All posts by Paul Raven

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ReWalk exoskeleton video – marketing the future as the present

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ReWalk is an Israeli-developed exoskeleton suit that gives paraplegics the ability to stand, walk – and even drive. This story has been floating around for a few days (including some typically tasteless Robocop comparisons from UK tabloid news outlets), but m1k3y at grinding.be posted the video and it looked so science fictional – that perfect balance between “wow, check it out” and no-big-deal workaday reality – that I thought it deserved a re-run here:

See what I mean about workaday? The whole atmosphere of the video is low-tech, almost mundane. Perhaps they’re playing down the technological angle for fear of attaching stigma, but it’s about as un-Robocop in style as you could imagine. What will promotional videos for the first commercially available brain-machine interfaces look like?

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Personality hacking – what are we willing to enhance?

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purple pillsOK, hypothetical question – let’s say you could pick any personality trait to be chemically enhanced. Which aspects of your personality would be in the top three? [image by Tom Saint]

According to a recent study, you’re most likely to be willing to tweak the parts of your psyche that you don’t consider fundamental to to your identity as a person – your ability to concentrate, for example, or maybe the number of hours of sleep you need each night. [via FuturePundit]

Human enhancement drugs are still very much in their infancy at the moment; to draw an analogy, many people were pretty leery of plastic surgery when it was first becoming more commonplace. So I suspect that we’ll see the ‘early-adopter’ pattern with more drastic enhancements, with artists, outcasts and other pioneers of the psyche venturing out beyond mere ‘cosmetic’ cognitive enhancement… after all, think how useful it would be to become autistic for a week.

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Is short fiction devalued by being available for free?

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Gordon Van Gelder – editor-in-chief of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction – has opened up a debate about genre fiction short stories and their online availability. Understandably, as a publisher of a physical ink-on-paper magazine, he’s wondering if the sheer quantity of free fiction online has devalued the form in general:

Here at F&SF, we’re open to experimentation and for the past year or so, we’ve been publishing one reprint a month on our Website. Last month, the free story was “The Political Officer” by Charles Coleman Finlay. A few days ago, someone posted on our message board that he wanted to read that story. I explained that it was no longer on our Website but he could buy a copy of that back issue from us or from Fictionwise.

As I did so, I realized that I was putting a reader in a position where he had to decide if he would pay for something he could have had for free just a few days earlier… which doesn’t strike me as a good position. I know that I don’t like being asked to make such a choice.

So I started to wonder: has short fiction been devalued by the fact that so many places offer it for free online nowadays?

This is a question that interests me too, for obvious reasons. I run Futurismic because I care about getting good writing in front of the eyeballs that enjoy it, and I compile the Friday Free Fiction posts for the same reason.

The answers to Van Gelder’s questions suggest that some people do indeed think short fiction is devalued by there being more of it available for free, but that strikes me as being counter to basic economic theory – surely the good stuff becomes more valuable when there’s lots of rubbish? [Caveat – I am, by no means, an expert in economics.]

Of course, one’s definition of a good story or book is a very personal thing, and doubtless has a lot of connection to the demographic the reader belongs to, so I dare say there’s no definitive answer.

But nonetheless, I’d like to ask Futurismic‘s readers the same question, though with a different angle to it: do you perceive the short fiction we publish as being inferior because you don’t have to pay to read it? And what effect has the availability of free short stories had on your buying habits?

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Friday Free Fiction for 22nd August

Unless I’m very much mistaken, this is one of those rare occasions where the US and the UK get a long weekend at the same time – so let’s celebrate with some Friday free fiction, eh?

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A trio from ManyBooks.net:

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From Paul McAuley:

I’ve added a new short story, “A Brief Guide To Other Histories“, to my fiction archive. First published in Postscripts #15, it shares the same multiverse as [McAuley’s latest novel] Cowboy Angels.

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The latest from Apex Online:

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There’s some new stuff at Subterranean Online; I’m not entirely sure what’s newest, because either I’ve not been paying attention or their feed hasn’t been coming through to my reader properly of late. So, my apologies if I’ve posted any of these already, or missed any out:

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From Jayme Lynn Blaschke, Memory #21:

Flavius recoiled from the creature, throwing up his arm between them. The thing stared at him briefly, nictating membranes sliding quickly across the eyes before its spindly arms abruptly produced a translucent, frosted dinner plate with crusted orange balls delicately arranged upon it. It deftly set the plate before Flavius as another arm deposited a tall flute of burgundy liquid on the table. It cocked its head without saying a word, then swiftly retreated straight up.

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From Jay Lake:

The tarot issue of Behind the Wainscot has gone live. This includes my short-short “Heirophant Bridge“, along with a number of other short-shorts and flash pieces by a wide assortment of authors. Quick, interesting read.

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The sixteenth (!) DVD extra from Shadow Unit is called “Mythology”

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Via SF Signal, we hear that Jeffrey Carver has released his novel Neptune Crossing as a free ebook in a variety of formats, which you can download from Starrigger.com; looks like there’s some stories as webpages there, too.

From the same tips list, a couple of titles at the curiously named Munseys:

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And here’s a handful from the Friday Flashers:

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That’s your lot – plenty to be going on with there, I think. In the meantime, keep your tip-offs and plugs coming through – this time only the deadline is 1800 GMT THURSDAY, because I’m out of town on Friday week and will need to pre-compile. Have a great weekend!

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Nostalgia does science fiction a disservice

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Old book jacket art for The Wailing Asteroid by Murray LeinsterNovelist Ian Sales makes an interesting point – a lot of the stories and novels held up as classics of the science fiction genre are actually very bad adverts for the modern form:

I’ve complained before about the undeserving admiration given to many science fiction novels and short stories of earlier decades. Such reverence frequently results in fans recommending these works to people wanting to try the genre. And that’s not a good thing. Readers new to the genre are not served well by recommendations to read Isaac Asimov, EE ‘Doc’ Smith, Robert Heinlein, or the like. Such fiction is no longer relevant, is often written with sensibilities offensive to modern readers, usually has painfully bad prose, and is mostly hard to find because it’s out of print. A better recommendation would be a current author – such as Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds, Iain M Banks, Ken MacLeod, Stephen Baxter, and so on.

I think Sales has a good point there. I came to science fiction through the authors publishing in the eighties, and as such I’ve found that a lot of the classics are, while interesting from a historical perspective, pretty unfulfilling reads. And hell knows being made to read some of Dickens’ more tedious works at school gave me a knee-jerk reaction to literary classics, too. [Murray Leinster cover scanned by J Levar]

Which authors would you recommend to a reader wanting to dip their toes into the genre, and why?