All posts by Paul Raven

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Falcon flying free – SpaceX finally make it to orbit

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For my fellow dreamers in the audience, here’s a little something to momentarily take your mind off financial instruments, presidential debates and environmental doom:

From the press release:

SpaceX announces that Flight 4 of the Falcon 1 launch vehicle has successfully launched and achieved Earth orbit. With this key milestone, Falcon 1 becomes the first privately developed liquid fuel rocket to orbit the Earth.

“This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team,” said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. “The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull’s-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake.”

Watching that makes me feel that – as a species – we’re pretty awesome. It’s just a shame we can’t stop arguing over which subgroups of the species are more awesome than the others… what might we achieve then?

[Story via pretty much everywhere; video first seen at Warren Ellis’s gaff]

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Friday Free Fiction for 26th September

Another week, another inbox brimming with free-to-read science fiction stories. Hell knows we could all do with a bit of escapism right now… so dive on in, free fiction fans!

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Manybooks is keepin’ it old-school, yo:

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Meanwhile, over at Feedbooks:

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You can read yet more of Paul McAuley‘s new novel; chapter three of The Quiet War awaits your eyeballs.

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Futurismic alumnus Tobias Buckell has been throwing up the first few chapters of his new novel Sly Mongoose on his website: here are chapters 1, 2 and 3.

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This week’s Strange Horizons fiction offering is “Cowboy Angel (Part 2)” by Samantha Cope.

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From the people at Apex:

For your consideration, “What You Know” (PDF) by Geoffrey Girard, one of the exciting new stories in Jodi Lee’s Apex anthology Courting Morpheus.

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Via SF Signal:

  • Mike Gordon has posted free excerpts of his novel Tracks at his website
  • Douglas Clegg goes one further with the entire text of his novel Afterlife
  • SpaceWesterns presents Part 1 of “The Mound” by H. P. Lovecraft and & Zealia Bishop

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Gwyneth Jones has just made available the entire text of her seminal Bold As Love novel, the first in the series of the same name, in PDF format.

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A message from dj lotu5:

Hi! Previously, I submitted my story “Tissue Banking”, which you linked to. Here is another story in the same vein that you may enjoy: “Laser Skin Reinscription“

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Here’s your Friday Flash Fiction action for the week:

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Non-sf online comics bonus via Scumlord Warren Ellis:

Paul Sizer’s been serialising his new music graphic novel BPM online while the physical book’s been printing in Malaysia. As I write, there’s something like 47 pages of the book up there for free reading.

I took a quick look, and ended up devouring the lot; beautiful colourful artwork, and if you’ve ever been into the DJ/club/dance music scene, it should be right up your street.

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That’s your fiction thrift for the week, folks – hope you enjoy. Don’t forget to send in your tip-offs and shameless self-plugs for next week; deadline is 1800 GMT every Friday! Have a great weekend…

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Your backyard nuclear plant will be ready in five years

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Energy crisis? What energy crisis? You’ll be laughing all night in your floodlit garden under the gaze of your jealous fossil-fuel using neighbours once you’ve got Hyperion’s clean, safe and portable[1] backyard nuclear reactor up and running!

Hyperion Power Generation - backyard nuclear reactor

Yes indeed; using good clean water as both moderator and coolant, the Hyperion reactor simply cannot become a runaway reaction, and the uranium hydride fuel is useless for making weapons with – so you’ll not get any politically-motivated sanctions imposed on you by coalitions of powerful nation-states!

The Hyperion reactor will start shipping in the summer of 2013, so start saving now! Or alternatively take out a loan based on the projected amount of energy you’ll be able to sell back to an increasingly desperate and expensive national grid – provided you can find a bank that’s guaranteed not to collapse[2], or a cooperative government administration to bail you out when the worst happens.

[ 1 – 2.5m tall concrete unit can be transported by most commercially-available heavy plant machinery. ]

[ 2 – You may want to consider researching financial institutions based in China or other Asian nations. ]

[Story originally found at grinding.be; image from Hyperion’s website, and there’s an interview with surprisingly lucid and woo-free Hyperion CEO; please note snarky tone of post is a form of gallows humour after an hour of wading through the day’s news.]

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Sarah Palin’s Second Life

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Two different Sarah Palin avatars in Second LifeYou don’t have to pick sides to say that Sarah Palin’s nomination as Republican VP candidate has been controversial. No medium is devoid of discussion about her, be it positive or negative – and even in the metaverse of Second Life, both poles of opinion are represented.

But of course, a virtual world allows ways of expression support or disdain that are arguably impossible elsewhere, like creating walking talking embodiments of Palin’s attributes as perceived by the creator. As Wagner James Au at New World Notes reports, some are positive:

“Sarah has some pretty distinct features,” she says. “I’m used to making more round and smooth featured faces, and while I could just make a square head I wanted to try for something more realistic.” She pretty much kept her Palin avatar’s body generic. “I can only guess as to what type body frame and build she has.”

While some are more critical:

… the Sarah Palin in the fur bikini, which its creator, Cymbal Constantine, developed as a satirical riff off the notorious bikini Photoshop.

“I don’t agree with her hunting views or her views regarding women’s rights,” Ms. Constantine tells me. “I am highlighting her extremist views which I do not feel the media is doing a good job of [covering]. As a woman, Sarah is deeply insulting to me.”

It’s hard to concentrate on our conversation, because Bobby the chatbot baby insists on gurgling random sentences out loud. “You make me feel loved!” he babbles.

Cymbal Constantine nods to him. “My child of course. Prop baby.”

Second Life’s much-touted potential as the next platform for internet business seems to have been moved to a back burner, but I think its potential for creative peaceful protest and socio-political satire has yet to be fully explored. [image from linked New World Notes article]

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A new hope? Another call for positive science fiction

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As an antidote to the previous doom-flavoured post, here’s recent Clarion alumni Damien G Walter suggesting that it’s time science fiction started taking a more hopeful and positive look at the future:

But there are no end of reasons to have hope for tomorrow. Biotechnology and genetic research offer fantastic advances in medicine, yet their portrayal in science fiction is typified by the gloom of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. The internet is already democratising many new areas of society, but our political future is still most commonly depicted as one flavour of Big Brother dystopia or another. Environmental or economic collapse might plunge us all headlong into the apocalypic future of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or we might respond to them with intelligence and ingenuity and take the opportunity to find better ways of living. To look at the infinite possibilities of the future and see only darkness is a failure of imagination.

Here, Walter echoes similar calls from Jason Stoddard and Jetse de Vries, and doubtless some others I’ve not noticed (or, just as likely, forgotten about); it definitely appears to be a theme with some of the young turks of science fiction writing. Are we witnessing the first stirrings of a new movement?

And what about the readers? OK, so the writers are bored of dystopic futures, but how many of us would like a little more optimism in our escapism?