Monthly Archives: February 2009

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Friday Free Fiction for 20th February

Roll up, roll up – all the fun of the science fictional fair can be found in Futurismic‘s Friday Free Fiction roundup! Step right inside, and don’t mind the geeks, ma’am…

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Here’s a couple from ManyBooks:

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And here’s a bunch from Feedbooks:

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News of a free anthology from Mike Brotherton:

The anthology of astronomy stories I’ve been working on for the last year or two, off and on, is finally completed and available: Diamonds in the Sky.

The anthology is free and you can go there now and read the stories, most of which are original but a few of which are reprints from Analog or Asimov’s. Contributors include Hugo and Nebula award winning authors. Each story focuses on one or two key ideas from astronomy and should have some educational value, but are hopefully first and foremost simply entertaining and good quality stories. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation as a public education and outreach effort, and I’d like to reach as many readers as possible so please spread the word!

Via Jeremy Tolbert, who made the anthology website… and who you should seriously consider hiring to make yours, if you’re in need of one. Or maybe even if you’re not.

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Tor.com presents “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon” by Ken Scholes

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Strange Horizons presents “The First Time We Met” by Maria Deira

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Hub Magazine presents “A Little Mystery” by Len Bains

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COSMOS Magazine presents “Letting Go” by David Walton

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A message from Nancy Jane Moore:

I’ve put “Thirty-One Rules for Fulfilling Your Destiny” – the one piece of flash fiction in my PS Publishing Showcase collection, Conscientious Inconsistencies – up on Book View Cafe this week.

Thanks, Nancy!

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Issue #2 of Arkham Tales is now available for free download!

This issue contains fiction by K.S. Clay, Dev Jarrett, Jason Hardy, Bric Barnes, Bret Tallman, Matt Finucane, Catherine J. Gardner, John Jasper Owens, Diane Payne, and Garrett Calcaterra, and poetry by K.S. Conlon.

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Looks like I missed a few of the recent free chapters of Jason Stoddard‘s Eternal Franchise, so here are parts 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 for you to get stuck into.

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SF Signal play host to the fourth and final of their excerpt chapters from David Moody‘s Hater. See also: Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3;

Furthermore, and perhaps in an effort to make things easier for your humble collator, most of SF Signal‘s free fiction listings for the week that aren’t featured here individually can all be found in one convenient post. Result!

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Finally, let’s see what the Friday Flash Fiction gang have been up to this week:

  • Gareth L Powell has another excerpt in lieu of Friday Flash; this one is from a story called “The Winding Curve” which he co-wrote with Robert Starr.
  • Gareth D Jones has another of his translations, namely “Yn Aavuilley Moal” – “Delayed Reaction” in Manx, no less.

And delivering the more regular format, we have the following:

Plus Dan Pawley gets back in the saddle with a double dose: “The Folksinger” and “Lost in the Supermarket“.

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And that’s your lot, once again. Please forgive any typos or errors, as I’m trying to set up a new computer and have hence hurried through this round-up a little more than I should – I’m sure some eagle-eyed commeter will bring my attention to any mistakes! In the meantime, keep us posted with tip-offs and plugs, and have yourselves a great weekend.

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The fragmentation of science fiction

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Miscellaneous sf novelsio9 picked out an interesting quote the other day; here’s Jacob Wiseman of genre small press Tachyon Books talking to The Rumpus about the fragmentary market for science fiction publishing:

You’ve got all these smaller groups in the field that are no longer able to really talk to each other, so there’s less of a central conversation… You can’t just stick a rocketship on the cover of a book and expect it to sell. That’ll work for the Hard SF readership, but that’s not going to sell thousands of copies. In the 1960s there were only 150 or so books published each year, so it was really possible for a dedicated fan to read 50 to 100 of them. Now, Locus lists something like 2,500 books published in the genre annually. No one can read that much.

Futurismic is quite obviously ‘part of the problem’ here, if you care to see it as a problem (and if you concede that the ‘smaller groups can’t talk to each other’)… and I must confess that I don’t. Indeed, I’ve compared the fragmentation and expansion of sf to the proliferation of rock music subgenres many times before; it may not make things easy for publishers to make money (which is not a good thing) but it produces a panoply of diverse iterations from a basic cultural idea… which is great for the end user because it means that there’s more likely to be something that really flicks your switches (though it may be more difficult to discover than the latest big-name thriller).

If you read Futurismic, I presume you have an interest in what might be described as ‘non-classic’ sf – but do you think the proliferation of subgenres have weakened the core appeal of the genre, or have they just distributed it more widely through multiple cultural structures? [image by yours truly]

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Lubing the unregulated edges of the internet

cellphone solar chargerIsn’t that the best title ever? Jan Chipchase strikes again, talking about the anthropological outcomes of the proposed universal micro-USB phone charger format:

Widespread adoption of Micro-USB lowers barriers to entry for would-be services providers – they currently need support a range of memory cards, umpteen data cables, Bluetooth and InfraRed […] A mobile phone optimised Bollywood movie can take 20 minutes to transfer from a laptop onto a generic micro-memory card – currently it’s hardly convenient.

If you follow Chipchase’s Future Perfect blog (and if you enjoy the stuff we talk about here at Futurismic, I suggest that you really should do) you’ll be aware that developing nations are far more dependent on their cellphones for infrastructural purposes than we are in the West; universal accessories would remove a number of small and pointless obstacles from the flow of commerce. In other words:

There is a place at the edges of the internet where the level of friction makes content and data grind to a halt. It’s largely unregulated. And it just got seriously lubed.

[Image by Ken Banks, kiwanja.net]

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The costing of ebooks

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Yeah, another ebooks post, but new material is coming in so thick and fast that every day I seem to find an answer to a question that was raised the day before. Point in case – why aren’t ebooks priced at a tiny percentage of the cost of a hardback? Take it away, HarperCollins:

We still pay for the author advance, the editing, the copyediting, the proofreading, the cover and interior design, the illustrations, the sales kit, the marketing efforts, the publicity, and the staff that needs to coordinate all of the details that make books possible in these stages. The costs are primarily in these previous stages; the difference between physical and electronic production is minimal. In fact, the paper/printing/binding of most books costs about $2.00…

In other words, a $26 hardback equates to a $24 ebook.

Now, I’m in no position to refute those figures, but I don’t think it takes an economics expert to look at them and realise why the publishers are struggling at the moment; if their analysis people can only shave off $2 per unit by removing the printing, shipping, warehousing and remaindering from the equation, then there’s a business model that was on shaky ground before the ebook entered the picture. I suspect the bits I’ve bolded are where the haemorrhaging could be stemmed most effectively.

But it’s easy to say that from the outside looking in; if anyone among Futurismic‘s readership can supply hard figures on this stuff, I’d be glad to give you a soapbox, so drop us a line.

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Don’t burn all the fossil fuels (yet)

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icebergAccording to Professor Gary Shaffer of the University of Copenhagen we should stop burning fossil fuels now so that we will have enough coal, oil, and gas left when we need to fend off the next ice age over the next several hundred thousand years:

…for a management scenario whereby fossil fuel use was reduced globally by 20% in 2020 and 60% in 2050 (compared to 1990 levels), maximum global warming was less than one degree Celsius above present. Similar reductions in fossil fuel use have been proposed by various countries like Germany and Great Britain.

In this scenario, combustion pulses of large remaining fossil fuel reserves were then tailored to raise atmospheric CO2 content high and long enough to parry forcing of ice age onsets by summer radiation minima as long as possible. In this way our present equable interglacial climate was extended for about 500,000 years, three times as long as in the “business as usual” case.

Nice to see some people are cranking up their Buxton indices into the 100, 000 years range.

[via FuturePundit][image from nick  russill on flickr]