All posts by Paul Raven

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William Gibson interviewed at io9

William GibsonJust in case you hadn’t noticed, the good folks at io9 have an interview with the nigh-legendary William Gibson, who I’m sure needs no introduction to Futurismic readers. Here he is explaining why he thinks people describe his work as dystopian:

“None of us ever live in dystopia. That’s an imaginary extreme. They just live in shitty cultures. And these societies [in my books] seem dystopian to middle class white people in North America. They don’t seem dystopian if you live in Rio or anywhere in Africa. Most people in Africa would happily immigrate to the Sprawl.“

Click on over; plenty of brain food in exchange for five minutes of your time. [image by fugin]

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Writing and piracy – Stoddard pops Pogue’s balloon

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Did you read David Pogue’s post about why he doesn’t release electronic versions of his books?

“Unfortunately, I’ve had terrible experiences releasing my books in electronic form. Twice in my career, ‘blind’ people e-mailed me, requesting a PDF of one of my books. Both times, I sent one over–and both times, it was all over the piracy sites within 48 hours, free for anyone to download.

I’ve got a mortgage and three kids to put through college, and it broke my heart! Unfortunately, the bad apples have once again spoiled it for everyone else.”

Now watch as Jason Stoddard pops it with the pin of pragmatism:

“When Mr. Pogue hand-wrings about revenue lost to piracy, he uses his mortgage and his kids’ college bills to justify his income stream. He doesn’t talk about the value of his work, or the time he put into it, but instead resorts to a petty and rather petulant sense of entitlement. “I worked hard to get here! I deserve this moolah!”

Well, who says? Who says anyone has any right to any kind of revenue multiplication scheme?“

It’s not a story any creative worker who’s already making a good living wants to hear, but that doesn’t make it any less true. This isn’t some neo-hippie “information wants to be free” agenda either. It’s an observation, nothing more; the genie is out, and you can’t re-cork a bottle when the bottle itself has vanished.

Two choices present themselves: sit back and bitch as your business model dies around your ears, or search for a way forward. Piracy is progressive taxation; knowing as many hungry writers and musicians as I do, I feel that perhaps Mr Pogue should be proud that he’s well enough known (and his work well enough valued) that people want to pirate it.

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Los Alamos’ Roadrunner supercomputer breaks petaflop barrier

Roadrunner petaflop supercomputerLos Alamos, New Mexico is now home to the aptly-named Roadrunner supercomputer. [image from linked NYT article]

Built by IBM computer scientists using hundreds of Cell microprocessors – hardware originally developed for games consoles, and which power the Playstation 3 – Roadrunner will be used to run simulations of exploding nuclear warheads, although the US military are giving it a run at more pleasant tasks like climate simulation before it settles down to its grim career. [via SlashDot]

Roadrunner clocks in at 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second – that’s nearly twice the speed of IBM’s own Blue Gene/L supercomputer, the previous champion. To put that into perspective, the NYT article equates a petaflop as follows:

“… if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.”

So, yeah – pretty fast.

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Friday Free Fiction for 6th June

Chipped from the granite of regular internet content, we present to you the fictional gems prised out from the unyielding seam. Or something like that, anyway!

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Here’s a handful from ManyBooks.net:

  • “The Night Of The Long Knives” by Fritz Reuter Leiber Jr.
  • “Heist Job on Thizar” by Gordon Randall Garrett – (“In the future, we may discover new planets; our ships may rocket to new worlds; robots may be smarter than people. But we’ll still have slick characters willing and able to turn a fast buck–even though they have to be smarter than Einstein to do it.”)
  • “A World Called Crimson” by John Darius Granger – (“There was a boy and a girl and a strange new planet; the planet was alive with hideous dangers. But the boy and girl were very young and all Robin wanted to know was: “Who stole my doll?”” Well, there’s your human angle, right there.)
  • The Great White Queen by William le Queux – A “Lost Race” tale, apparently, from 1897 – all 90k+ words of it!

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It’s a veritable Richard Kadrey-fest at FeedBooks:

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The latest Clarkesworld is in the wild, as reported by Nick Mamatas:

“Regular readers may remember that I “got Lishy” with Paul Jessup‘s “The Secret in the House of Smiles“, which is our fiction feature this month.

Also, get those fingers ready to write cranky letters about our non-fiction feature Cheer Up Emo Kid! Being Depressed (or Gay) is Not All in Your Genes.”

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You can download Pantechnicon #7, or just read it all online – the choice, dear reader, is yours!

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Via BoingBoing:

“Little Fuzzy is [H. Beam] Piper‘s masterpiece, a tight, neat science fiction story that epitomizes the golden age of sf. It concerns a prospector on a distant world who discovers a potentially sentient aboriginal race (the “Fuzzies”), and his ensuing fight – fists, lawyers and even guns – to get them recognized as sentient beings.

Little Fuzzy is in the public domain, so there’s both a free ebook and a free audiobook recording available of the text.”

Never read it myself, but I remember my mother adoring it – and she’s got great taste. She thinks I’m handsome and intelligent, so she must do. 😉

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Cthulhu be praised! Via Metafilter, Selected Stories of H P Lovecraft! (Nearly fifty or so, by the look of it – can the fabric of reality handle that much terror?)

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A morsel of fiction from Peter Watts – “Family Values“:

“Screw this. I’m sick of being outnumbered by morons. I’m calling in reinforcements.”

We all know that feeling, AMIRITE?

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke is up to instalment 14 of Memory:

“You bastard.” Flavius’ voice was a low growl. “You let them kill me twenty-seven times?“

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A last-minute submission from Jake Freivald:

“The new issue of Flash Fiction Online is up with two new stories (one sci fi, one horror), a classic flash (literary), an essay by SFWA member Dave Hoing (call it literary, I guess), and, for the writers out there, the first installment of a new column by award-winning author Bruce Holland Rogers about writing the short-short form.”

Cheers, Jake!

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And finally, speaking of flash fiction, it’s those fine and fulsome Friday Flash Fictioneers:

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And that’s everything pre-deadline for this week, ladies and gents. Keep those tips and plugs coming in – and have a great weekend!

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Open-source self-replicating machine, er, self-replicates

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Self-replicating machines, as a concept, have been around since mathematician John von Neumann thought them up. But there has never been a working non-organic machine that has been able to construct a fully-functional working clone of itself … until now. [story via pretty much everywhere; image from the RepRap homepage]

“RepRap achieved self-replication at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK.”

RepRap - self-replicating machine

I’ve linked to the RepRap Project before when I first started blogging here at Futurismic, and so I’m immensely pleased to see they’ve reached this major milestone. And the head-twistingly awesome bit about it is that, as RepRap is 100% open-source, you can just download a parts list and make your own, then set it to make copies of itself to give to your friends.

“The machine that [self-replicated] – RepRap Version 1.0 “Darwin” – can be built now – see the Make RepRap Darwin link, and for ways to get the bits and pieces you need, see the Obtaining Parts link.”

OK, so it looks clunky, and it lacks the conceptual elegance of Drexler’s engines of creation, but think of it as a proof of concept. Imagine that RepRap could build a functional replica of itself at half the size, and that then the replica could replicate to half the size again, and so on. Unless you’re worried about the largely improbable “grey goo” scenario, it’s possible that we’ll look back on RepRap as the dawn of a new age for the means of production …

… or the root cause of global unemployment, maybe. 😉