All posts by Paul Raven

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Charlie Stross on signing tour of the US

charlesstross_cthulhu Futurismic readers based in the US should be pleased to hear that hyper-prolific British science fiction writer Charlie Stross is being whisked off for a promotional tour of the States by Ace Books. The dates:

Tuesday, October 9th

12am – Amazon.com Fishbowl session at Amazon’s Union Station Offices in Seattle.

7pm – a public reading (and signing) at University Bookstore at the Science Fiction Museum (325 5th Avenue North, Seattle).

Wednesday, October 10th

2pm – reading and signing at Google in Kirkland. (NB: Google staff only, sadly.)

Thursday, October 11th

7:30pm – reading and signing at Powell’s City of Books (1005 W. Burnside Street, Portland).

Friday, October 12th

1pm – reading and signing at Google in Mountain View.

7pm – another reading and signing at Borders at 400 Post Street, San Francisco.

There are also plenty of radio and magazine interviews in between, apparently, so you should be able to catch the man in action somehow, wherever you may live. And I recommend you do so – I’ve had the privilege of seeing Stross speak a number of times, and in addition to being a fine writer he’s as sharp as a tack, and a very funny man indeed. [Image ganked from the (now sadly defunct) Table of Malcontents blog]

[tags]science fiction, authors, Charlie Stross, tour[/tags]
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Martian Water Saga, Part [x+1]: it’s back on again! Maybe.

mars_icy Long term readers of Futurismic will know well my frustration with the constant see-sawing of scientists over the "is Mars wet?" issue, and I’m going to spare relative newcomers the weight of my angst.

Instead, I’ll just point to a story that reports on analysis done at MIT which suggests the southern polar ice cap of Mars may actually be water and not ‘dry ice’ … and to another, dated just a few days ago, which says images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter seem to indicate that certain topographical features of the Red Planet may not have been carved by water as previously suspected … although the results "don’t confirm or deny" the theory. [Image credited to NASA/MOLA Science Team]

Look, can we not arrange for some sort of moratorium on this to-and-fro guesswork until such a time as we actually have some substantial scene-of-the-crime evidence to go on, as opposed to very clever people making educated guesses based on photographs taken from orbit?

[tags]space, Mars, water, speculation[/tags]
Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 21st September

Partly, I suspect, due to us getting BoingBoinged last week, we’ve got a mailbox full of free fiction this time round:

From Karl Schroeder:

… I just thought I’d let you know that I’ve released a free ebook version of my first novel, Ventus, under a Creative Commons license.  It’s available in a variety of formats from my website at www.kschroeder.com.

I’m delighted to be able to give something back to the community in this way, and I’m hopeful that people who haven’t been familiar with my work previously will get a good introduction to it with Ventus.

I’ve read quite a few of Karl’s novels now, and I’ll be making sure I get this one too.

From L. Lee Lowe:

You can read my online YA fantasy novel Mortal Ghost at  http://mortalghost.blogspot.com ; it’s also going out as a podcast at http://lleelowe.com

More general short stories can be found at  http://lowelands.blogspot.com

Next year I hope to begin serialising Corvus, my F/SF hybrid. It’s set in a slightly alternate future in which the minds of teen offenders are uploaded into computers on the pretext of rehabilitation – a form of virtual wilderness therapy. The novel is part thriller, part love story, part riff on the nature of consciousness. If you’re interested, you can read the first chapter here: http://corvus-lowe.blogspot.com

From Edward Willett (who mailed this in before he heard I’d hired him onto the team here at Futurismic):

I recently posted my 1999 YA SF novel Andy Nebula: Interstellar Rock Star (originally published in paperback by the now-defunct Roussan Publishers of Montreal) online in its entirety; it’s at www.edwardwillett.com/andynebula.htm.

I also have several previously published short stories online, and some sample chapters of books, all accessible at http://www.edwardwillett.com/sfanfantasy.htm. I’ll also be posting some sample chapters from my upcoming DAW book Marseguro in a couple of months

From Nancy Jane Moore:

In case you’d like to provide info on free SF in Spanish, here’s a
link to the latest issue of the Argentinian magazine, Sinergia:
http://www.nuevasinergia.com.ar/

The current issue has one of my stories (in translation) and also a
translation of one by Lewis Shiner, as well as stories from writers from Argentina, Mexico, Peru and the Ukraine. Truly an international
publication.

From Rudy Rucker:

Flurb #4 is live!

It’s another fat and juicy issue, including stories and essays by: Charlie Anders, Kathleen Ann Goonan, John Kessel, Marc Laidlaw, Kim Stanley Robinson; also my meeting with Hieronymus Bosch; also pieces by three newer writers: David Agranoff, Gord Sellar, and Penlope Thomas; and also a group-written jam by “Gustav Flurbert”!

Crikey!

Now the stuff that we spotted elsewhere:

Cory Doctorow wrote a Creative Commons licensed story for Radar about ‘the day Google turned evil: "Scroogled". Read, share, rehash, remix, enjoy!

Strange Horizons publishes original short fiction every single week, as you probably already know … but Futurismic’s own Jeremy Tolbert especially recommends the latest from Eliot Fintushel, "How the Little Rabbi Grew".

The regulation selection from Manybooks.net:

We have audio-books, too. From Darusha Wem:

I thought I ought to draw your attention to the podcasts at podiobooks.com . There are lots of SF novels serialized in audio there for free downloading pleasure, including my own cyberpunk novel Beautiful Red.

Added odd-ball bonuses, both via Metafilter:

And finally, more from the Friday Flash Fiction gang (because sometimes small is beautiful): Gareth L. Powell, Gareth D. Jones, Shaun C. Green, Neil Beynon and yours truly.

Enjoy!

**EDIT for late addition! From Beth Wodzinski:

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, we’ve made one of the stories from our upcoming pirate-themed issue (guest-edited by John Joseph Adams, release date Nov. 1) available for free download. The story is "The Sweet Realm," by Jill Snider Lum, and eager readers can grab a copy on our site: www.shimmerzine.com

That’s your lot.

Writers, editors and anyone else – if there’s something you want included in next week’s round-up, drop me (Paul Raven) a line using my email address on the Staff page.

[tags]free, fiction, stories, online[/tags]
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Moore’s Law to end in fifteen years?

microchip Gordon Moore has predicted the expiry of the "Law" that bears his name to occur within the next ten to fifteen years. Moore’s Law is a rule of thumb that states that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit doubles every two years (or thereabouts), and it has held up remarkably well since Moore coined it in the mid-sixties.

Indeed, this isn’t the first time Moore has sounded a death-knell for the Law, but as conventional electronics is inherently limited by the laws of physics, it’s plausible that it has to stop at some point. So what does this mean for the exponential theories of Singularitarians like Ray Kurzweil? Or will technologies like quantum computing pick up the ball before semiconductors drop it? [Via SlashDot][Image by oskay]

[tags]Moore’s Law, computing, electronics, futurism[/tags]
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Manufacturing2.0 – Ponoko’s personal manufacturing community

3 Comments

When Bruce Sterling spots something and considers it worthy of note, you can assume he knows what he’s on about – especially if it’s connected to his spimes idea.

But it doesn’t take a genius to see the huge disruptive potential of the "personal manufacturing network" business model behind Ponoko. I’ll simply quote their site, because I couldn’t put it more succinctly than this:

"Ponoko is the world’s first personal manufacturing platform. It’s the online space for a community of creators and consumers to use a global network of digital manufacturing hardware to co-create, make and trade individualized product ideas on demand.

The ponoko.com marketplace connects creators, consumers, digital manufacturing hardware and service providers to promote, make and trade products on Ponoko and social networking websites."

Poke around the site, and think about it. One of the few things I’ve seen recently where the tired cliche "this could change everything" really does apply.

[tags]fabbing, design, manufacture, social networking, spimes[/tags]