All posts by Paul Raven

Blog

Free ‘virtual anthology’ of Philippine speculative fiction

1 Comment

Philippine Speculative Fiction anthology cover artNormally I save up free fiction links for our regular Friday round-up, but as this is something a little bigger than usual I think it warrants special mention. Filipino genre fiction mavens Charles Tan and Mia Tijam have co-edited an entire virtual anthology of speculative fiction written in English by Filipino writers – a great way to expose new writers to an otherwise hard-to-access market. Here’s the table of contents:

Thanks to SF Signal for the heads-up… If you take a look, let us know what you think.

Blog

New Dawn Fades – punk rock speculative fiction zine

New Dawn Fades cover artThe two things dearest to me would be science fiction and music with loud guitars in it, so what could possibly be better than something that blends them together?

That’s exactly the idea behind New Dawn Fades, a bi-annual print zine that aims to be “the crazed hillbilly father at a polygamist shotgun wedding between punk rock, science fiction, fantasy, horror, slipstream, surrealism, magic realism, and the sh*t that’s just plain weird.”

New Dawn Fades is a project of one Jason Heller, who wrote the rather superb story “Behold: Skowt!” that appeared on Apex Online recently – if they turn out to be of equal quality, he’ll be on to a winner. Although destined to be predominantly print, some material will apparently be overflowing onto the New Dawn Fades website, so keep an eye out.

Blog

This post will make you 75% more likely to make the right decision on medicines!

3 Comments

drug capsulesNo report on a new wonder-drug would be complete without the statistical results of the clinical trials – you know, the bit where it says that people taking Wotdafuxocin were 60% less likely to find captioned cat pictures funny, or something similar. [image by rbrwr]

It will probably come as no surprise to our more cynical readers that these risk reduction numbers – while technically correct – are expressed in a way to maximise the medicine’s results as perceived by the casual reader:

Those are the figures on risk, expressed as something called the relative risk reduction. It is the biggest possible number for expressing the change in risk. But 54% lower than what? The trial was looking at whether it is worth taking a statin if you are at low risk of a heart attack or a stroke, as a preventive measure: it is a huge market – normal people – but these are people whose baseline risk is already very low.

If you express the same risks from the same trial as an absolute risk reduction, they look less exciting. On placebo, your risk of a heart attack in the trial was 0.37 events per 100 person years; if you were taking rosuvastatin it fell to 0.17. Woohoo.

Other research shows that even when faced with the same risk reduction expressed in two different ways, the majority of people will still pick the one where the number looks bigger. Don’t beat yourself up about it too much, though – it’s not just us patients who fall for the marketing tricks:

The same result has also been found in experiments looking at doctors’ prescribing decisions.

But try to think positive – it’s not often we get placed on an equal footing with our doctors, after all.

Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 14th November

1 Comment

Good grief, it’s Friday again! Where does the time go? Well, some of it obviously goes into scouring the RSS feeds of the genre scene in search of free fiction for you to read…

***

Two shorts and a novel at Manybooks:

***

There’s a couple at Feedbooks:

***

Here’s one at Afterburn SF: “The Ambassador” by Mark Lawrence

***

The Fantasy & Science Fiction gang have another free sample up for your perusal: “The Only Known Jump Across Time” by Eugene Mirabelli

***

COSMOS Magazine has published one of its seemingly irregular fiction pieces in the form of the post-Singularity tale “A Place to Call Home” by Amber D Sistla

***

Fresh fiction from Mindflights: “The Book Signing” by Valerie L Smith

***

From Eos Books:

For November and December only, click to download a free eBook of Adam Troy Castro‘s novel Emissaries From the Dead.

Well, you heard ’em – get to it!

***

Strange Horizons presents the concluding part of “Return” by Eric Vogt

***

Via just about everyone, The New Yorker has a story by Jonathan Lethem called “Lostronaut”

***

Futurismic alumnus Tobias Buckell has a bunch of his stuff to try, including a big chunk of his latest novel, Sly Mongoose:

… I’ve folded the first third into an RTF file and put it up online, just like my segments for Crystal Rain and Ragamuffin. All three can be found around the website, and the broken links some reported have been fixed. So here they are:

***

There’s three fresh pieces at Byzarium:

***

Via SF Signal:

  • The November issue of Aphelion features stories from by T Richard Williams, Scott T Barnes, Joshua L Hamilton, E S Strout, Mary Brunini McArdle, Jeani Rector, Casey Callaghan, Ash Hibbert, K A Masters, Joel Doonan, and Kim Rush (phew!)
  • Electric Spec comes as a PDF you can download. The new issue has stories from Tyree Campbell, S Hutson Blount, Jason K Chapman, Lyle Skains, and Bob Burnett

***

Big Pulp presents “Save Tomorrow With a Smiley” by James Bloomer

***

Here’s this week’s selection of Friday Flash Fiction:

***

Non-fiction bonus! Locus Online is hosting a PDF version of the October 2008 issue of Locus Magazine.

***

Well, that’s all for this week. You know the drill by now with letting us know about anything you or your friends are doing in the free fiction bracket, right? Right – deadline 1800GMT every Friday. Have a great weekend!

Blog

Hubble telescope directly observes an exoplanet

Via pretty much everywhere, here’s some space-pr0n for your Friday morning – real-light images from the Hubble telescope show a planet orbiting the relatively near-by star of Fomalhaut.

Fomalhaut star system image including planet

Astronomy types have been inferring the presence of exoplanets by gravitational lensing for a few years now, but this is apparently the first time one has been imaged directly. [image from linked NASA webpage, which has a full credit list nearly as long as this entire blog post]

Personally, I can’t read this story without being taken back to the golden years of staying up stupidly late to play Elite – if I remember correctly, Fomalhaut was an Imperial system where you could get a great price on slaves…