Category Archives: Blog

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Futurismic Fiction Hiatus

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You’ll notice there’s no new short story for the month of December here at Futurismic.  The reason is quite simple:  time has outraced our inventory.  We just haven’t been able to find appropriate, high-quality stories faster than we’ve been publishing them.

This is not for lack of trying by our contributors, and I am continuing to work through the submissions as quickly as I can.  A lot of good material has come in, but we’re looking for great, and this month we didn’t quite find the story we were looking for.

Another issue is that a considerable amount of what’s been submitted hasn’t been a perfect fit with our guidelines, which I strongly encourage potential writers to review thoroughly to get an idea of what we’re looking for.  I’m aware there’s a school of thought out there that suggests:  when it doubt, send it and let the editor decide.  I’m not entirely on board with that approach, though; here at Futurismic we really are looking for a particular type of story, so writers who spend even just a little time researching what we’ve published in the past and what excites us at the blog can save themselves some wasted effort, and us a lot of time, by targeting us appropriately.  For my part, I plan to contribute more to the blog in the coming months in an attempt to improve the general idea of what Futurismic is about as a fiction market.

Of course, many of our potential contributors are reading the guidelines and targeting us appropriately.  We really do appreciate that!  And thanks to all the writers who’ve been submitting to and supporting Futurismic over the past five years.   I look forward to working with many more of you down the road.

At any rate, since we clearly haven’t made our deadline this month, we thought it would be best to take a month off to recharge and hopefully restock our inventory, so that we can get off to a running start in 2010.

And yes, we’re definitely still open to submissions!

Blog

Tax ’em back into town?

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The UK iteration of Wired is doing a themed issue entitled “Rebooting Britain”, kicking around ideas for changing the face of an already-changing nation for the better. Many of them could be more broadly applied to any Western/developed nation, but a few of them address issues that are somewhat more unique to the UK. For example, Britain is apparently one of the very few nations where the percentage of people living in cities is not increasing; this doubtless has a lot to do with deep-rooted notions of the romance and allure of country living that inform the English psyche, though the increasing proliferation of surveillance and petty bureaucracy in urban areas may well be a contributing factor too.

But the rural lifestyle is disproportionately expensive from an environmental perspective; people who live in the country need to drive further and more often, they need to use more energy for heating their homes, and so on. So, P D Smith suggests, why don’t we tax the rural lifestyle heavily to encourage people back into more efficient city living?

To create a low-carbon economy we need to become a nation of city dwellers. We tax cigarettes to reflect the harm they do to our health: we need to tax lifestyles that are damaging the health of the planet – and that means targeting people who choose to live in the countryside. We need a Rural Living Tax. Agricultural workers and others whose jobs require them to live outside cities would be exempt. The revenue raised could be used to build new, well-planned cities and to radically upgrade the infrastructure of existing cities.

We have an opportunity to create an urban renaissance, to make cities attractive places to live again – not just for young adults, but for families and retired people, the groups most likely to leave the city.  Turning our old cities into “smart cities” won’t be easy or cheap, but in a recession this investment in infrastructure will boost the economy. We need to learn to love our cities again, because they will help us to save the planet.

It’s a nice idea and well-meant, but there are some pretty obvious flaws to the suggestion. First and foremost, Smith seems to have overlooked the fact that the affluent middle classes who are at the centre of the migration into the countryside are the most politically active slice of the UK population, and no government in its right mind (if such a thing exists) is going to risk alienating them by crushing their dreams of “getting away from it all” with their hard-earned money.

Another problem is the assumption that country living is necessarily less energy efficient. As the months pass, more and more middle-class jobs will fall into the sphere of knowledge work, making them ideally suited for telecommuting… which is something that businesses looking to save on their payroll overheads are starting to wake up to. Offer the chance to work from home in exchange for a smaller pay-packet, and there’ll be a significant take-up.

Plus country houses – while usually bigger and less efficient than city dwellings – are more easily retrofitted for energy efficiency, and more likely to have that money spent on them by their owners rather than by government grants – if there’s a clear economic benefit to investing in a “greener” household, you can bet your life the middle class will be all over it like a rash, especially once a few trendsetters start doing it and trumpeting the benefits.

And let’s not forget that homes in the countryside are theoretically closer to domestic sources of food; with a little logistical planning and some smart entrepreneurship, even small villages could become efficient nexuses for local produce distribution. Hell, they could even start aiming for self-sufficiency and community agriculture, like the Pennines town of Todmorden, which is showing signs of successfully shifting toward community farming and a “locavore” lifestyle [via Global Guerrillas, of all places].

In short, there are definite downsides to the British rural exodus, but using the blunt instrument of tax to reverse it is bound to fail. Better still, surely, to embrace the rural shift and let economics do the hard work for you?

Blog

Software that learns to recognise faces and voices like a child

camera-head stencilsA computer scientist at the University of Pennsylvania has decided to mimic the way children learn to recognise faces and voices in order to speed up the artificial learning curve of intelligent systems:

Using novel learning algorithms that combine audio, video, and text streams, Taskar and his research team are teaching computers to recognize faces and voices in videos. Their system recognizes when someone in the video or audio mentions a name, whether he or she is talking about himself or herself, or whether he or she is talking about someone in the third person. It then maps that correspondence between names and faces and names and voices.

“An intelligent system needs to understand more than just visual input, and more than just language input or audio or speech. It needs to integrate everything in order to really make any progress,” Taskar says.

The information Taskar’s team feeds into the system is free training data harvested from the Internet. Attempts to teach computers visual recognition in the pre-Internet age were hampered in large part by a lack of training content. Today, Taskar says, the Internet provides a “massive digitization of knowledge.” People post videos, comments, blogs, music, and critiques about their favorite things and interests.

Hah! And they said YouTube would never do any real good! Taskar’s computer seems destined for a life of increasing frustration with irresolvable plot lines, though, as they’re training it by showing it episodes of Lost:

As Tasker’s team feeds more data about Lost into the computer—such as video clips, scripts, or blogs—the system improves at identifying people in the video. If, for example, a clip contains footage of characters Kate and Anna Lucia, after being taught, the computer will recognize their faces.

“The alogorithm is learning this from what people say, or from screenplays as well,” Taskar adds. “The screenplay doesn’t tell you who is who, but it tells you there’s a scene with [two characters] talking to each other.”

Taskar says the information the research has produced can be helpful in many ways, particularly in searching videos for content. Currently, if a father is searching for a photo of his daughter playing with the family dog in his gigabytes of photos and videos on his hard drive, unless the photo is tagged “daughter playing with dog,” chances are he isn’t going to be able to find it.

Well, that’s your consumer-level pitch, sure, but the system will be too large and ungainly (and expensive) for Joe Average for a long time. Tasker should probably talk to the UK government… that panoply of CCTV cameras keeps growing, and it costs big money to hire people to watch their output. And what could possibly go wrong with putting an automated recognition system in charge of crime prevention? [image by bixentro]

Blog

Charlie Stross: we’re probably never going to build starships

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an unlikely spaceshipHere’s a second piece of punditry for your Monday morning, this time from the inimitable Charlie Stross. He’s been poking the traditional sf mythology of the starship with a sharp stick over the last few months, and the end result is a suggestion that – as far as realistic speculation about the future is concerned – we need to recognise the starship as the nautical metaphor it really is, and face up to the fact that the only plausible way we could reach other stars is through tiny “starwisp” probes made of memory diamond substrate. [image by Brenda Starr]

Again, the whole piece is well worth your time (if only to see that Stross has sat down and run the numbers on it), but here’s the coup de grace:

… yes, I think human interstellar exploration (and yes, maybe even colonization) might be possible, after a fashion. But to get there, we’re going to have to master at least two entire technological fields that don’t yet exist, even before we start trying to blast compact disc sized machines up to relativistic velocities. And that’s without considering the difficulty of how to cram an industrial infrastructure capable of building more of itself, of a machine capable of surviving in deep space — the equivalent of those 300,000 NASA technicians and engineers — into the aforementioned CD-sized machine …

If we succeed in doing it, it’s going to look nothing like the Starship Enterprise. Or even New Horizons. The whole reference frame we instinctively assume when we hear the word “ship” is just so wrong it’s beyond wrong-ness: it’s on a par with Baron Munchausen’s lunar exploits as seen in light of the Apollo Program. We need a new handle for discussing and analyzing such a venture. And the sooner we consign the “-ship” suffix to the dustbin of failed ideas, the better.

If Stross is right, then the only sf writer of my experience who has written truly plausible descriptions of post-human exploration beyond the solar system is Greg Egan… can anyone suggest any others?

But just in case Stross has put you on a downer with his debunking, here’s a potential antidote in the form of scientists speculating about using the Hawking radiation from small man-made black holes as a power source for interstellar propulsion. One of them even goes so far as to suggest that the sweet-spot in the physics that informs the theory implies that we live in “a universe optimised for building starships”…

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David Brin: is America’s loss the world’s gain?

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Marshall Plan propaganda posterY’know, I really like David Brin, even though I don’t always agree with what he says; he’s got a contrary stripe a mile wide, and he’s one of the few self-identifying conservative thinkers in science fiction who’s willing to break ranks with populism and call out the failings of his own side – something that is just as rare on the liberal side of the fence, IMHO.

Brin’s guest-blogging at Sentient Developments again, and his latest post is provocative reading, regardless of your personal politics. The thesis is roughly as follows: America may have spent itself into economic and political decline, but in doing so it leaves as its legacy a world lifted out of poverty thanks to the counter-mercantilist trade flows set up by the Marshall plan. [image by kafka4prez; orginal copyright status uncertain, so please contact for takedown if required]

You should go read the whole thing (there’s probably ten minutes worth of text there, so it’s one of his smaller rants), but here’s a few highlights for the impatient:

While Marshall crafted a historically unprecedented, receptively open trade policy called “counter-mercantilism” (I’ll explain in a minute), MacArthur vigorously pushed the creation of Japanese export-oriented industries, establishing the model of what was to come. Instead of doing what all other victorious conquerors had done – looting the defeated enemy — the clearly stated intention was for the United States to lift up their prostrate foe, first with direct aid. And then, over the longer term, with trade.

[…]

At the behest of Marshall and his advisors. America became the first pax-power in history to deliberately establish counter-mercantilist commerce flows. A trade regime that favored the manufactures of many foreign/poor countries over those in the homeland. Nations crippled by war, or by millennia of mismanagement, were allowed to maintain high tariffs, keeping out American manufactures, while sending shiploads from their own factories to the U.S., almost duty free.

Moreover, despite the ongoing political tussle of two political parties and sometimes noisy aggravation over ever-mounting deficits, each administration since Marshall’s time kept fealty with this compact — to such a degree that the world’s peoples by now simply take it for granted.

Forgetting all of history and ignoring the self-destructive behavior of other empires, we all have tended to assume that counter-mercantilist trade flows are somehow a natural state of affairs! But they aren’t. They are an invention, as unique and new and as American as the airplane, or the photocopier, or rock n’ roll.

[…]

Even if America is exhausted, worn out and a shadow of her former self, from having spent her way from world dominance into a chasm of debt, the U.S. does have something to show for it the last six decades.

A world saved. A majority of human beings lifted out of poverty. That task, far more prodigious than defeating fascism and communism or going to the moon, ought to be viewed with a little respect. And I suspect it will be, by future generations.

This should be contemplated, soberly, as other nations start to consider their time ahead as one of potential triumph. As they start to contemplate the possibility of becoming the next great pax or “central kingdom.”

If that happens — (as I portray in a coming novel) — will they emulate Marshall and Truman, by starting their bright era of world leadership with acts of thoughtful and truly farsighted wisdom? Perhaps even a little gratitude? Or at least by evading the mistakes that are written plain, across the pages of history, wherever countries briefly puffed and preened over their own importance, imagining that this must last forever?

I’m as guilty as the next man of casting American influence in a negative light, and Brin’s analysis provides an intriguing counterpoint to that nay-saying: an argument to the effect that history may remember that influence more positively than our proximity to it currently permits.

What do you think America will be remembered for in fifty years’ time? (And keep it cordial, folks; nation-bashing and racism will be deleted without hesitation, so keep a historical perspective, please.)