A Spiderman impersonator got himself arrested and fined for a breach of the peace at Scotland’s "T in the Park" music festival for clambering up a 30-foot speaker rig during the headline act’s set. Feel free to provide your own punchline in the comments … [via ForbiddenPlanet][Image by Spojení]
The title tells it all – a Nebraskan State Senator, in an attempt to make a point about frivolous lawsuits, files an injunction against God. I can hear the cranks revving their engines already … [Via Pharyngula]
You may or may not have heard about the ‘bank run’ of panicking customers withdrawing their savings from beleaguered UK lending institution Northern Rock over the last few days. While the phenomenon of snowballing panic causing the initial problem to worsen is an old one, it has moved to populate the online world in parallel with the offline – so many customers are trying to access Northern Rock’s website at once that their servers can’t cope and return 404-page-not-found errors, adding to the impression of an institution in trouble. [Image from Getty, copied from BBC article]
As a side note, the Financial Times is predicting that this is the start of a rough period for finance on both sides of the pond – welcome to Crunch Week.
Well, I received a lot more applicants for blogging positions here at Futurismic than I expected to, which was immensely flattering – even though it was hard work to pick between them all, because they were all of great quality. Thanks to everyone who showed an interest – and apologies to those who didn’t make the cut!
But the editorial choices have been made, and the next few days should involve some new faces cropping up at Futurismic – four new bloggers, eager to share the cool and interesting stuff they come across in their daily web adventures! I’m sure you’ll be welcoming to them all, and I hope you (and they) enjoy the refreshing influx of new voices!
As always, thanks for reading – you’re the people who really make Futurismic what it is, and we’re looking forward to making it bigger and better than ever before.
As we say here in the UK, “Cor blimey, guv’nor, wotta lotta free stuff!” Actually, there’s probably a grand total of twenty people on the face of the planet who’d even consider saying that, but the point remains – it’s a bumper crop of free fiction this week, and no mistake.
Manybooks.net just keeps on giving with the old-school classics:
Plus the Free Speculative Fiction Online gang have updated once again; lots of fresh meat for genre carnivores right there.
More modern stuff:
There’s a lot of taster excerpts about; Orbit Books has posted the first chapter of The Awakened Mage by Karen Miller, and SciFiChick has a list of thirteen (thirteen!) current genre titles with free excerpts available online in hope of hooking you into lashing out for the full book.
Chris Roberson has obviously been so impressed by our efforts here that he’s cloned the idea (it’s OK, Chris, we won’t sue! ;] ) and is doing his own Free Fiction Friday posts – his first offering is an excerpt from his out-of-print book Cybermancy Incorporated.
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Extra webcomic goodness – an online reworking of War Of The Worlds in comic form … which has the ultimate merit of being completely devoid of Tom Cruise. [via Ectoplasmosis]
And now, for the interminably busy, podcasts!
From Librivox, a 28-part audiobook version of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
If you like genre podcasts, you probably already know and love Escape Pod – but I wish to draw your special attention to Transcendence Express by Jetse de Vries, not just because he’s one of my fellow editors at Interzone, but because he’s a damn fine writer in his own right, and this is one of his best pieces of work.
And finally, if you’d like something bite-sized, there’s a growing clade of people doing a piece of flash fiction every Friday: Gareth L. Powell, Neil Beynon, Gareth D. Jones, Martin McGrath … and even yours truly.
Enjoy, and have a great weekend!
PS – compiling this list would be impossible without continual cribbing from the diligent chaps at SFSignal. If you like what we do here at Futurismic, you should definitely be subscribed to them, too.
Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.