All posts by Paul Raven

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The human billboard – people as advertorials

visual haiku - graffiti faceHere’s a neat bit of alarmingly plausible speculative thinking for you – what if the next frontier for contextual advertising is us?

The gent sitting next to me is an advert for high risk heart disease – the last passenger to rush aboard the plane, snarling at fellow passengers as he marches the isle trying to find space for his luggage, squeezing his plump frame into seat 8E before proceeding to wolf down 2 buttery croissants. It’s a compelling enough everyday drama for the stewardess to raise her seen-it-all-honey eyebrows, and its compelling enough for us to want to know more. If you’re in the business of pushing ads this is obviously an opportunity to push your product.

Sound ridiculous? Well, not really – how many small-time bloggers already rake back a few cents from ads on their sites? And it’s not like we’re averse to the idea of promoting products on our person: think about designer sportswear, or music and film merchandise. [image by Mikey G Ottowa]

By the way, the linked site is the blog of Jan Chipchase, who’s a kind of futurist thinker employed by Nokia to travel the world and think up stuff like this. And if you’re even vaguely interested in futurism (which, if you read Futurismic, I guess you must be), you should really be subscribed to it. He’s a very smart cookie indeed.

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Friday Free Fiction for 31st October

Well, my guess is most of you are more focused on dressing up Halloween-style and hitting the town tonight than wondering where your next fix of free fiction is coming from. But no seasonal holiday can stand in the way of Futurismic‘s relentless cataloguing of free genre stuff to read on the intertubes, so you’ll at least have something with which to sooth away the hangovers tomorrow afternoon… 🙂

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Here’s a few from Feedbooks:

And another item from the Futurismic back-catalogue, the ultra-dark super-snark of Alex Wilson‘s “Dry Frugal with Death Rays“.

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News from John “Electric Velocipede” Klima:

In case you’re wondering about what the contents of the new issue are like, here’s a quick sampler:

There will more to come from the issue. You can check out the full table of contents, which has links to excerpts from all the fiction and poetry in the issue.

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Via a number of sources, both blogs and email (so blanket thanks to everyone!), Technology Review recently ran a short story called “Glass” by Daryl Gregory.

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Another rogue DVD extra just cropped up at Shadow Unit.

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Via the eternally vigilant SF Signal:

Afterburn SF has published “Vigilant” by Mike Rimar.

MindFlights has published “Good News from a Foreign Land” by Diane Gallant.

And there’s a selection of four from Aberrant Dreams:

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This week’s story at Strange Horizons is “Nine Sundays in a Row” by Kris Dikeman.

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Tor.com has a free story called “A Water Matter” by Futurismic alumnus (and all-round jolly nice chap) Jay Lake.

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Via Forbidden Planet International:

Dominic Green, an author some may remember from his appearances in the august pages of that pillar of the literary SF community, Interzone, is giving up on trying to get novels published. Despite his Interzone credentials and a Hugo nomination in 2006 he’s had no luck with most publishers (a plight I’m sure many writers will empathise with) and has decided to post them online, free, so at least perhaps some readers can have a look and hopefully enjoy them. There are two adult works – Abaddon and Smallworld – and a young adult work, Saucers and Gondoliers.

That’s presumably not the same Dominic Green who was my former landlord…

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This week’s new material at SpaceWesterns is suitably horrific for the season:

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More spookiness over at Subterranean Online:

… a vintage tale by SubPress favorite Norman Partridge […] “Apotropaics“, a very different, and very chilling take on vampires.

Good grief. Am I the only person in genre fiction who’s bored of hearing about vampires, zombies and other lesser-known strains of the undead? Just askin’.

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We’re up to iteration 28 of Jayme Lynn Blaschke‘s Memory.

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A last-minute arrival from Jake Freivald at Flash Fiction Online:

There’s a new story up for Halloween: “Ray the Vampire” by Mercedes M. Yardley. The rest of our November issue will be published next week.

Cheers, Jake! See? More vamps. Sheesh.

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Finally, a couple of non-fiction bonuses:

First of all, Robert J Sawyer recommends a free download of The Atlas of Cyberspace by Martin Dodge and Rob Kitchin. Looks like it covers both the real and fictional manifestations of cyberspace, too, so plenty of geek points there.

Secondly, Gary Gibson says:

If you either fancy yourself as a writer, or you’re shopping your first novel around, or even several books deep into a career, you could do a lot worse than reading The Career Novelist, by American super-agent Donald Maass…

Fortunately, you can now download that book entirely free in PDF format directly from the Maass agency.

It apparently (and synchronously) comes recommended by Robert Sawyer as an essential book for any aspiring writer, also.

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Well, that’s your lot, folks. Keep the plugs, tip-offs and recommendations coming in (deadline 1800 GMT every Friday!), and have yourselves a great Halloween, Samhain, or non-denominational two-days-off, which ever you prefer. Adios!

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Keys cloned from long-range photographs

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bunch of keysHere’s a neat but nasty little criminal hack that some smart folks at UC San Diego just released as a proof-of-concept: it’s possible for someone to clone your house keys from a photograph taken up to 200 feet away.

The keys used in the most common residential locks in the United States have a series of 5 or 6 cuts, spaced out at regular intervals. The computer scientists created a program in MatLab that can process photos of keys from nearly any angle and measure the depth of each cut. String together the depth of each cut and you have a key’s bitting code, which together with basic information on the brand and type of key you have, is what you need to make a duplicate key.

Crafty stuff, so much so that they suggest that blurring your key teeth on public photographs is probably as wise as blurring your credit card numbers – though it’s hard to imagine a criminal bothering to do this if they could just get their hands on the right sort of bump key.

But it’s a great example of the sort of minor science fiction plot point that would have sounded ridiculously futuristic just ten years ago… I guess maybe tagging yourself with an RFID chip to open your door has merits after all. [picture by Bohman]

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Geoff Ryman on the origins of Mundane SF

Geoff Ryman and MonQeeThe charming, modest and erudite Geoff Ryman – author of Air, The Child Garden and more, plus the progenitor of the still-divisive Mundane SF manifesto – gets his turn in the interview hotseat over at the Nebula Awards website. Here he is explaining what inspired that controversial manifesto:

In 2002 Clarion I saw that a whole kind of SF writer, those whose work was based on science, were increasingly outside the SF and fantasy culture.  I wanted to help get them published and I very suddenly found myself writing The Mundane Manifesto, based on some of the things the guys (and they were guys) had said.  Both about old tropes driving out the new, and also an avoidance of the coming crunch in terms of oil, global warming, overpopulation, and development economics.

Some interesting stuff there, including an admission that Ryman himself may not have been the ideal figurehead for the subgenre. Go read. [photo by Danacea]

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Google’s BookSearch goes legit in $45m deal

spiral stacks of books and magazinesThe headline pretty much says it all, really, but in case you’d not heard it elsewhere it appears that the wranglings between Google and the publishing companies over the company’s Book Search project have finally been settled. Once the plan has been stamped off by a federal judge, the Big G will build an independent ‘Book Rights Registry’ to monitor copyright matters, and we’ll have some new ways of getting access to old or obscure books without leaving the comfort of our swivel chairs. [image by Thomas Hawk]

What’s interesting is that there was apparently a good chance of Google actually winning the case had it gone to court… and it’s not quite the bed of roses for the publishers as it might initially seem, as Google’s now nicely placed to play a very influential role in the future of publishing.