All posts by Paul Raven

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Friday Free Fiction for 25th April

Greetings, fiction fans – Friday means freebies!

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Before we get going with the linkage, it’s worth pointing out that Wednesday was the first anniversary of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. What that means in real terms is that there’s bucket-loads of extra free fiction from all manner of writers spattered all over the intarwebs, and it’s all collected in one convenient LiveJournal Community.

I’ve not checked it out yet (I kinda phear t3h LiveJournal, as I imagine it has the power to erode the last few precious hours of free time I have), but I think we can safely assume that’ll be a real rabbit-hole for fiction fans. Please report back if you find anything particularly good in there that deserves a link of its own!

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OK, so back to the usual suspects. It’s just the one from Manybooks.net this week:

  • “Daughters of Doom” by Herbert B. Livingston (“Deep in space lay a weird and threatening world. And it was there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . . .” Mwuah-hah-hah-haaaah!)

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Nathan Lilly dropped me a note to remind us all that part 2 of A R Yngve‘s “A Man Called Mister Brown” is online at SpaceWesterns.com this week, along with some non-fictional stuff about BSG.

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Another new piece goes up over at Subterranean Online – “Your Collar” by Elizabeth Bear.

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I have stumbled upon (and added to the sidebar) another online fiction outlet called Lone Star Stories, which I discovered thanks to the effusive praise Jeremiah Tolbert had for “The Wreck of the Grampus” by Jeremy Adam Smith.

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There’s another teaser/deleted scene piece (which all seem to get filed under the excellent ‘WTF BBQ’ category) over at Shadow Unit:

“Lau was a Valley Girl, dammit. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill.

And that was half the problem. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill, and that was not what this was. This looked like the navigation panel on the Starship Enterprise, and not the Sulu-era one with the slider and a couple of nonfunctional push buttons in primary colors, either.”

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Small Beer Press have evidently developed a taste for this free Creative Commons downloads business. This week they’ve set free Maureen F McHugh‘s short story collection Mothers & Other Monsters:

“… in her luminous, long-awaited début collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.”

Sounds good to me! That said, so does a small beer … it is Friday, after all!

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I got an email from a chap called Michael Roberts, who says:

“Back in January I wrote a little novelette which is probably not too publishable (or so I read; at 8743 words it’s really too long to put in a magazine). So I figured, why not put it online? And so I finally got off my figurative butt and did so. Now if I could only think of a good title …”

For future reference, Michael, there’s plenty of venues for fiction that length – so you’ll know for next time. If you go and read it, be sure to drop Michael a suggestion for his title!

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Which brings us round to the march of the Friday Flash Fictioneers!

  • Martin McGrath just missed the post last week with “King Rook“
  • Mind you don’t cut yourself on Jay Lake’s “Shard“.
  • Greg O’Byrne has an “Interstellar” fragment.
  • Neil Beynon‘s forty-second piece (he’s only ever missed roll-call once, IIRC) is called “Precious“.
  • Shaun C Green has reached a “Turning Point“.
  • Gareth D Jones gets all nostalgic in “Gone With The Window“.
  • And finally yours truly humbly offers you “Magic Eyes“.

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And that’s about your lot – I reckon the IPSTPD community should provide more than enough material to be going on with. So until next week, keep your eyes and ears peeled for more free fiction on the web, and drop us a line with your tips!

Have a great weekend, too.

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Prosthetic “fluidhand” raises the bar

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Fluidhand - prosthesis prototypeVia Warren Ellis’s grinders, I present to you: the Fluidhand!

“The flexible drives are located directly in the movable finger joints and operate on the biological principle of the spider leg – to flex the joints, elastic chambers are pumped up by miniature hydraulics. In this way, index finger, middle finger and thumb can be moved independently. The prosthetic hand gives the stump feedback, enabling the amputee to sense the strength of the grip.”

Prosthetics and exoskeletal tech are really making strides (arf!) at the moment. I don’t think it’s science fictional to suggest that we’ll be seeing prosthetic limbs that equal the functionality of the organic originals within a decade. [image borrowed from linked Physorg article]

But there’ll still be a stigma attached to having one, because of the aesthetic issues; it’ll be longer than a decade before there’s a false limb that would pass for a real one.

Maybe they’d become a badge of pride in certain industries or regions – among veterans of ideological conflicts, perhaps? And what about the possibility of elective prosthetics – people choosing to replace limbs that had nothing wrong with them?

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Web wars – white hats versus black in botnet battles

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CPU chip pinsThey may be off the news radar at the moment, but botnets are still a serious bugbear for computer security professionals – it’s hard work trying to defeat something that fights back, after all. [image by Rodrigo Senna]

So here’s a new idea from the University of Washington – why not fight fire with fire, and build a white hat botnet to defend against the DDoS attacks af the black hat botnets?

“Their system, called Phalanx, uses its own large network of computers to shield the protected server. Instead of the server being accessed directly, all information must pass through the swarm of “mailbox” computers.

The many mailboxes do not simply relay information to the server like a funnel – they only pass on information when the server requests it. That allows the server to work at its own pace, without being swamped.”

Sounds like a good plan. It’s beyond my knowledge levels, but the guys at Techdirt seem to think it’s a creative approach.

As a recent convert to Linux, this is the part where I smugly remind everyone that if certain commercially ubiquitous operating systems weren’t so riddled with security flaws, botnets wouldn’t be a problem anyway …

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The Earth can take care of itself

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Hungry African kidsDid you enjoy Earth Day?

Well, not everyone did. In fact, people in some equatorial countries are rioting over food shortages – a situation that even the slow-poke UN is worrying about.

One of the causes of spiralling food costs is the corn ethanol boondoggle. While it’s a good thing that we’re turning away from our dependence on oil derivatives, all the ethanol cars in the world will be of little comfort to hungry people … so we should probably be getting right behind the cellulosic ethanol researchers. And while we’re on the subject of cutting down on our oil diet, we could be making plastics from pig piss.

Perhaps you think I’m being a tree-hugger. If so, you’re missing the point. As happens so often, Jamais Cascio sums it up in the intro to an essay you should go and read:

“The grand myth of environmentalism is that it’s all about saving the Earth.

It’s not. The Earth will be just fine. Environmentalism is all about saving ourselves.“

[Supplementary links sourced from MetaFilter, Slashdot, BoingBoing and more; image by Felipe Moreira]

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Burst Fiction is Futurismic Flash

Writing in a notebookThe longer I work on Futurismic, the more free fiction outlets I discover – I never imagined there could be so many, and I’m sure there are plenty more waiting to be unearthed*. [image by apesara]

I bumped into a guy called Eric Chevalier over at Warren Ellis’s Whitechapel forums, and he told me about his Burst Fiction project. Burst Fiction is:

“[a]n active e-zine of one shot short stories, around 1000 characters in length, set in near contemporary times but with scifi tendencies.“

Sound familiar? It’s like a combination of Futurismic‘s submission guidelines and the Friday Flash Fiction format! So get yourselves over to Burst Fiction and hoover up some crumbs of story from the metaphorical carpet of the intarwubs. Writer-types, take note – they’re looking for more content, too.

Also recommended, this time by Eric “Saijo City” Rice, is QuillPill.com, which is essentially a Twitter-equivalent for fiction writing (or journal keeping). That’s probably oversimplifying it a little, but I’ve not yet had a chance to test it out for myself – if you have a look (or have used it already), maybe you’d let us know what it’s like?

[ * And you do know that if you find one yourself, you should drop us a line so we can add it to the Sidebar Of Justice, right? ]