Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
[ Be sure to check out the Does Not Equal Cafepress store for webcomic merchandise featuring Canadians with geometrically-shaped heads! ]
You’d probably be amazed just how many fiction submissions we get here at Futurismic – it’s more than I ever imagined we’d get, and the number grows by the month.
And that means our fearless fiction editor Chris East has a lot of work to do, none of which makes him a red cent, and it’s high time the poor guy had a holiday. So as of today, Futurismic is closed to fiction submissions until June 1st 2009; we’re in the fortunate position of having a decent inventory of contracted pieces for the next few months, so we want to give Chris a chance to hit Inbox Zero on the submissions and take a week or so off.
So, if you’ve got a piece you’re almost ready to send in, put it in a drawer for a few weeks, and then whip it out for a final polish (ahem) before sending it in when we reopen at the beginning of June. Sound like a plan? Lovely!
Enjoy your weekend, folks. 🙂
Happy May Day! Even if your religious or political leanings don’t care for the date, it’s not only a Friday but the first weekday of the month – which means we’ve just published our regular fictional offering, and you should go read Stephen Gaskell’s “Under an Arctic Sky” right away.
And when you’re all done with that, you can get started on this little list of free science fiction on the web as a way of filling up your weekend…
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Here’s a bunch from ManyBooks:
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And a couple from FeedBooks:
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HUB Magazine #84 features “My Dad’s Idea” by Llinos Cathryn
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I’ve lost track of what I’ve linked to at Shadow Unit and what I haven’t, as the DVD Extras don’t come with numbers to sort the order out. So here’s the latest two pieces, just in case: “Dragons” and “Disintegration“.
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Jason Stoddard delivers chapter 6.1 of Eternal Franchise
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Tor.com presents “TVA Baby” by Terry Bisson
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Via Ken MacLeod:
My colleague and fellow Genomics Forum Writer in Residence Pippa Goldschmidt‘s short story “The Competition for Immortality” is now online at LabLit.
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From good friend o’ the site Nancy Jane Moore:
I ripped my free Book View Cafe flash fiction for this week straight from the headlines: “How to Deal With the Coming Crisis” is about swine flu. By the way, I post a free flash fiction every Thursday on Book View Cafe, and we generally have new free fiction on the site every day.
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Via BoingBoing and loads of other places:
“[To make Thoughtcrime Experiments,] Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson selected nine mind-squibbling SF and fantasy stories from the slush pile, commissioned five works of art, paid the authors and artists, and packaged the whole thing as a high-quality anthology that you’re free to copy and remix. Artists include E-Sheep’s Patrick Farley and fanfic darling Erin Ptah; authors include Mary Anne Mohanraj, Carole Lanham, and Ken Liu. We also wrote an essay describing the process, which you can read if you’re interested in how we did it or what the SF/fantasy market looks like from the editor’s perspective.”
Looks like you can get Thoughtcrime Experiments in multiple formats from ManyBooks already, too.
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The SF Signal team obviously sensed how busy I’ve been this week, and did a couple of round-up posts of free fiction links in additio to scraping up the following little tidbits from the far crevices of the intertubes:
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And to cap it off, there’s one bit of Friday Flash Fiction this week, courtesy of “R-zero” by Sumit Dam.
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And we’re done – so get out of here and enjoy your weekend! But don’t forget to let us know about cool stuff we should be mentioning here, OK?
That’s the prediction of Nemertes Research, which will be publishing a report later this year warning that the Web has reached a critical point that could lead first to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes in a time, and eventually regular brownouts that will slow and even freeze their computers. (Times Online via KurzweilAI.net.)
The primary culprit is burgeoning demand for high-bandwidth video: the report notes that the amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire Internet in all of 2000, and new video applications such as BBC iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch high-def TV on their computers. (And I guess by providing links to those sites I’m contributing to the problem!)
Monthly traffic across the Internet is currently running at about eight exabytes (an exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes), and a recent study at the University of Minnesota estimates its growing by at least 60 percent a year–and that study didn’t take into account growing demand in China and India.
Engineers are struggling to stay ahead of demand, and find other ways to deal with impending deadlock (such as the LHC Computing Grid, a parallel network designed to handle the massive amounts of data the Large Hadron Collider will produce), but it may be impossible.
In other words, we may be living in the Golden Age of the Internet. But if it all crumbles around us, at least we’ll have something to tell the grandchildren.
(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)
[tags]computers,Internet,bandwidth,communications,Web[/tags]
We publish writers from all over the globe here at Futurismic, but this month I get to present a story by someone who lives damn near on my doorstep! Stephen Gaskell comes from Brighton here in the UK, but “Under an Arctic Sky” is as far from the faded Regency glamour of his seaside hometown as you could imagine. It’s a powerful story of dedication to a cause against the fiercest of oppression, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did!
Slava ran.
Ran as fast as he could. His icy breath speared the air. His footfalls made slapping sounds against the packed snow. The temperature must have been minus forty, but he didn’t feel the cold.
He didn’t look back.
Didn’t want to see the oil well derricks. Didn’t want to see the scarred black tundra. Didn’t want to see the line of nodding donkeys and their belches of fire.
Most of all, he didn’t want to see how close the snowmobiles were, buzzing behind him like angry bees.
In his mind’s eye he streaked ahead to the northerly reaches of the Kanin peninsula. Past herds of caribou, past the last encampments of the Nenets, past the odd polar bear loping away on the horizon.
The back of his neck felt stiff, as though somebody had kicked him there with a steel-capped boot. He stretched a gloved hand over his head to rub at the aching spot.
And stopped dead.
There was something embedded in his neck. Continue reading NEW FICTION: UNDER AN ARCTIC SKY by Stephen Gaskell
