All posts by Paul Raven

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Interviews with Gibson and Vinge

Poor Bill Gibson – the publicity wagon for his current novel Spook Country is still rolling, and he’s probably sick to death of public appearances and interviews, itching to get back to researching his next book. Still, lucky for us – here’s another interview with Gibson by Rick ‘Agony Column’ Kleffel, in audio form for your mobile media player pleasure.

Meanwhile, Vernor Vinge has been chatting to French science fiction site ActuSF (don’t worry, text in English) about his recent (and highly recommended) novel Rainbows End. [Both links via BoingBoing]

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Life on other planets

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Nothing divides space geeks like the question of extraterrestrial life. SETI boffin Seth Shostak is an avowed believer, even though he concedes there’s no compelling evidence to support the assertion so far. George Dvorsky is very interested in the Fermi Paradox, too, but much more willing to pick holes in accepted philosophy.

We’re still looking, of course – but we could do with more telescopes in space to help us locate and image exoplanets, and we’re still not entirely certain of how the universe itself came to be.

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Friday Free Fiction for 10th August

A slow week for free fiction, it appears … though I’m sure there was more that I didn’t hear about. Keep us posted, folks.

Strange Horizons has a new Tim Pratt story, “Artifice and Intelligence”.

Baen Books are making some of the stories from their delayed Libertarian anthology, Visions of Liberty, available for free; featured authors include the ubiquitous Robert Sawyer (“The Right’s Tough“), and Futurismic’s own Tobias Buckell in collaboration with Mike Resnick (“The Shackles of Freedom“).

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.

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Testing panspermia

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Panspermia is the theory that life on Earth may have arrived in a nascent form from outer space, carried through the void as bacteria in comets or asteroids. It’s controversial, certainly, but persistent too (as well as being a classic science fiction trope). A Scottish scientist has decided to test the theory for plausibility by sending a chunk of rock into orbit and back on an ESA spacecraft, to determine whether microbes can survive not just the cold and vacuum of space, but also the violent physics of atmospheric reentry.

Update! This just in: Centauri Dreams pours water, or rather radiation, on the plausibility of panspermia.