Monthly Archives: June 2009

Fiction

NEW FICTION: AWAKENING IN SIX PARTS by Karen M Roberts

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It’s time for another fresh piece of fiction here at Futurismic, and this one’s something quite unique. “Awakening in Six Parts” is a hugely immersive and somewhat gonzo tale about dreams, mathematics and relationships, set in a tomorrow whose strangeness only emphasises its plausibility. Karen M Roberts has created something that is mysterious and revelatory at once; this story has been haunting my own sleep since I first read it, and I hope it does the same for you. Enjoy!

Awakening in Six Parts

by Karen M. Roberts

One

It wasn’t precisely forbidden for a husband and a wife to discuss their dreams, but it wasn’t the sort of thing decent people did. Max’s coffee cup rattled against the saucer when Claudette raised the topic over breakfast.

“I think my night owl is defective.” Inside her teacup, some leaves had escaped the strainer. She rocked the cup in her hands, watching them swirl.

Without lifting his eyes from the editorials page, Max said, “Did you run it through the diagnostic programme?”

“It flew off before I had the chance. But the dreams, they were… ” Claudette broke off, unable to make sense of the vivid and impossible images that crowded on her tongue. “Do you ever have unsettling dreams?” She peered across the laminate tabletop. Max raised the page of newsprint closer to his nose.

The lucid dreams provided by the night owls were realistic and recurring, a secondary life experienced while the body rested. Who had designed the owls no one knew; they had simply arrived, winging down with the gift of pleasure without consequence, of fulfillment without price. Claudette had never spoken to Max about her dream husbands, and she had no desire to know about the fantasy women with whom he spent his nights. Continue reading NEW FICTION: AWAKENING IN SIX PARTS by Karen M Roberts →

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Reaching an accomodation with cancer

cancer cellsIn the Western world at least, cancer is one of our most intractable enemies; medical science has advanced hugely in the last half-century, and cancer mortality rates have fallen as a result of preventative measures, but the essential approach remains the same as it ever has been – eradicate the tumour cells from the body at any cost.

Mathematical oncologist Robert Gatenby reckons that’s the wrong route, though. He suggests that rather than doing our utmost to purge cancer from the body, we should instead seek to reach a form of compromise with it – playing it to a stalemate, in other words, treating it as an inevitability to be controlled rather than an alien incursion to be expelled.

How people treat invasive species can provide an analogy for thinking about cancer therapy. In treating a field for a pest, for example, you might treat three-quarters of it with a pesticide, and leave the other quarter untreated. Pesticide-sensitive pests remain there, and they spread out into the field after treatment, preventing pesticide resistance from becoming dominant.

Using pesticides on an entire field is like what we’re doing with cancer now. And we all agree that we’d rather get rid of the pests altogether, but if you can’t do it, if every time you have an infestation you treat it and get resistance, then you try a different strategy. The alternative is to try to reduce the pest population so that it doesn’t damage your crop, and accept the fact that they’re going to be there. That’s what I’m talking about with cancer.

There’s a certain seductive logic to Gatenby’s idea; it chimes in harmony with the more systemic approaches we’re starting to take to agriculture and the environment, for example. Obviously, there’s a lot of research to be done to check whether or not he’s on to something, but the prospect of higher cancer survival rates using the drugs and treatments we already have to hand is a heartening one. [image by euthman]

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Futurismic re-opens to fiction submissions

The title says it all, folks; we’ve given Chris a bit of breathing space, but now it’s time to re-open the floodgates for new fiction submissions here at Futurismic. If you’ve got something you think is ready to send to us, go give the submission guidelines another read-through, then click on through to the submissions webform and send us your masterpiece!

If you want to know what sort of standards you’re up against, keep your eyes peeled – there’ll be a brand new story on the site later today. In the meantime, why not dig through our previous publications?

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Romania’s balloon-launch moonshot

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The MoonIt’s been a while since space exploration was the sole province of national behemoths like NASA, despite the relative infancy of the commercial space sector. A small budget might prevent you from launching human payloads, but there’s still plenty of options at the bottom end of the funding scale… along with some tantalising enticements for an outfit with big dreams.  [image by ComputerHotline]

Romanian company ARCA is one such outfit, and they’re taking a stab at the Google-funded Lunar X Prize using comparatively cheap and simple technology:

… a balloon that can carry ARCA’s European Lunar Explorer (ELE) space probe into the upper atmosphere, eliminating the need for a traditional launch pad and allowing ARCA to launch close to the equator from a sea platform. The “0” pressure balloon design is similar to a giant black hot-air balloon that uses solar energy to heat the air inside, instead of the burner that normal hot-air balloons use.

Once the balloon soars above 11 miles (18 km), the three-stage rocket slung below will fire and boost itself into low Earth orbit. ELE will then travel to the moon and deploy its Lunar Lander, which resembles a knobby rubber ball that uses its own rocket engine to ensure a soft landing.

ARCA’s lander itself isn’t really designed to do much when (or rather if) it arrives on the Lunar surface; because of the way the X Prize is defined, reaching the Moon is more important than achieving anything there. But as with most private space-launch initiatives, it’s all about proof-of-concept – once they know they can make the journey, they can start thinking about what to cart along next time.

Balloon-launch projects always remind me of Zion Cluster from William Gibson’s early novels, which – if I remember correctly – was colonised by exactly this sort of cheap-and-cheerful bootstrap approach.