All posts by Paul Raven

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 17th April

Another week flies by – is it just me or are they getting faster? Haven’t I said that before? What if I’m caught in some sort of temporal loop in a simulated universe? What if none of you are actually real?

Ah, who cares – it’s Friday, and there’s free science fiction stories to read on the internet. Get stuck in!

***

Here’s a couple at ManyBooks:

***

And a bona fide classic from one of the genre’s best known names at FeedBooks:

***

HUB Magazine presents “The Not Knowing” by Conrad Williams

***

Subterranean Online presents “Under the Honey” by Liz Williams

***

Strange Horizons presents “The Man Who Lost the Sea” by Theodore Sturgeon, a classic from 1959

***

Jason Stoddard presents chapter 5.1 of Eternal Franchise

***

Jeremiah Tolbert presents “The Kansas Jayhawk vs. The Midwest Monster Squad“; this awesome geek-gonzo (geekzo? gonzeek?) story was published in Interzone a few years back, and comes with my sincerest recommendation as a fun read.

***

Shadow Unit has posted another DVD Extra:  “Disintegration”

***

Via Tor.com (and others – saw it there first), Lone Star Stories are giving away a free PDF version of their recent anthology, the Lone Star Stories Reader.

***

Via Cory at BoingBoing comes an opportunity to read a story originally written for him and his wife as a honeymoon gift: “(Nothing But) Flowers” by John McDaid

***

Also via BoingBoing (and many many others), Steampunk Magazine returns after a long hiatus with the free-to-download 5th issue of the subgenre-defining zine.

***

Just sneaking into my inbox before I leave the house comes a message from Lee Giminez:

I wanted to let you know that my science fiction short story, “September 12“, was just published in The Cynic Magazine.

Cheers, Lee!

***

Unusually, we seem to have caught almost all the same things as SF Signal this week, though they do have a beefy round-up post from earlier today that might be worth looking through. And don’t forget they’ve collected links to all the free-to-read Hugo Award nominee stories as well.

***

As my schedule in the world beyond the internet demands I be elsewhere this afternoon, I only have one piece of Friday Flash to report at the time of compiling this post, namely “Patterns” by Gaie Sebold. All later arrivals will be collected up in next week’s post, as always.

***

And there’ you have it; don’t forget to send us your tip-offs, plugs and links about good sf stuff to read on the web. In the meantime, I’m off to London to meet none other than Tim Powers – have a good weekend!

Blog

Discounts and risk in the ebooks market

2 Comments

Remember that post from Evan Schnittman a few weeks back – the one titled “Why ebooks must fail”? Well, he promised to start discussing potentially workable models for the ebooks business, and that’s exactly what he’s now doing.

The first follow-up is titled “Discounts Must Align to Risks”; it looks at the current deep-discounting procedures that prevail in the dead-tree books business as it stands (which share risk between publishers and retailers), and presents three possible ways for a similar system to be applied to the otherwise intangible ebook:

The following ideas, if massaged and improved on by enough smart people, may help evolve trade ebook selling into a practice that wisely shares the risk and provides stimulus and margins for all involved. These models are not new – they are culled from today’s trade retail models. With that in mind, here are three discount models for discussion.

The first is called On Consignment, and it would operate exactly as it does today, except with shorter, perhaps dramatically shorter, discounts. Discounts should align to risk and there is very little risk being shared in this model.

The second model is called Advance Purchase (non-Returnable). Rather than rely on the timing of sell-through at the reseller, publishers are paid for ebook sales in advance. So, resellers that wish to carry an ebook of a publisher can order it as they currently do, or they can purchase the number of “sales” they believe they would make in a given period of time, and pay for this upfront at a greater discount. For this model, a retailer should receive discounts similar to those given on non-refundable sales in print.

The third model is called Refund for Credit (Returnable). Essentially it is a “returns” model for the ebook market. It’s designed to allow retailers to take risks on a larger pool of titles, as they can receive credit by “returning” some of the advance “sales.” This model helps retailers get a better discount for a title than they would if they order On Consignment, but less than the Advance Purchase model. It also helps publishers, as there would be greater incentive to pre-pay for sales for a wider variety of titles, enhancing the cash flow. Again, this model should employ discounts similar to those available for returnable sales in print.

These ideas are probably old hat to industry insiders, but for the rest of us peering in through the shop window it’s an interesting insight into the way the industry works, and the ways it might adapt to change in the near future.

Schittman makes the point that his blogging is not “sanctioned by, endorsed by, or even remotely associated with” his employers at OUP, but one wonders how many people on the inside – of the OUP, and publishing in general – are keen for this discussion to be dragged into the open, and how many would rather sit on the lid of Pandora’s box.

Blog

The truth about Somali pirates

34 Comments

Jolly Rodger pirate flagWell, what do you know – there’s more to the Somalian piracy stories than meets the eye. Far from being the eye-patched privateer chancers that the term ‘pirate’ conjures up, they’re desperate people trying to make a living and protect their homeland from exploitation by more developed nations who’ve seen fit to take advantage of the political instability of the area.

Sure, their methods are rough (and definitely illegal), but what are a people without a government to defend them supposed to do when foreigners start trawling their waters for fish and dumping nuclear waste?

This is the context in which the “pirates” have emerged. Somalian fishermen took speedboats to try to dissuade the dumpers and trawlers, or at least levy a “tax” on them. They call themselves the Volunteer Coastguard of Somalia – and ordinary Somalis agree. The independent Somalian news site WardheerNews found 70 per cent “strongly supported the piracy as a form of national defence”.

No, this doesn’t make hostage-taking justifiable, and yes, some are clearly just gangsters – especially those who have held up World Food Programme supplies. But in a telephone interview, one of the pirate leaders, Sugule Ali: “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits. We consider sea bandits [to be] those who illegally fish and dump in our seas.”

There are two sides to every story, as the old saying goes. That said, it’s interesting to note that this article is by the same guy who did the hatchet-job on Dubai the other day… [via BoingBoing; image by Paul Keleher]

Blog

Recession-proof business models for online games

Coory Doctorow’s latest Guardian column looks at the ways in which MMO game designers are trying to make their virtual worlds immune to recessions and other external economic pressures. In a nutshell, it’s all about creating a partly isolated arbitrage economy that leverages the meatspace disparity between the cash-rich and the time-rich:

Seen through this lens, a “game” is just a bunch of applied psychology that makes kids work long hours to earn virtual gewgaws that adults are trained to desire. In this “Free to play, pay for stuff” world, kids are alienated from the product of their leisure by a marketplace where the game-company skims a piece off of every transaction.

The psychology of this is fascinating, since it all only works to the extent that the game remains “fun”. One key element is that skilled players (eg, kids) must not feel like the rich players are able to buy their way into positions of power. Game devs are advised to sell defensive items – shields, armour, dodging spells, but not offensive ones. A skilled player will still be able to clobber a heavily armoured rich player, given enough time (and skilled players have nothing but time, by definition), but may quit in disgust at the thought that some rich wanker is able to equip himself with a mega-powerful sword or blaster that gives him ultimate killing power. No one wants to play in a game where one player has an “I win” button.

(Just as a side note, I find it quite endearing that Cory has taken so naturally to British slang like “wanker” and “can’t be arsed”.)

While we’re on the subject of MMO economies, though, I might just mention EVE Online again. Not only is it unique in the connection between its in-game currency and the economy of its ‘home’ nation of Iceland, but in the staggeringly huge degree of obsession that its most powerful players can develop.

… consider that the game has both legal and illegal channels for real world income to bleed into the game. You can spend your hard-earned money on an in-game item called a ‘PLEX’ which can be used to add two months of in-game subscription time to a character, and then sell these PLEXes on the in-game market for in-game currency (isk). If you’re rich in-game and poor in reality, you can play EVE for free by simply purchasing PLEXes; if you’re rich in reality and don’t have time to make spaceship money, you can sell some PLEXes and buy as many spaceships as you feel like. Of course, many players go outside of the established CCP-sanctioned system and buy and sell both currency and characters on the black market of eBay; a substantial sum of hard currency can be earned by a diligent eBayer, and it is an accepted belief among many EVE players that some people are making a day-to-day living off selling isk.

And that’s nothing – read the rest of that report for stories of players spending literally thousands of dollars of real-world money on EVE campaigns, planning to sabotage the power lines to the real-world houses of other players in order to weaken their factions at the crucial moment, and more. No matter how many new worlds we build, we take our weird human flaws and foibles with us.

Blog

What #amazonfail says about Twitter

1 Comment

amazonfail logoTwitter has definitely made the transition from inexplicable geek tool to mass-media buzz phenomenon (as indicated by the plethora of recent posts about it, both here and elsewhere).

The rapidity of Twitter’s rise (and, arguably, its seeming innocuousness) has allowed it to get the jump on organisations unprepared for its power, speed and influence – as demonstrated by the #Amazonfail debacle over the easter weekend.

Jeremiah Tolbert takes a look at #amazonfail, and determines that Twitter is almost the ideal medium for that sort of emergent protest, as well as a warning to organisations big and small that they need to learn to respond to criticism on microblogging networks as quickly as possible:

In the information void that existed on the weekend, many intentions were invented to explain. Right-wingers had collaborated to manipulate the system via tags. Amazon had capitulated to right-wingers and dropped the titles. It was a programming error. A massive conspiracy of internet pranksters manufactured it so that they could feed on the outraged tears of twitter users. And so on.

Much like Nature abhors a vaccum, the internet ahbors an absence of information.

Amazon’s lack of immediate response allowed the controversy to build to unprecedented levels. Rarely have I seen the internet move in one angry direction so effectively. It never would have moved this quickly in the time before Twitter. Email, texts, none of them had the perfect assembly of features and usability that Twitter does.

Much as we were discussing with respect to the Moldovan Twitter revolution, there’s no implicit morality in this system; it gets used to express the hopes, prejudices and fears of its users. Spiraltwist at grinding.be makes the point:

Forget the bot networks. Forget the viruses. All you need is a massive follower list (or enough people to cross pollinate their twitter streams with your message) and people clicking to take down or disrupt websites for a bit. Click. Click. Click.

There must be dozens of technothriller authors across the planet chewing their pencils in frustration at having been pipped to the post by reality on a particularly pertinent Zeitgest plot device…