be launched. It’s a low-budget lo-fi approach, but if it works, why not?

Still hungry for space-related stuff? Carnival of Space #14  is live at Universe Today.

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When cybermoths attack!

Orange fuzzy moth - cybernetic status uncertainI’ve blogged this here before, but it deserves mentioning once again just for its sheer science fictional majesty – good old DARPA have been implanting minute electro-mechanical devices into moth pupae, so that when the insects hatch they’re fully wired for … well, that’s the thing. They’re still working on a viable application for the idea (which is an odd methodology, but what the hell, they have the budget for it), but the idea of using the bugged bugs as some sort of reconnaissance companion for fighter pilots seems to be the way they want to go. [Gizmodo]

By the way, Wired’s Danger Room blog is on-site covering the current DARPATech convention, should you hunger for more weirdness of a similar ilk. [Image by Jurvetson]

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Robot rock and roll

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GTRBOT666I love my rock music, and I love robots, and I’ve been heard to remark once or twice that the two spheres of interest simply don’t converge often enough. I need never do so again, however, for thanks to Wired I have now discovered Captured! By Robots – a band that consists of one human guy in a gimp mask and a stage-full of freaky foul-mouthed automatons. Be warned – the video clips beyond the link feature synthesized swear-words and the sort of music that doesn’t make it onto daytime radio. Amen to that.