Monthly Archives: August 2008

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Friday Free Fiction for 1st August

It’s a weekday, and it’s the first of the month, which means that there’s a brand new original science fiction story here on Futurismic for you to read!

Alex Wilson‘s “Dry Frugal With Death Rays” is a superb slice of dark satire, so I’d like to suggest you start there before getting to grips with our usual round-up of free fiction elsewhere in the intertubes.

All done? OK, here we go…

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Just two titles from Manybooks.net:

And nothing at all from FeedBooks this week… I guess many of the volunteers who transcribe these stories are now burdened with summertime duties involving younglings. Hey, everyone needs a holiday, right?

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John “Electric Velocipede” Klima is climbing onto the Friday freebies bandwagon over at Tor.com:

Welcome to what will be a regular Friday feature from me. I am going to post a Weekend Getaway every Friday. This will be a link to a piece of short fiction that’s available online for free. I’ll discuss the piece(s) and give you links. Then you feel free to play in the comments and provide your thoughts on the work.

Here are the stories:

You’ll need to visit the Tor site to catch the discussion, of course, but I’ve provided the direct links to the stories for those who want to get straight to the action.

That post is from last week, by the way – a downside of being UK-based is that my Friday is finishing just as most of the States is digging into the second cup of coffee, so sometimes things get posted too late for me to add. 🙁

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While we’re talking about Hal Duncan, the man himself reports that there’s “a wee fairy story of mine called “The Behold of the Eye“” available in the latest issue of Lone Star Stories.

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More Shadow Unit DVD extras: “Two-Handed Grip“, and the tenth part of Vigil (which has no title I can accurately discern).

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Apex Online‘s latest fiction contribution is “In the Seams” by Andrew C Porter:

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Fiction

DRY FRUGAL WITH DEATH RAYS by Alex Wilson

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This month’s slice of Futurismic fiction comes from the widely-published Alex Wilson. Dry Frugal With Death Rays is a dark satire of office politics, corporate bureaucracy, thwarted ambition and revenge gone awry – enjoy!

Dry Frugal With Death Rays

by Alex Wilson

The ergonomic cubicle gel came up to Sal’s chin. Five hours of immersion had left the pads of his fingers wrinkled and slimy. He couldn’t wipe his eyes without making it worse. It was the most important morning of his life, and he was stuck in his cubicle corral with a computer that insisted he wasn’t.

“And you’ve looked, right?” Tech support asked, clearly siding with the computer on this one. “At the latch? You’ve tried turning around and looking to see whether it’s open or closed?”

“Yes,” Sal said. “I’ve looked.” He tried emphasizing the urgency with his arms. In training videos, they iterated how body language carried over into the voice, even though Sal found sloshing around in gel more distracting than helpful on client calls.

Continue reading DRY FRUGAL WITH DEATH RAYS by Alex Wilson →

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The Pensieve: memory augmentation device

memoryStraight out of the Greatest Kid’s Franchise of the Century So Far (please enlighten me if there is one greater) we have a transhumanist/human-augmentation project from IBM:

The technology, nicknamed “PENSIEVE” by the IBM team, uses associative recall to make connections between pieces of related data acquired by a person. The advantage of the new technology is its ability to understand the context in which data is captured, then connect various data, and then use this knowledge to help bring the correct information to a person when it is needed.

Along with similar projects, like MyLifeBits from Gordon Bell at Microsoft, technologies like this will presumably be the first steps towards the extremely advanced memory augmentation systems envisioned by Ray Kurzweil in The Singularity is Near.

[story via Slashdot][image from edans on flickr]