All posts by Paul Raven

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Friday Free Fiction for 8th February

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It’s the highlight of your week! It’s the blog-post that you seek! It strips the breath out of your lungs and makes your knees go weak! It’s … Friday Free Fiction!

(OK, so maybe I’ve been a little short on sleep this week. Don’t mind me – the links are good even if the filler isn’t, right? 🙂 )

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Manybooks.net provides us with stories from the really old-school …

…to the new-school:

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Alastair Reynolds, in case you’re not familiar with the name, is one of Britain’s top-grade space opera writers. He’s just made an excerpt from House of Suns, his latest novel, available to read on his website.

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Time moves so fast – there’s already another issue of Clarkesworld Magazine!

This one has fiction from Stephen Graham Jones and Alexander Lumans; non-fiction from Richard Bowes, and Futurismic alumni Tobias Buckell interviewing Catherynne M. Valente.

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From Edward Schubert (via Slushmaster, and also by email from Dutch man-mountain and Interzone fiction editor Jetse de Vries):

To Readers of Science Fiction and Fantasy everywhere,

When you have something great, you want everyone to know. So you tell people about it. You share it. You pass it along to friends everywhere. Well, that’s what we’re doing with InterGalactic Medicine Show. We want to make sure everyone has had a chance to check out what we’re doing, so we’re offering up a sampling of our stories – for free.

During the month of February we are going to make one story from each of our first four issues available at no charge. Two stories will be set free on February 1st, and two more on February 15th. Just visit www.intergalacticmedicineshow.com and explore the table of contents; the free stories will be clearly marked.

What are you waiting for? Go take a look!

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Steven Brust emailed to tell me that his entire Firefly novel My Own Kind of Freedom is available on his website.

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The BBC has let loose a whole bunch of free Doctor Who eBooks at their website – the old-school ones, too (much better than the latest incarnation, IMHO – though YMMV).

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Free audio fiction (Geordie style): the Starship Sofa‘s latest audio story is Pat Murphy‘s “Going Through Changes“.

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Well, look at us getting all cosmopolitan! We received our first FFF submission from Denmark from Lise Andreason: “A Meeting“.

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Friday Free Fiction just wouldn’t be the same with the Friday Flash Fictioneers, now would it?

And I’m immensely proud to announce that Jay Lake appears to have taken me up on my invitation to join in. However, due to the wonders of timezones, it appears he posts his work long after this UK-based editor has gone to bed.

But so what if we link them a week later? Here’s last week’s offering: “Passive Voices” by Jay Lake.

(The good Mr Lake also let loose a poem entitled “Evolution In Action” this week, which I don’t think is quite as bad as he’s making it out to be.)

Another guest appearance emerged last Sunday from Dr Ian Hocking in the form of “The Pilgrim” – no idea if he’s going regular with flash or if that was just a one off. We’ll keep you posted.

Which brings us to the usual suspects: Gareth D Jones is caught in a “White-Out“, while Neil Beynon is waiting until “After The Rain” and Gareth L Powell is headed for “Woomera“.

Greg O’Byrne thinks he has located “Nirvana“, Shaun C Green has written a “Love Story” and Dan Pawley has been “Found In Evidence“.

And finally, yours truly found himself with an “Unwanted Passenger“.

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And there you have it – that should keep you busy for a little while, I’m guessing. In the mean time, don’t forget to send us your tips and notifications about free fiction in the wild – blatant self-pimping more than welcome.

Have a great weekend!

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A bracing walk will charge your phone

Power-generator-knee-brace File under “gimme one of those” – a Canadian university team has developed a knee brace device that harnesses the movement of the leg while walking to produce 5 Watts of power. [Image from linked NewScientist article]

That’s enough to run ten mobile phones at once, apparently (though why you’d ever need more than one isn’t clear … I kid, I kid). From the article:

“The generator does not significantly increase the effort required for walking, says Max Donelan of Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, who led its development.

“Muscles spend about the same amount of time working as brakes as they do working as motors,” he explains. The device is designed so it only generates electricity during the “braking” phase of each step. This is when the leg is being unbent and is decelerating, just before the foot touches the ground.

The device works similarly to hybrid and electric cars, Donelan points out. They boost efficiency by generating electricity from energy expended during braking – known as regenerative braking.”

A device that saves on my electricity bill and encourages me to exercise? It’s the ultimate accessory for the self-sufficient cyberpunk-around-town – where do I sign?

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The future is … expensive

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pile-of-dollar-bills Wired’s Gadget Lab blog has a piece on science fictional technologies or engineering projects that are within our grasp in almost every way … except financially. It’s a decent enough blend of informative and snarky that I can forgive the use of the term “sci-fi” in the title … 😉

Floating cities, Transatlantic tunnels … it’s kind of sad to think that, as the commenters there keep pointing out, most of the projected costs would vanish into the budget for the Iraq “liberation” and rattle around like a ball bearing in an oil tanker. Also pointed out is the conspicuous absence of the space elevator – I seriously want to see one of those built before I die. [Image from stock.xchng]

Additional bonus! The last two entries in the Wired piece are about rail guns and space travel; frequent Futurismic commenter Brian Wang combines the two in a post about the potential of rail guns to be used as economical launch systems to lift payloads to orbit.

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Can shorter books save fiction?

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small-stack-of-books A blogger at The Guardian wonders whether the decline of interest in reading could be slowed by reversing the trend for bigger longer books. [Via SF Signal] [image from stock.xchng]

“Readable in a couple of hours, a novella demands far less time than a full-length novel: you can get through them in the same amount of time it takes to watch a film or two reality television programmes. If you read one in bed you can actually finish it in one go, as opposed to reading the same few chapters repeatedly because you keep forgetting what you covered the night before.”

Perhaps she has a point; she also mentions that writing novellas forces the writer to be more concise and economical with words in much the same way as the short story form.

I guess this is a reiteration of the “burst culture” argument – the idea that as our culture speeds up, we only have the attention span to deal with shorter works. But will a change of format reverse the trend, or is the reading decline a generational phenomenon with more complex roots than simple attention span?

How would you “save the novel”? Does the novel need saving?

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$1billion spent on British cosmetic surgery in 2007

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Spike-mohawk-body-mod I really fell out with my parents over my body-mod efforts, as tame as they are by some standards. “It’s not natural,” my mother would say. “You’re marginalising yourself into a small group of people who aren’t content to leave their bodies the way they are.” [Image by UnsureShot – no, that’s not me in the picture.]

Not such a small group after all, mother dearest – research suggests the British have spent over $1billion on cosmetic surgery in 2007 alone. [Via grinding.be]

Of course, they’re spending that money chasing after an unattainable media-manipulated conception of perfect beauty, which is still more socially acceptable than investing a few hundred dollars a year in having permanent pictures drawn on you and holes punched through various parts of your anatomy … horses for courses, I guess.

But whichever way you cut it, body modification of one type or another is becoming very commonplace. So why are people still so aghast at the concepts of transhumanism?