All posts by Paul Raven

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Friday Free Fiction for 2nd November

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A fairly weighty haul of free fiction for you this week. Let’s see what we’ve got …

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We’ve got short stories!

ManyBooks.net: "With No Strings Attached" by Gordon Randall Garrett, "No Great Magic" by Fritz Leiber, "Subversive" by Mack Reynolds, "The Servant Problem" by Robert F. Young (1962) and "The Fourth Invasion" by Henry Josephs (1956).

Project Gutenberg: "The Red Room" by H. G. Wells.

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We have webzines!

Via Nick Mamatas, the latest Clarkesworld Magazine:

Check out Acid and Stoned Reindeer by Rebecca Ore!
And if you’d like to get agitated, why not read our latest commentary The Language of Defeat by Jeff Vandermeer.

I just read Rebecca Ore’s story – that’s quite a piece of work. Go see!

Screaming Dreams has a Halloween issue available as a PDF for you to download, too.

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We have book tasters!

Pyr has posted the first 3 chapters of Killswitch by Joel Shepherd.

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We have entire novels!

In the mailbox from Stefan Pernar:

I published my first science fiction (although I would like to call it science future 😉 ) novel a few days ago – you can find it at www.jame5.com.

From the blurb: "Jame5 is a "Sophie’s World" for futurists and singularitarians in which the author takes his readers trough a hard take off technical singularity with all its philosophical consequences. What is good and what is evil? Where are we coming from and where are we going? What are happiness and the meaning of life? What do prophets have in common with dictators? All of these questions and more are being touched in this novel …"

Sounds interesting. If anyone would like to send us a review, please do so!

Also, transrealist genius Rudy Rucker has released the entirety of his latest novel, Postsingular, as a Creative Commons download. It comes heartily recommended by me, if that’s worth anything to you.

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And it wouldn’t be Friday Free Fiction without the Friday Flash Fictioneers.

There are a few absentees this week; I know some of them are NaNoWriMo-ing, and that’s a reasonable excuse. (I wish I had one as good, but my fiction time this week was spent dealing with yesterday’s Futurismic hardware crisis …)

Justin Pickard is NaNoWriMo-ing too, but instead of ducking out, he’s posting excerpts – here’s "Traitor!".

Other contributors this week: Neil Beynon gives us "Rainbow"; Dan Pawley provides "My School Trip", and FFF’s founder Gareth L Powell donates "Sun Scrying".

We’d be more than pleased to invite new Fictioneers into the gang – drop us a line if you have a short piece you’d like us to include. The only rules are – it has to be under a thousand words, and it has to be published on your own site on a Friday!

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In case there’s not enough here to keep you busy (in which case I envy the amount of free time you have), Free Speculative Fiction Online has once again updated their (far more comprehensive) list with many new additions from writers old and new.

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Happy reading, and have a great weekend!

[tags]free, fiction, stories, online[/tags]
Blog

Apologies for our absence

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Apologies if you visited here over the last 24 hours or so, and wondered why we’d gone into the mortgage business. There were some pretty drastic technical issues server-side with our hosting company, but thankfully they seem to be fixed now.

We know there are a few posts to repair from the last week or so, but we’re sure you’ll bear with us in the meantime as we tidy up the mess. To be honest, we’re just damned thankful we weren’t hacked, as we initially thought we were …

The moral of this story, folks? TAKE BACKUPS. REGULARLY.

We now return you to our scheduled programming … 🙂

[tags]futurismic, downtime, hardware, problems[/tags]
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Gun-barrel camera

gun barrel camera As a UK citizen, I’m getting used resigned to cameras appearing everywhere. But I can’t quite make my mind up about these gun barrel-mounted cameras that are being pilot-tested by police in Orange County, Illinois. I guess the idea is to make cast-iron evidence available from confrontations between police and suspects – it’s probably fair to say that in a situation where there’s a drawn gun in play, the heat of the moment may make eye-witness accounts less than reliable.

But the obvious potential for a new level of police-focused reality television can’t be ignored … and rather than making an officer think twice about drawing his gun, maybe he or she will feel they’re better protected by the evidence collected by having it in their hand with the camera running? Who can tell. One thing’s for sure, there’d be a lot less fog surrounding the de Menezes case if UK anti-terror cops had these things fitted to their weapons. [Via Engadget] [Image cribbed from original source article]

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ZOMFG kkkonspiracy!!1

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Wired has a run-down of the ten most popular conspiracy theories, which will either raise a wry chuckle out of you or fire you up into a paranoid rant-fest, depending on your personal belief systems.

I’m kind of fascinated by conspiracy theories, and when I was younger used to subscribe to quite a few (mostly the UFO-related ones, I’m ashamed to admit – a classic case of wishful thinking). Curiously, the book that completely cured the problem for me was Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s conspiracy classic, The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

It’s apparently the innate pattern-recognition functions of the human mind that create conspiracy theories wherever we find a vacuum of fact surrounded by unexplained events … how long do we have to wait until Occam’s Razor becomes hardwired, I wonder?

[tags]conspiracy, theories, psychology, philosophy, logic[/tags]
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Power-generating … shirts?

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ipod sleeve Now this is just a great idea, plain and simple – clothing made from fabrics with piezo-electric materials embedded in them, which will generate electric current as a result of the flexing produced by the wearer’s motion. The project has been sponsored to the tune of AUS$4.4million by the Australian Defence Department, and the potential for military applications is obvious enough, but the same technology would be very lucrative in the commercial sector too. Of course, it’s not in the bag yet – the researchers behind the idea suggest a viable product may be ready in four or five years – but the day when I can travel without having to pack an arsenal of batteries and wall-warts can’t come soon enough. [Via SmartMobs] [Image by Mgus]

[tags]mobile, devices, power, generation, clothing[/tags]