All posts by Paul Raven

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Friday Free Fiction for 11th July

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Good grief, would you believe it’s Friday already? Well, it surely is – and Friday means free fiction at Futurismic, as is customary. Eyeballs at the ready? Let’s go!

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Here’s another couple of titles from ManyBooks.net:

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Everything went a bit loopy with the Feedbooks RSS feed over the weekend, and I ended up with about 400 titles in my feed-reader, most of which seemed to be boxing-themed, for some odd reason. I think I only cleared out the duffers, and the sf titles I’ve already linked, but you may want to go browse around and check just in case.

Otherwise, there’s another huge wodge of Richard Kadrey‘s stuff:

Plus another novel by Matthew Phipps Shiel:

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Another free fiction site via SF Signal; Munseys, which has the following for your reading pleasure:

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Also via SF Signal are a few freebies from Solaris Books: a short story called “Tornado of Sparks” by James Maxey, originally published in The Solaris Book of New Fantasy, and the ongoing serialisation of Chris Roberson’s Three Unbroken.

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EOS Books are giving away a free electronic version of Karen Traviss‘ novel City of Pearl.

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At Subterranean Online this week, there’s an appreciation of Mike Resnick by Nancy Kress as well as a novella from Resnick, “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge“.

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And last but not least, your weekly helping of Friday Flash:

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And there it is; that should keep you busy for a while. Weekend web warriors should keep an eye on their feed readers over the next few days, as Futurismic begins syndicating its new resident webcomic – watch this space!

In the meantime, your tip-offs and shameless self-plugs are always welcome – FFF submission deadline is 1800 GMT.

Have a great weekend!

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Turning windows into solar panels

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apartment windowsI’d love to be able to fit solar panels to my home (not that we’ve been getting much sun this year, grouch grouch), but as I live in a flat I don’t have a roof to put them on. Thanks to a crafty hack from the boffins at MIT, that may not be a problem – they’ve found a way to turn windows into solar panels. [image by uqbar]

Sunlight is concentrated in existing solar power devices using large, mobile mirrors that track the sun as it moves across the sky. But these can be expensive to deploy and maintain. In the MIT device, called an “organic solar concentrator” and described in the latest issue of Science, the researchers painted a mixture of organic dyes onto the surface of a pane of glass. The dyes trap different wavelengths of sunlight and then guide the energy along the glass towards the PV cells at the edges.

“The point of all this is to get away with using far fewer solar cells,” said Marc Baldo, an electrical engineer at MIT. “The concentrator collects light over its whole front surface, but the solar cells need only cover the area of the edges.”

Not only does this make solar an option for people who don’t own an entire building, it also makes it a much cheaper proposition in general; solar cells aren’t cheap to make, and the industry can’t keep up with current demand as it stands.

And just to pre-empt someone piping up and saying that solar will never fully replace [energy source x], yeah, you’re probably right. But as one of a suite of renewable sources, it can make a contribution towards doing so – and right now we need every option we can get.

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Do free ebooks actually affect the sales of paper books?

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We’ve had a good few years of activists like Cory Doctorow advocating the free digital book as a loss leader against the physical product, and in the last twelve months or so we’ve seen a distinct rise in the number of authors and publishers getting on board with the idea. The question is – is Doctorow right? Does giving it away make people more willing to pay?

Simon “Bloggasm” Owens has evidently been wondering the same thing, so he thought he’d chase up some of the authors who’ve recently had free versions of their novels released via Tor‘s mailing list. Tobias Buckell and John Scalzi both reported noticeable upticks in sales following their freebies, though fantasy author Daniel Abraham saw no change at all – neither up nor down.

Scalzi points out that it’s risky to make the results into science:

“… I don’t think that ‘scientifically’ is the standard required here; I think ‘heuristically’ is probably better. If you consistently see a rise in sales of an author’s work after the release of a free e-book, then heuristically you have a good idea it’s beneficial.“

But the telling thing is this:

“Every Tor author [Owens] spoke to for this article said they hoped the publisher would continue offering the ebooks even after the new site debut. When [he] asked them whether they would be willing to offer another book of theirs to the giveaway list there wasn’t a moment’s hesitation with their answers.”

So, we can’t be sure that giving away ebooks is a good thing, but we can say that few who’ve tried it think it’s a bad thing.

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Against the geek hierarchy, brothers and sisters!

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Singaporean temple - a hierarchy of godsI guess most Futurismic readers are familiar with the disdain that being a science fiction fan brings from “normal” people, right? So, if we know how it hurts to be rejected on the basis of a completely harmless hobby or intellectual pursuit, why do we still do it to other people?

This is the question that Jeremiah Tolbert asks in his inaugural column for Fantasy Magazine. Take it away, Jeremy:

“In the Bad Old Days before the geek yearbook stereotype turned from “most likely to be 30 and still playing D&D in parent’s basement” into “most likely to be a billionaire before 30”, many fans were targeted with the word in a hurtful manner. If you’re on that chart [the well-known “Geek Hierarchy” flowchart], you’ve almost certainly been made fun of for it by someone. Such is life, and convincing the mainstream to accept us is a much larger battle than the one I wish to address here. But how about we take a break from bagging on one another?”

How about it, indeed. Much like Jeremy, I try hard to live by those ideals… though I’d be lying to claim that I’ve always done so, or that I don’t slip every now and again to this day. [image by jurvetson]

In an example of the sychronicity that the blogosphere is so good at creating, sf novelist Richard Morgan‘s guest spot standing in for Jeff VanderMeer at Omnivoracious takes a more specifically bookish approach to the same issue:

“… just try telling an audience of fantasy fans that Frodo should have died at Mount Doom. Steve Erikson tried it at a convention, and nearly caused a riot as a result. Oh yes, children, for if there is bigotry out there in the big bad world of mainstream literary crit, there’s as much and to spare in here, in the cosy and slightly claustrophobic confines of our genre. For every mainstream critic who wouldn’t know good science fiction or fantasy if it bit him in the ass, there is also a fistful of genre fans who think The God of Small Things must be some kind of fantasy epic about war between microscopic elves, Vineland is that Norse Saga about the Vikings discovering America, and Philip Roth is, wait a minute, oh yeah, that guy who used to sing with Van Halen, right?”

I guess everyone has a mote in their eye of some sort… we humans really have to struggle to get past our innate instinct to despise “the Other”, even in matters as inconsequential as the books we like reading. Small wonder we’re still fighting wars over patches of ground and coloured rags tied to sticks, then.

[ * Disclosure – Richard Morgan is one of my clients. ]

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Editorial: in the interests of transparency

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Running Futurismic is a big responsibility – not because anyone makes it that way for me, but because I chose to take it on and make it the kind of science fiction site I wish there were more of. This applies very much to content, but extends to certain ethical considerations as well.

I’m a great believer in transparency as a guiding principle; I’m not obliged to explain myself or my editorial policies, but there are times I feel it’s the right thing to do – and recent events on better-known sites have demonstrated that it’s best to be upfront about anything that might be considered controversial by our readers.

Futurismic‘s Fiction sidebar entries are there to show support for other web publishers, large and small. In the absence of a huge (or even small) pot of money to donate to them, I support them by linking to them – it’s the baksheesh of the internet.

I don’t judge the sites on the quality of their fiction or their presentation; that’s a choice for you the reader to make for yourself. That they’re down here in the trenches putting blood, sweat, free time and eyestrain into publishing writers and giving readers fresh sf content is enough for me. That fits with my ethics for people who deserve what little support I can provide.

But I won’t support a site whose guiding ethics and attitudes I find myself repulsed by. Hence I’ve removed a certain site from the sidebar, and will be expunging all other links to it from Futurismic‘s content. If you want to know why, this will explain it.