Craig Venter had better watch out – he’s got some competition. Experts in the field predict we’ll see the first successful attempts at creating “wet artificial lifeforms” within three to ten years.
Monthly Archives: August 2007
Winning Mars – free science fiction novel from Jason Stoddard
As already noted at T3Aspace and reported by Gareth L. Powell, Jason Stoddard has decided to release an entire unpublished novel for free under a Creative Commons licence. Winning Mars is an expansion of the novella by the same name that appeared in Interzone #196.
Now, in the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that Jason and I are friends, that he helped me out by building my concrete compound of doom in Second Life for me (and made a fine job of it too), and that I may have started this habit by convincing him to release his short story “Fermi Packet” in a similar fashion.
But in case you’re thinking that means you should take my recommendation with a pinch of salt, bear in mind that as well as being published in Interzone (more than once), he’s also sold short stories to us here at Futurismic, as well as Talebones, Darker Matter and Strange Horizons, among others.
What I’m trying to say is that this guy writes great science fiction, and that Winning Mars will be well worth your time. At this price (you know, like, free), how could it not be? All he asks is that you let him know what you though of it after you’ve read it, positive or negative.
So, what are you waiting for? Download the PDF of Winning Mars now, while stocks last!
[Cross-posted to VCTB]
Career advice for writers, by writers
My feed reader is full of useful advice for writers once again, so I thought I’d share the wealth:
Jeff Vandermeer’s Evil Monkey delivers the second short sharp installment of his Guide to Creative Writing:
“Alas, market predictions aren’t like assholes, because everyone has two or three, and they usually serve little purpose.”
Luc Reid tries to nail down what it is that makes certain stories rise from “good, but not quite what we’re looking for” to “sold”:
“So what makes a story rise above its fellows, inspire love, stand out? The intuitive response would be that it does the things we talked about better. The characters are stronger, the plot is more compelling, the description is more vivid. But usually standing out is going to mean something else, and it’s going to differ from writer to writer and sometimes from story to story. The stories that rise above are not just more competent than the stories that don’t, although more competent is always better.”
Moving beyond the writing itself and into the territory of promotional work, Charlie Stross explains the dos and don’ts of public readings with his usual dry humour:
“The water jug isn’t an optional extra. I usually take the precaution of bringing along a drink of some sort, simply because my throat dries out after ten or fifteen minutes of speaking and if I’m scheduled late in a day of readings, the folks providing supporting facilities such as jugs of water tend to be getting a bit erratic themselves.”
And finally, David Louis Edelman has some advice on how to self-promote with ethical integrity:
“3. Avoid glaring sins of omission. This is a difficult guideline to follow, because it’s very subjective. Don’t use ellipses to claim that your book is “an absolutely terrific… thriller” when the actual review states that your book is “an absolutely terrific example of what not to do when writing a thriller.” Don’t try to sell to a group of Vietnam vets by claiming that your book has a Vietnam vet in it, while conveniently forgetting to mention that said character gets run over by a truck on page 4.”
Ah! The intarwebs: helping aspiring writers (to avoid writing by supplying them enough advice from genuine writers that they can convince themselves reading it is a more valuable way to spend their time than actually writing) since 1997!
[Cross-posted to VCTB]
Friday Free Fiction for 17th August
Orbit are sharing the first chapter of The Electric Church by Jeff Somers.
Project Gutenberg has uploaded Valley of Dreams by Stanley G. Weinbaum, and Brain Twister by Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer.
AntipodeanSF Issue #110 is now live – lots of free fiction to be had there.
Robert Reed’s Eight Episodes is up for grabs for free on Fictionwise.
Electric Velocipede (an excellent small-press print mag in its own right) has made the Jeffrey Ford story “The Way He Does It” available online.
Concatenation has David Brin’s short piece”Reality Check”, written for Nature Magazine’s “Futures” series, available as a PDF.
In a similar vein, Cosmos Magazine has “Time Travelling: A Quick Reference Guide” by Robert Friedman.
Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine is sharing the love with Scott Bradfield’s story, “Angry Duck”.
Alan DeNiro has released a lengthy sf narrative poem entitled “The Stations” under a Creative Commons licence … so you can not only read it, but remix it too, should you wish.
Last but not least, and not strictly fictional either, John “Bacon-Cat” Scalzi has interviewed Futurismic’s very own Tobias Buckell about his writing career, and the pervasive influence his Caribbean roots have had on his work.
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.
Speed of light exceeded? Er, probably not.
You may have noticed the widely reported story that a team of German scientists have managed to make photons exceed the speed of light in the course of an experiment. Well, let’s just say that’s probably not exactly what happened. [Engadget]