Monthly Archives: September 2008

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Friday Free Fiction for 26th September

Another week, another inbox brimming with free-to-read science fiction stories. Hell knows we could all do with a bit of escapism right now… so dive on in, free fiction fans!

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Manybooks is keepin’ it old-school, yo:

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Meanwhile, over at Feedbooks:

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You can read yet more of Paul McAuley‘s new novel; chapter three of The Quiet War awaits your eyeballs.

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Futurismic alumnus Tobias Buckell has been throwing up the first few chapters of his new novel Sly Mongoose on his website: here are chapters 1, 2 and 3.

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This week’s Strange Horizons fiction offering is “Cowboy Angel (Part 2)” by Samantha Cope.

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From the people at Apex:

For your consideration, “What You Know” (PDF) by Geoffrey Girard, one of the exciting new stories in Jodi Lee’s Apex anthology Courting Morpheus.

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Via SF Signal:

  • Mike Gordon has posted free excerpts of his novel Tracks at his website
  • Douglas Clegg goes one further with the entire text of his novel Afterlife
  • SpaceWesterns presents Part 1 of “The Mound” by H. P. Lovecraft and & Zealia Bishop

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Gwyneth Jones has just made available the entire text of her seminal Bold As Love novel, the first in the series of the same name, in PDF format.

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A message from dj lotu5:

Hi! Previously, I submitted my story “Tissue Banking”, which you linked to. Here is another story in the same vein that you may enjoy: “Laser Skin Reinscription“

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Here’s your Friday Flash Fiction action for the week:

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Non-sf online comics bonus via Scumlord Warren Ellis:

Paul Sizer’s been serialising his new music graphic novel BPM online while the physical book’s been printing in Malaysia. As I write, there’s something like 47 pages of the book up there for free reading.

I took a quick look, and ended up devouring the lot; beautiful colourful artwork, and if you’ve ever been into the DJ/club/dance music scene, it should be right up your street.

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That’s your fiction thrift for the week, folks – hope you enjoy. Don’t forget to send in your tip-offs and shameless self-plugs for next week; deadline is 1800 GMT every Friday! Have a great weekend…

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Your backyard nuclear plant will be ready in five years

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Energy crisis? What energy crisis? You’ll be laughing all night in your floodlit garden under the gaze of your jealous fossil-fuel using neighbours once you’ve got Hyperion’s clean, safe and portable[1] backyard nuclear reactor up and running!

Hyperion Power Generation - backyard nuclear reactor

Yes indeed; using good clean water as both moderator and coolant, the Hyperion reactor simply cannot become a runaway reaction, and the uranium hydride fuel is useless for making weapons with – so you’ll not get any politically-motivated sanctions imposed on you by coalitions of powerful nation-states!

The Hyperion reactor will start shipping in the summer of 2013, so start saving now! Or alternatively take out a loan based on the projected amount of energy you’ll be able to sell back to an increasingly desperate and expensive national grid – provided you can find a bank that’s guaranteed not to collapse[2], or a cooperative government administration to bail you out when the worst happens.

[ 1 – 2.5m tall concrete unit can be transported by most commercially-available heavy plant machinery. ]

[ 2 – You may want to consider researching financial institutions based in China or other Asian nations. ]

[Story originally found at grinding.be; image from Hyperion’s website, and there’s an interview with surprisingly lucid and woo-free Hyperion CEO; please note snarky tone of post is a form of gallows humour after an hour of wading through the day’s news.]

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Nothing says “future” like a big fat airship

As Charles Stross says, “Zeppelins have always been an icon of futurism” and I’ve always wondered why the heck we haven’t gotten over the Hindenburg and moved in to our Bright New Future. The Register gives us the lowdown on all the various engineering problems that need to be overcome for airships to be viable as a mass transport system, and how engineers are trying to solve them:

A Ukrainian airship visionary based in California has won further US military funding to develop his miraculous “Aeroscraft” sky-leviathan design. However, some question marks remain over the craft’s unique – almost miraculous – buoyancy-control technology.

[image from the Register story]

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Sarah Palin’s Second Life

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Two different Sarah Palin avatars in Second LifeYou don’t have to pick sides to say that Sarah Palin’s nomination as Republican VP candidate has been controversial. No medium is devoid of discussion about her, be it positive or negative – and even in the metaverse of Second Life, both poles of opinion are represented.

But of course, a virtual world allows ways of expression support or disdain that are arguably impossible elsewhere, like creating walking talking embodiments of Palin’s attributes as perceived by the creator. As Wagner James Au at New World Notes reports, some are positive:

“Sarah has some pretty distinct features,” she says. “I’m used to making more round and smooth featured faces, and while I could just make a square head I wanted to try for something more realistic.” She pretty much kept her Palin avatar’s body generic. “I can only guess as to what type body frame and build she has.”

While some are more critical:

… the Sarah Palin in the fur bikini, which its creator, Cymbal Constantine, developed as a satirical riff off the notorious bikini Photoshop.

“I don’t agree with her hunting views or her views regarding women’s rights,” Ms. Constantine tells me. “I am highlighting her extremist views which I do not feel the media is doing a good job of [covering]. As a woman, Sarah is deeply insulting to me.”

It’s hard to concentrate on our conversation, because Bobby the chatbot baby insists on gurgling random sentences out loud. “You make me feel loved!” he babbles.

Cymbal Constantine nods to him. “My child of course. Prop baby.”

Second Life’s much-touted potential as the next platform for internet business seems to have been moved to a back burner, but I think its potential for creative peaceful protest and socio-political satire has yet to be fully explored. [image from linked New World Notes article]

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Dark matter, dark energy…and now, dark flow

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800px-Big_bangIf this doesn’t boggle your mind, your mind is un-boggleable (Via Space.com):

Patches of matter in the universe seem to be moving at very high speeds and in a uniform direction that can’t be explained by any of the known gravitational forces in the observable universe. Astronomers are calling the phenomenon “dark flow.” The stuff that’s pulling this matter must be outside the observable universe, researchers conclude.

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A theory called inflation posits that the universe we see is just a small bubble of space-time that got rapidly expanded after the Big Bang. There could be other parts of the cosmos beyond this bubble that we cannot see. In these regions, space-time might be very different, and likely doesn’t contain stars and galaxies (which only formed because of the particular density pattern of mass in our bubble). It could include giant, massive structures much larger than anything in our own observable universe. These structures are what researchers suspect are tugging on the galaxy clusters, causing the dark flow.

“The structures responsible for this motion have been pushed so far away by inflation, I would guesstimate they may be hundreds of billions of light years away, that we cannot see even with the deepest telescopes because the light emitted there could not have reached us in the age of the universe,” Kashlinsky said in a telephone interview. “Most likely to create such a coherent flow they would have to be some very strange structures, maybe some warped space time. But this is just pure speculation.”

Even though I was a teenager in the 1970s, I don’t say this very often, but…far OUT!

And I mean that literally.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]cosmology, Big Bang, astronomy, outer space[/tags]