There’s plenty of good science fiction appearing online for free these days – and not just here at Futurismic, either. This time it’s the turn of Technology Review (a damn fine tech-news website in its own right) to play host to ‘Osama Phone Home’, a new short story by David Marusek, author of Counting Heads, which was definitely one of the best novels of last year. [SFBC]

There’s nothing worse than mail-ordering some fresh new threads only to have them arrive and not fit you properly. Sony-Ericsson think this is another case for your increasingly-ubiquitous portable computing platform mobile phone; load in your measurements, scan the barcode on the clothes, and check the cut on a screen image of a virtual you wearing the virtual duds. Could this be the elusive killer app for Second Life?

Science fiction stalwart Ben Bova has a column at Bonita News where he rails against what he sees as a rising tide of moronitude that threatens to drown the human race itself. I have some sympathy with what he’s saying, but I very much doubt that getting more people to read science fiction would make a difference. [SF Signal]

Never let it be said that genre fiction is a staid and unchanging backwater of literature. Andrew Wheeler of the SF Book Club rounds up three newly-birthed (and somewhat tongue-in-cheek) literary manifestos that have shambled in from the wilds of the blogosphere. Of course, clockpunk doesn’t have a manifesto as such, but you can bet that now BoingBoing have pointed it out, we’ll be hearing a lot more about it.

Regular readers of Futurismic will know the name of Jason Stoddard as one of our more popular fiction writers. He recently had a story called ‘Fermi Packet’ published in Talebones Magazine, about an alien invasion of a post-singularity human civilisation, and featuring a digital composite of Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds as its main character. “That’s a great story,” I told him, “you should release it as a free download to the blogosphere at large.” And what do you know, that’s exactly what he did. So go download and read ‘Fermi Packet’, some top-grade geek science fiction.