Monthly Archives: August 2007

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Friday Free Fiction for 3rd August

Here’s your weekly serving of free genre fiction on the web:

Steve Libbey emailed to tell us about The Secret World Chronicle, a podcast novel series he’s been doing with Mercedes Lackey since last year; the whole of the first book is already available, plus some extras to tide us over until the next book starts being rolled out. Steve says, “the series is a sci-fi take on a world where heroic and villainous metahumans live alongside normal people. Needless to say, it is a blast to plot and write.” Sounds interesting. If you listen to it, why not email us a review here at Futurismic?

Nancy Jane Moore dropped us a line to let us know that she is among a batch of writers to have a story published in the latest issue of Farrago’s Wainscot, a free webzine featuring stories which are “quirky ones that might not quite fit other places,” in Nancy’s own words.

The first 63 pages of Joe Abercrombie’s novel The Blade Itself are available at Pyr’s website.

Project Gutenberg has added downloadable versions of an old Harl Vincent space opera, Creatures of Vibration, Project Mastodon by Clifford D Simak and Paul Ernst’s The Radiant Shell.

Via SF Signal: Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Colours Of Space is available as a free ebook or audiobook.

Darker Matter #5 is live – and it’s apparently the last ever issue, too. Which sucks (though we understand the cause).

Clarkesworld #11 is also out and about.

Stephen Baxter’s classic short story “Raft” has appeared at InfinityPlus, and bestSF.net are hosting the full text of Chris Roberson’s “Companion To Owls”.

And the not-fiction-but-related-reads-of-note:

Locus Online has excerpts from an interview with short story craftsman Paolo Bacigalupi.

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.

Also, I must acknowledge all the other blogs that I have cribbed and compiled this information from – cheers, folks! I’ll be adding you to the blogroll when I get a spare moment.

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Howard Waldrop (and Friends) at Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

Howard23DHoward Waldrop is a brilliant, iconoclastic and thoughtful writer. His prose is as dense as depleted uranium, and as intricately constructed as DNA. He’s blogging at Not A Journal, the blog of the crew behind Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. His first essay is a typically Waldrop-ian journey from Rozerem to beavers to the opening of the American west and the Civil War.

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Liberating The Sail

33-SmThe art of setting and trimming sails has a long and noble history, but when you think about it, it’s an art that exists because of fundamental flaws in the technology. Sails are fixed to a few basic positions that must be carefully tended to translate the impetus of wind into forward motion. Dan Tracy, “an enthusiastic sailor and fisherman from Mount Desert Island, Maine,” took a page from the kiteboarder’s playbook and attached a really big kite to a trimaran. Flying a kite lets him catch higher, steadier winds, from a wider variety of angles, to power his boat. Check him out on your next visit to Hawaii. [treehugger]

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The Future of Search?

Logo BigA company called Powerset will be making a new natural language search technology available to the public in September. If the company’s claims are true (as credulously reported in the Technology Review), their search technology will be fundamentally different than the many algorithms that have been used in the past. Instead of developing results based on word and synonym matching, Powerset’s technology teases out the deep linguistic structures embodied in the search queries and in the searched text to make both more accurate and less obvious connections. Points to Powerset CEO Barney Pell for admitting that:

There was not one piece of technology that solved the problem… but instead, it was the unification of many theories and fragments that pulled the project together.

…and that most of the technology was licensed from Xerox PARC. If you’re interested you can sign up for the beta on their website. [kurzweilai]

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Bruce Schneier and Kip Hawley in Conversation

Kip HawleyBruce Schneier, that pragmatic and insightful observer of the so-called security state, is interviewing Kip Hawley, the head of the Transportation Safety Administration. The interview is going up on Schneier’s blog in 5 installments. Read part 1 to start.

Kip Hawley comes out sounding almost reasonable, though Schneier demolishes most of Hawley’s points (or at least those points that don’t reduce to, “it’s secret, so just trust me”).