All posts by Paul Raven

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Friday Free Fiction for 18th January

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Hi folks – your Free Fiction was somewhat delayed this week thanks to some hosting-related downtime. But better late than never, eh?

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They’re keeping it old-school at Manybooks.net, as is traditional:

 

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David Barr Kirtley has the give-away bug; you can read “Save me Plz” and “Blood of Virgins” on his website, both of which appeared originally in Realms of Fantasy.

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From the folks at Orbit:

It’s only a …er… matter of weeks before [the new Iain M. Banks novel] Matter arrives in bookstores. The first Culture novel since Look to Windward, Matter is one of the most anticipated science fiction novels coming out this year. We’re thrilled to be publishing it, and thrilled to offer a first look at the stunning prologue.

At the risk of sounding boastful, I’ll tell you that I was lucky enough to be sent an ARC of Matter, and I can assure you it’s a book you’ll want to read if you have even the slightest fondness for space opera with a twist. Go check out that prologue if you don’t believe me – Iain M. Banks isn’t my authorial hero for nothing, you know..

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Free fiction in audio format!

How’s about John Wyndham‘s classic cosy catastrophe Day of the Triffids?

And over at Podiobooks you can download a free audiobook version of Grey by Jon Armstrong, a book originally published by Night Shade Books in February 2007.

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From my good web-buddy Doctor James “Big Dumb Object” Bloomer:

The new issue of Spacesuits and Sixguns Magazine is online and it includes my story “A Letter Of Complaint“. If you’ve ever done your grocery shopping online (as is increasingly common in the UK) – and have been left baffled at the produce that actually turns up – then this one is for you.

Get your shopping delivered? You lazy bum, James – I walk to the shops and hence lower my carbon footprint! 🙂 Well done on the story, man.

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You’d have to have been very busy (or very cynical) not to have noticed it’s Nebula season.

In addition to all their other hard work (without some of which these posts would be almost impossible) the SF Signal gang are keeping a list of Nebula nominated fiction complete with links to freely readable online versions where available.

So if you like your free fiction fresh, up-to-date and award nominated, that’s probably your best first port of call right now.

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It looks like the Friday Flash Fictioneers are up to nearly full complement this week. Let’s see what we have:

Neil Beynon has “The Cloud“, Dan Pawley is “Adrift“, Gareth L Powell is at “The Highest Point“, and Martin McGrath is “Leaving The World” – a definite thematic drift upwards, wouldn’t you say?

Down here on the ground, though, Gareth D Jones has a “Prequel“, Shaun C Green has a “Human Interest Story“, and yours truly takes on “Sturgeon’s Law” (hopefully without falling foul of it).

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Flash fiction bonus: more flash to read, and a market to submit to! Go take a look at the aptly named FlashFictionOnline.com.

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And a non-fiction bonus, via BoingBoing:

Julian Dibbell has released the text of his ground-breaking “My Tiny Life” as a free download through Lulu.com.

Part memoir and part ethnography, My Tiny Life is about the social life of the online, text-based virtual world LambdaMOO and my own brief encounter with it in the early ’90s. Andrew Leonard, in Salon, called it “the best book yet on the meaning of online life.”

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OK folks, that’s your lot for this week.

Don’t forget, we’re always wanting your tips, recommendations and shameless self-plugs. Even if your work turns up in one of the sites in the sidebar, we’ll still give it a mention here if you just let us know about it! Just drop me a line via the Staff page.

Have a great weekend!

[tags]free, fiction, stories, online[/tags]
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A cornucopia of hard science fiction ideas

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Old-school typewriter Here’s one for the writers among our readers. The excellent Jim Van Pelt* has an article at The Fix Online wherein he lists a number of potential sources for the kernel ideas of hard science fiction stories.

“So, do you need a degree in science or math to write hard science fiction? Nope. Numerous hard science fiction authors write their stories without that background. […] Admittedly, though, the non-science or math authors will have to work a little harder to not write laughable hard science fiction. They need to cheat a bit. They may need help coming up with ideas, and they certainly will need help for the science that is not at their fingertips. Fortunately, the help is no farther away than the nearest bookstore.”

Or your local library, I’d add to that statement (use ’em or lose ’em, folks). [Image from Image*After]

And, of course, the internet has its value for the same sort of process, once you know where to look. Jeremy Tolbert thinks it would be good if that process were easier, though:

“Someone with access to the big primary biological sciences literature should post reviews/summaries in laymen’s terms of each issue. Nature, Science, and more. People could volunteer and write in summaries for any primary literature they want. Group blog the literature. Get it out there in the web, in a format that science-interested people can understand.

Because I think there’s a barrier still between that level of academic knowledge and the web population. I’d like to see a gateway giving me a glimpse at what’s going on. I don’t know where the local university’s science library is, and I can’t afford to subscribe to those magazines (who can?).”

Well, we do a sort of low-calorie version of that here at Futurismic, but we’d be happy to run more beefy material. Any volunteers? 🙂

[ *I’ve linked to Jim Van Pelt’s writing advice numerous times, both here and on my own blog, and I feel sure I will do so again. The web is full of writing advice, much of it sincere and well-meant, but I have yet to discover a regular source of clear and honest advice that’s as reliable and fun to read. Being subscribed to Jim’s LJ feed is like having an avuncular writing tutor all of your own. This is not a paid plug, nor is it ass-kissing – I just think the guy deserves recognition and respect. ]

[tags]writing, science fiction, hardware, ideas, science[/tags]
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Facet – open source swarming smart-phone software

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Cellphone This one must have passed me by at the time, but Warren Ellis’s team of future-culture hounds at grinding.be have brought it to my attention. A New Scientist article from October 2007 talks about Facet, an open source software project that networks mobile phone cameras over Bluetooth:

“To test the software, the researchers attached four phones running Facet to the ceiling of a corridor in their department. The phones were angled so that the camera of each could see a different part of the corridor and so that they could all see peopling walking past.

Whenever a phone detects an object entering or exiting its field of view, it sends a message via Bluetooth to alert the phones on either side. These phones, in turn, pass the message on to other nearby handsets so that eventually the entire network receives the message.

One handset on the network also reports this information to a computer over a normal GPRS cellphone connection.

Each phone determines the distance to its nearest neighbour. The phones currently use the average speed people walk to guess the distances between themselves, based on how long people take to move from one phone’s view to another’s.”

That would put fairly top-range surveillance capabilities into the hands of street-level operations. Maybe the only logical response to nation-states with endemic surveillance of citizens is for the citizens to start watching the watchers? [Image by Asim Bijarani]

[tags]phone, technology, surveillance, open source[/tags]
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Rights for robots? Not according to Peter Watts.

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blue toy robot I think this is about the third or fourth variation of this story I’ve seen in the last few years, but nonetheless – The Guardian has a brief piece wherein philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests we should be thinking ahead about what rights we will need to grant to our sentient machines.

Which is very well-meant, I suppose. But science fiction author Peter Watts takes a rather different view of the necessity for robotic rights – basically, there isn’t any.

“I’ve got no problems with enslaving machines — even intelligent machines, even intelligent, conscious machines — because as Jeremy Bentham said, the ethical question is not “Can they think?” but “Can they suffer?”* You can’t suffer if you can’t feel pain or anxiety; you can’t be tortured if your own existence is irrelevant to you.

You cannot be thwarted if you have no dreams — and it takes more than a big synapse count to give you any of those things. It takes some process, like natural selection, to wire those synapses into a particular configuration that says not I think therefore I am, but I am and I want to stay that way. We’re the ones building the damn things, after all. Just make sure that we don’t wire them up that way, and we should be able to use and abuse with a clear conscience.”

How about you – are you looking forward to running your Roomba ragged, or planning to kennel your Aibo when you go on holiday? [Image by Plutor]

[tags]robotics, rights, ethics, technology[/tags]