Monthly Archives: January 2009

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Trend blend for 2009

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trend_blend_2009From What’s Next Trend Maps we have a trend map for 2009. In the words of the creator:

I’ve been tearing interesting articles out of newspapers and magazines for over twenty years. And for over twenty years I’ve regularly lost them or put them somewhere I can’t find them. So eventually I had an idea. Why not re-write these articles to highlight the key points and connections and then archive them online where they would be easy to find? Better still, why not create a website so that other people could find them too?

Also check out the key innovations timeline. Or read the book.

[via Charles Stross][image from cambodia4kidsorg on flickr]

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Hyperlinking reality

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where_isResearchers at MOBVIS project are working on a pattern-recognition system that allows you to take a picture of a building on your mobile and have the software identify where you are and what you’re looking at:

…the genius of the system boils down to a higher-dimension, feature-matching algorithm developed by the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia, one of the partners of the project. It can very accurately detect minute but telling differences between similar objects, such as buildings or monuments, both by the appearance of the buildings themselves and their context in the streetscape.

Apparently the system gets it right about 80% of the time.

[from Physorg][from Unhindered by Talent on flickr]

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What will become the next non-monetary economy?

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Chris “Long Tail” Anderson has an interesting guest post from Adam Gurri that discusses non-monetary economies, like the acting profession:

The thing about acting is that the labor force (actors) actually value the ability to do work in that field that they are willing to take on work for nothing and take on other jobs as a sort of cross-subsidy.  There is a sort of demand for employment in theater, which makes competition among actors so fierce as to actually drive down wages (at time of entry at least) to zero or near zero.

His argument continues that many content-creation jobs (like blogging about your profession, for example) have such low overheads that they’re cutting the feet out from under journalists, who were paid to have the time to research topics they probably didn’t know much about to start with. There’s still ‘room at the top’ for good writers with deep knowledge (whether they started as journalists or experts), but the old career path from copyboy upwards seems to be gone for good.

Whether you see that as a good thing or a bad thing probably depends on what sort of work you do, but I think we can all agree it’s happening. The question is – after journalism, what will be the next to fall? And might the flow of money be supplemented by some sort of reputational currency, like whuffie?

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Friday Free Fiction for 2nd January

Well, here we are in a brand new year – how did that happen so quickly?

Some of you will have been back at work today, while some of you are probably still trying to shake off hangovers from the last few days, (and some of us are caught between the two)… but you can all rest easy in the knowledge that I’ve been collecting free science fiction links for the last two weeks!

Your weekend reading starts here, ladies and gents:

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Here’s a bunch from Feedbooks:

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A couple at Manybooks:

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And a singleton at Project Gutenberg:

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Here’s another freebie from Jay Lake: “Lux Fiat”

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Strange Horizons presents “Engines of Survival” by Larissa Kelly

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Hub Magazine presents “The Watchers at the Window” by Marie Faye Prior

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Clarkesworld presents:

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Via the SF Signal gang:

The good folks over at Snowbooks have posted a free short story from George Mann called “The Shattered Teacup”. It’s subtitled “A Maurice Newbury Investigation” which means it’s set in the Steampunk/Doctor Who world of his awesome novel The Affinity Bridge. Snowbooks has made the story available in both PDF and audio formats for your choice of reading and/or listening enjoyment.

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Madeline Ashby has a five-part speculative story over at the excellent Worldchanging site: “βoyfriend” follows a high-school girl of the near future in the run-up to Prom night, and is well worth a look.

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Some new titles have cropped up in Baen Books‘ free library

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Among a trio of new poems at Polu Texni is a subtly sf-nal piece called “Unruly Harvest” by friend-of-Futurismic Shira Lipkin.

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A note from Jake Freivald:

New free flash is up on Flash Fiction Online: “The Fallen Angel” by Mike Resnick and “As Their Eyes Touched God” by Robin Gillespie are the speculative fiction pieces for the month.

Cheers, Jake!

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Via the newly-revived Genre Files:

Stumbled across a new webzine the other day that looks rather interesting. It’s called Three Crow Press and it’s produced by relatively new independent genre publisher Morrigan Books.

Predominantly dark fantasy and horror according to the strapline, so not really prime Futurismic fodder… but it certainly deserves a place in the Free Fiction Sidebar of Justice. 🙂

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If you want to catch up with the latest fiction publications over at Book View Cafe, you can check out the lists of short stories, novellas and novel excerpts, which are updated on a weekly basis.

By the way, there’ll be more news to come regarding Futurismic and Book View Cafe – watch this space!

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And here’s the inevitable collection of goodies that SF Signal caught:

  • Mindflights presents “Gaming Real Life” by K C Shaw and “Santa Is My Homeboy” by Rachel V Olivier
  • Afterburn SF presents “Ismay’s Run” by Joanne Hall
  • “Kat and Mouse: Guns for Hire” is a new, weekly web serial by Abner Senires about a pair of guns-for-hire trying to eke out a living in the 2042 in the California Free State metroplex of Bay City.
  • Grantbridge Street & other misadventures presents: The Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction comic book adaptation of Michael Moorcock‘s Behold the Man [editor’s note – I’m not entirely sure this work is out of copyright; also, the page features a rather annoying autoplaying flash music gizmo which you’ll probably want to scroll down and deactivate right away. Why anyone would choose to make their site *more* like MySpace is quite beyond me, but there you go; it takes all sorts.]
  • The latest issue of Ray Gun Revival has fiction from Clinton Lawrence, Alice M Roelke, Drew Arrants, Richard S Levine, Timothy A Sayell, Martin Turton, M Keaton, Keanan Brand, and Sean T M Stiennon
  • AntipodeanSF has its latest issue up with short speculative fiction stories by David McVeigh, Richard Kerslake, Mark Farrugia, Mark Tremble, Marian Stone, Shaun A Saunders, Anna Potts, KJ Hannah Greenberg, David Such, and Simon Petrie
  • Issue #14 of The Future Fire presents stories by John Kratman, Rick Novy, and Richard Thieme
  • The Scientific Indian presents: “Live and Exclusive” by Aditya Sudarshan

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And finally, some Friday Flash: since the last round-up, Neil Beynon has published “Beats” and “New Space“, while Gareth D Jones has delivered – appropriately enough – “Another Year“, and Shaun C Green – even more appropriately – brings us “Two Thousand and Eight“.

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And that’s the lot – more than enough to keep you busy there, I’m thinking. Don’t forget we’re always open for your tip-offs and plugs, so keep ’em coming… but for now, Happy New Year to you all!