All posts by Paul Raven

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SHINE – Jetse de Vries and Solaris Books to produce a positive science fiction anthology

Well, it looks like all those who’ve been so negative about the positive science fiction manifesto will get a chance to see whether or not it can work in the real world. Jetse de Vries, former Interzone fiction co-editor (and a writer in his own right) has pitched and sold an anthology of positive sf to Solaris Books. Here’s the press blurb:

Shine is a collection of near-future, optimistic SF stories where some of the genre’s brightest stars and some of its most exciting new talents portray the possible roads to a better tomorrow. Definitely not a plethora of Pollyannas (but neither a barrage of dystopias), Shine will show that positive change is far from being a foregone conclusion, but needs to be hardfought, innovative, robust and imaginative. Most importantly, it aims to demonstrate that while times are tough and outcomes are uncertain, we can still bend the future in benevolent ways if we embrace change and steer its momentum in the right direction.

There’s a separate Shine anthology blog/website which Jetse intends to become “an open platform for optimistic sf”, and there are guidelines for those interested in submitting stories for consideration – the reading period isn’t until late spring next year, so there’s plenty of time to polish up your piece before sending it off.

I’m happy to say that, while we’re not involved in any material way, Futurismic is proud to stand behind Jetse and Solaris on this project, and we’ll be giving it whatever support we can; I hope some other science fiction venues will see the merit in supporting people who are trying something new, even if it doesn’t necessarily line up with their own personal tastes.

That said, it seems even the strident ladies of io9 are divided on the merits of dystopian science fiction… maybe Shine will win over the hardcore? We’ll just have to wait and see… 🙂

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Near-future sf is not impossible, says Gareth L Powell

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Gareth L Powell has decided to refute Charlie Stross’s recent claim that near-future science fiction is impossible to write. As a quick recap, Charlie said:

We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.

Gareth sees that as shrinking away from the challenge:

I don’t see SF as a dry, intellectual game of prediction. I don’t feel the need to be proven right by posterity. If the immediate economic future looks a little uncertain, I’ll fudge a little. I’ll make my best guess and hope for the best. I’ll write a story about people.

After all, this kind of uncertainty is hardly new. Science fiction writers in the 1980s had to consider the fact that the futuristic stories they were writing could be rendered obsolete at any moment by a full-scale global nuclear war – but they kept on writing. They made some basic assumptions and they went for it.

For instance, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early Eighties, at the height of the Cold War, when the superpowers were on the brink of a holocaust, and as far as he knew, he could have been vapourised before finishing the novel, but he finished it anyway.

I’m going to side with Gareth on this one – after all, we publish near-future stories here at Futurismic, and no other type!

But what about you lot? Do you find the plausibility of the predictions in a piece of near-future science fiction as important as the plot and the characters?

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Turn on, jack in, zone out – the coming of the global computer hive-mind

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Metaverse cyberpunkKevin Kelly admits he’s not the first person to postulate that “a superorganism is emerging from the cloak of wires, radio waves, and electronic nodes wrapping the surface of our planet.“ He also reckons that cloud computing is amplifying the effect:

The majority of the content of the web is created within this one virtual computer. Links are programmed, clicks are chosen, files are moved and code is installed from the dispersed, extended cloud created by consumers and enterprise – the tons of smart phones, Macbooks, Blackberries, and workstations we work in front of.

Nova Spivak agrees – which makes sense, as he’s trying to build Web3.0, a.k.a. the Semantic Web – but suggests that we’ll avoid a Terminator-esque ending because human consciousness may be the key to the whole thing:

What all this means to me is that human beings may form an important and potentially irreplaceable part of the OM — the One Machine — the emerging global superorganism. In particular today the humans are still the most intelligent parts. But in the future when machine intelligence may exceed human intelligence a billionfold, humans may still be the only or at least most conscious parts of the system. Because of the uniquely human capacity for consciousness (actually, animals and insects are conscious too), I think we have an important role to play in the emerging superorganism. We are it’s awareness. We are who watches, feels, and knows what it is thinking and doing ultimately.

Maybe that sounds a little bit Mondo-2000 techno-hippie nineties-retro to you, hmmm? OMGZ maybe Spivak is a victim of terrible brain changes wrought by teh ev1lz of teh intarwubz!!!1 OH NOES:

Researchers have found that the brains of ‘digital natives’ are developing to deal more efficiently with searching and filtering large amounts of information, and making quick decisions. On the down side, that behaviour is changing the brain’s neural patterns impairing the social skills of heavy web users (what’s new?) and even triggering an increase in conditions like Attention Deficit Disorder.

Well, it looks like the internet must have eroded the fundamentals of cause and effect, too… who knew? I guess there’s no point in delaying the inevitable, so I’m off to get my cerebral jack fitted so I can transcend the limitations of this stupid meat prison. The future is within our grasp, brothers and sisters! [image by Katiya Rhode]

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Twitter – the newest addition to the terrorism toolbox?

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Yes, folks, you read that correctly – Twitter is becoming the latest channel for the multipronged assault on Freedom as promulgated by nebulously defined ideologues everywhere! At least that’s what the US Army intelligence types reckon, ranking Twitter and other microblogging services alongside GPS maps and voice modulation software as the latest potential tools of terror.

I think the person who submitted the story to SlashDot summed it up best: “Just wait until the Army finds out about chat rooms and email!“

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Friday Free Fiction for 24th October

Friday rolls round once again, like some perpetually mobile ball-bearing in the supermarket aisle of life… so best grab onto a stack of free fiction to break your fall, eh? Let’s see what we’ve got…

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There’s a big batch of pulp-era classix at Feedbooks:

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AntipodeanSF‘s new issue has ten micro-flash stories waiting to be read.

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There’s a new issue of Behind the Wainscot, too:

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This week’s fictional offering from Strange Horizons: “Just After Midnight” by Christie Skipper Ritchotte.

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Tor.com are offering a free ebook version of Brian Francis Slattery‘s Spaceman Blues. The only catch is that you have to be a registered member of the site to get at them, but I imagine the bulk of you are already.

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Here’s a bit of a break from science fiction, if you fancy it, via a tip-off from Futurismic‘s own Tom Marcinko:

Literary agent Lucienne Diver declared “Urban Fantasy Week” and has posted some short stories by some of the series authors in her stable on her Livejournal.

Cheers, Tom!

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Via Nick Mamatas, the summer issue of Weird Tales is available as a free PDF download, for an unspecified limited period…

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Peter Watts has a snippet of fiction up at his blog that comes with spoiler warnings, the title of which appears to be “Good News for Modern Man“. Peter Watts being Peter Watts, it probably isn’t good news at all…

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Via the indispensable SF Signal, there’s an excerpt from Alastair Reynolds‘ The Six Directions of Space at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist.

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The latest news from Subterranean Online:

The Fall 2008 issue is well under way, with the serialized “Celestial Empire” novelette by Chris Roberson now complete…

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More leather-slappin’ sharp-shootin’ fiction at SpaceWesterns.com:

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke is still dredging through a sea of Memory – here’s part 27.

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To close things off, here’s a handful of Friday Flash Fiction:

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And that’s about your lot, folks… for this week, anyway. Keep those tip-offs coming in; I need ’em before 1800 GMT if they’re to make the cut on Friday! In the meantime, have a great weekend.