Now this is a bit more like it. Opencongress.org has been running for a while, but now it’s got social networking baked in. Track your favourite (or least favourite) senators, bills and issues! Make friends! Blog about it! [Via MetaFilter] [Image from Wikipedia]
Now, I know it’s early days yet, but this is surely a step in the right direction towards a genuinely inclusive democratic process? All we have in the UK is an e-petitions facility that gets used frivolously. 🙁
Coincidences happen. Synchronicity is a function of the inherent human propensity for seeing patterns in an essentially random world.
Seriously, I got over the whole conspiracy theory thing years ago (and, funnily enough, it was reading The Illuminatus! Trilogy that inoculated me against it), but I’m still kind of fascinated by the process of conspiracy theories – the inevitability of how they appear wherever there is a chain of events and a vacuum of facts surrounding them. Where we can’t see causality, we create it – from whole cloth if necessary. [Image by Ford – or should that be Fnord?]
Point in case – undersea optical fibre internet cables being severed or malfunctioning in the Asia and Middle East regions. Four have gone down in a very compressed time-frame; the entirety of Iran has been without internet connectivity for a couple of days (and you can check the internet traffic report for the Asia region to see of that’s still the case).
So, what’s going on? Official story – shipping anchors and power failures. Obvious conspiracist conclusion – ZOMFG clandestine operations!!1! I think we can all agree that the latter is unlikely (though sadly all too easy to believe), and that the former seems too simple to be true – even if it actually is*.
Now, leaving aside the question of what’s actually happening (which no amount of internet debate is going to determine), let’s try to answer another question – are conspiracy theories an inevitability in complex societies where it’s impossible for everyone to know everything? Or will the increasingly connected nature of the world slowly shine a light into all the dark corners where these ambiguities hide?
[* So don’t call Occam’s Razor on me, I’m not claiming anything either way; just highlighting ambiguity for the sake of debate. Play nice.]
How alliterative a title is that, eh? 😉
Alliterative the date may be, but it’s not the richest haul of free reads we’ve had. Still, there’s plenty enough here to keep you entertained for seven days …
***
A few from Manybooks.net:
***
Another email from the sharp-eyed and well-connected (not to mention fabulously-named) Cole Kitchen:
“Another e-zine for the list: Allegory, the “tri-annual online
magazine of SF, fantasy & horror,”.(I can’t find a back-issues archive on their site, but some of these can be found via the Internet Archive.)”
Thanks, Cole – added to the sidebar!
***
Another new webzine on the block – albeit without any fiction content until the projected launch date of 1st March – is Oddlands Magazine, whose editor Soren Bask has just stepped out of the shadows. One to keep an eye on – and a new market for folk to submit to, of course. 🙂
***
Jayme Lynn Blaschke appears to be doing some kind of running serial fiction thing over at the No Fear Of The Future group blog. Just posted is part three of “Memory”, but I assume you’ll want to start at the beginning.
***
If I’m not very much mistaken, Peter Watts is also posting fictional snippets on his blog. “Job Security” certainly has his comments field buzzing, and rightly so.
***
Free audio fiction! James Patrick Kelly, obviously pining for the halcyon days of reading his novel Look Into The Sun to the public of the interwebs (way back in the dark ages of, oooh, last year), has started doing the same with his Nebula-nominated story “Men Are Trouble“.
***
Neil Beynon, fellow traveller of the Friday Flash Fiction train, is having a rather productive week. In addition to the usual FFF output (see below), he’s got a whole other story on his site: “Wide Open Space“.
***
This is the second week in a row that a Futurismic staffer has had a story published. This week it’s the turn of blogger Tomas L. Martin, whose story “The Shogun and the Scientist” is now online at Aberrant Dreams.
***
It’s a very thin week for the Friday Flash Fictioneers – a lot of us (including yours truly) appear to have had obstacles thrown in our way by that thing called life (which, despite being a great generator of stories, has a neat knack of preventing them being written). But a few of the troops are holding the fort:
Neil Beynon was late to last week’s offering, so “Silver” gets a plug this time round; his thoroughly punctual offering for this week is entitled “Fragments” – these in addition to the full story mentioned further up! Go, Neil!
New recruit Greg O’Byrne examines the “Life of Diamonds“; meanwhile, Gareth L Powell appears to have been doing some writing at the “Coffee House“.
***
Non-fiction bonus! Via Warren Ellis‘s highly-trained gang of web-scouring super-monkeys at grinding.be (which anyone who digs Futurismic will probably love to bits and should subscribe to immediately):
“Stuart Home’s brilliant 1987 book THE ASSAULT ON CULTURE: UTOPIAN CURRENTS FROM LETTRISM TO CLASS WAR is available in full, here.”
As is pointed out, it’s sure to be dated. But even a dated political text can tell you a lot, if only about the time it was written. Right?
***
That’s your lot – don’t forget to contact us with any tips, winks or blatant self-plugs you may have. In the meantime, have a great weekend!
Think what you will about literary manifestos, there’s no denying that the Mundane SF movement provoked a reaction among the sf community.
The original Mundane Manifesto, written by Geoff Ryman, has been lost to the digital abyss of the interwebs, but many others have built on his initial ideas, and the Mundane SF blog keeps up a regular barrage of thought-provoking posts designed to make the reader reassess the purpose of science fiction writing.
Over at Asimov’s, James Patrick Kelly takes a look at the thus-far short history of the sub-genre, and concludes:
“… I have written some stories that fit the MundaneSF prescription and some that do not. I find myself in sympathy with their arguments when I recall my intentions as I wrote those particular stories that pass their test. It is difficult to write about futures that could actually come to pass, and not only are most of the tropes they decry unlikely, but some are in dire need of an aesthetic makeover. And yet, since so many of my best known—and favorite—stories are clearly not Mundane, I can’t in conscience declare myself for the movement.
But I am listening to what they say.”
Futurismic, by definition, has a certain sympathy with the thinking of the Mundanistas – as do I on a personal level. But I still love wide-screen space operas and well-written far-future interplanetary stories – sub-genres that the Mundane movement would see relegated to the status of pulpish wish-fulfillment and fantasy.
As Futurismic readers, I assume you all enjoy reading stories that fit the Mundane template. But do you agree that those which don’t fir the template are failing to use the full potential of science fiction as a vehicle for ideas? Should fiction have any purpose beyond entertainment?
As far as I can tell as an outsider, the space program isn’t a big feature of any of the presidential candidate campaigns at the moment. But that’s not to say there aren’t people who would like it to be – Space.com reports on the space policy geeks who are leveraging the internet to get their questions onto the agenda.
Meanwhile, the game is still afoot in the private sector, with SpaceX reporting a successful firing test of their Falcon 9 multi-engine reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle. A full launch test of the Falcon 9 is tentatively scheduled for later this year. [Image courtesy NASA]
