OK, folks; for those of you who haven’t already done the same or similar, yours truly is trundling off to do the family thing for a few days, so Futurismic will be going into a short hibernation as a result. I’ll probably be popping in briefly between Xmas and New Year’s, but please don’t be surprised if content is minimal – I have some work projects to finish up, for a start, and I could do with a bit of brain-downtime. Hell, I think we all could, AMIRITEZ?

So have a great holiday, of whatever denominational flavour (or lack thereof) you prefer. But just before I go, here’s a note in my inbox from from new UK indie publisher called Fingerpress:

[We]  recently published Smallworld by Hugo-nominated author Dominic Green. The book’s available in paperback, and also can be downloaded under a Creative Commons license from here: http://genres.fingerpress.co.uk/smallworld.html

And the blurb from that page reads as follows:

Mount Ararat, a world the size of an asteroid yet with Earth-standard gravity, plays host to a strangely confident family whose children are protected by the Devil, a mechanical killing machine, from such passers-by as Mr von Trapp (an escapee from a penal colony), the Made (manufactured humans being hunted by the State), and the super-rich clients of a gravitational health spa established at Mount Ararat’s South Pole.

But as more and more visitors to the tiny rock are dispatched with cold efficiency by the faster-than-sight robot, the children (and their secretive parents) start to wonder who put the robot there, and who – or what – is really in need of protection.

Sounds like it has a Robert Sheckley kind of vibe to it… so if you fancy a free read, go download it, why don’t you?

Happy holidays, folks, and thanks for reading. 🙂