All posts by Paul Raven

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Friday Free Fiction for 25th July

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Good grief, it’s Friday again – and Friday means free fiction! Here’s what flowed through town on the RSS river this week:

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From Manybooks.net:

  • “The Memory of Mars” by Raymond F Jones (“As soon as I’m well we’ll go to Mars for a vacation again,” Alice would say. But now she was dead, and the surgeons said she was not even human. In his misery, Hastings knew two things: he loved his wife; but they had never been off Earth!)
  • “Hail to the Chief” by Gordon Randall Garrett

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More Who stuff from FeedBooks:

And some shorts by Philip Francis Nowlan:

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Apex Online have a story by none other than Nick Mamatas, outgoing Clarkesworld editor: “Summon, Bind, Banish“.

Alick, in Egypt, with his wife, Rose. Nineteen aught-four. White-kneed tourists. Rose, several days into their trip, starts acting oddly, imperiously. She has always wanted to travel, but Alick

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Urban cyclists and the participatory panopticon

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bicycles and graffitiMy journey to my day job is just ten minutes of hard thrash across town on my BMX*, but hardly a week goes by without someone coming within inches of ending my life (or at least my ability to walk unaided) with their car**. [image by freebeets]

And Velcro City doesn’t have a patch on the traffic nightmares that bigger metropolises like London or Glasgow have to offer – cities where commuting by bike is increasingly common and increasingly dangerous. So smart cyclists have worked out a way to put the burden of attention back on the car drivers: helmet-mounted video cameras.

“Although the camera has not changed my commute to any great extent, it does make me feel safer and calmer. Now, instead of screaming in annoyance at motorists, I simply point at my camera. It’s amazing how quickly they back off when they clock it.”

I really love the passive elegance of this solution, and it’s a reminder that ubiquitous surveillance can actually work for the benefit of the little guy… even though he’ll have to be proactive instead of waiting on Big Brother for help.

I wonder what the other upsides to the participatory panopticon might be? Will muggings and similar violent crimes start to drop off the scale when we’re all lifelogging our daily lives?

[ * Yeah, I should probably grow up, but I rode BMX for so long as a kid that the geometry of regular bikes feels completely alien to me. ]

[ ** Usually a taxi driver, too. That’s not stereotyping, either; I keep a diary, and the percentage stats are very telling. ]

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Print-on-demand in three dimensions – Shapeways beta launches

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Fabricated 3D trefoil objectVia Jamais Cascio and BoingBoing comes word of the beta launch of Shapeways, a Philips spin-off company that specialises in on-demand fabrication services. In other words, they’re like a LuLu for 3D objects: you design ’em and email the files, they’ll “print” them out. Go check out their blog if you’re interested in seeing the machinery they use.

Fabbing is a great science fiction trope, because it has the potential to be used in both good and bad ways. For the good, companies would only ever need make as many of something as they could actually sell, leaving less for the landfills.

But here’s a flipside scenario for you: let’s say a marketing outfit manages to scrape the electoral register for names and addresses, feeds the resulting database into a service like Shapeways and instructs it to ship some dumb gimmick to every home on the list?

3D spam, folks. You heard it here first*.

[ * Well, I imagine Bruce Sterling beat me to it more than a few years back, and I’ll bet Sven Johnson has mentioned it more than once, not to mention countless others. “On the shoulders of giants”, and all that… ]

[image by oskay; object pictured actually made by CandyFab, a 3D printer that specialises in printing edible confections but which can work with other materials too.]

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Shira’s spontaneous free fiction blogathon for charity

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A message arrived in the Futurismic inbox from Shira Lipkin, a regular contributor in our Friday roundups. Says Shira:

I’m doing a blogathon this Saturday, July 26 – posting to my LiveJournal every half hour for 24 hours to raise money for the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. This is my sixth year blogathonning, and I write spontaneous short fiction every year. It usually tends to have an urban fantasy bent (as in fantasy in a city, not paranormal romance), but this year, I’m taking a distinctly SF angle on it. For 24 hours, I’ll be in character as a xenoarchaeologist, trying to make sense of precollapse Earth… with the help of over 50 artists who donated “artifacts” to this project, including a few SF/F authors themselves. All artifacts are being auctioned, with a story card.

It all goes down on Shira’s Livejournal, and the auctions are findable on eBay.

And there’s a lot more info on my LJ about why I do this, and why BARCC.

Sounds like a super project for a great cause; I hope some of Futurismic‘s readership will lend their support! We hope it goes well, Shira.

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Geolocational tags for soldiers

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soldiers disembark from a vehicleGood old DARPA comes up with some comparatively solid practical ideas in between the really bat-shit crazy stuff. Take the “Individual Force Protection System”, for example, which is essentially a way of tagging troops with traceable devices so they can be found if things get hairy on the battlefield. [via grinding.be]

The Land Warrior hardware can be used to locate its wearer too, but that might understandably get ditched by troops in a rout due to its bulk. By contrast, the IFPS is a little plastic cylinder that could be strung next to a soldiers dogtags, and allegedly allows him or her to be detected from up to 150km away without the use of GPS technology. [image by SoldiersMediaCenter]

Soldiers as spimes, anyone?