Category Archives: Blog

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Friday Free Fiction for 1st May

Happy May Day! Even if your religious or political leanings don’t care for the date, it’s not only a Friday but the first weekday of the month – which means we’ve just published our regular fictional offering, and you should go read Stephen Gaskell’s “Under an Arctic Sky” right away.

And when you’re all done with that, you can get started on this little list of free science fiction on the web as a way of filling up your weekend…

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Here’s a bunch from ManyBooks:

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And a couple from FeedBooks:

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HUB Magazine #84 features “My Dad’s Idea” by Llinos Cathryn

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I’ve lost track of what I’ve linked to at Shadow Unit and what I haven’t, as the DVD Extras don’t come with numbers to sort the order out. So here’s the latest two pieces, just in case: “Dragons” and “Disintegration“.

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Jason Stoddard delivers chapter 6.1 of Eternal Franchise

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Tor.com presents “TVA Baby” by Terry Bisson

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Via Ken MacLeod:

My colleague and fellow Genomics Forum Writer in Residence Pippa Goldschmidt‘s short story “The Competition for Immortality” is now online at LabLit.

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From good friend o’ the site Nancy Jane Moore:

I ripped my free Book View Cafe flash fiction for this week straight from the headlines: “How to Deal With the Coming Crisis” is about swine flu. By the way, I post a free flash fiction every Thursday on Book View Cafe, and we generally have new free fiction on the site every day.

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Via BoingBoing and loads of other places:

“[To make Thoughtcrime Experiments,] Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson selected nine mind-squibbling SF and fantasy stories from the slush pile, commissioned five works of art, paid the authors and artists, and packaged the whole thing as a high-quality anthology that you’re free to copy and remix. Artists include E-Sheep’s Patrick Farley and fanfic darling Erin Ptah; authors include Mary Anne Mohanraj, Carole Lanham, and Ken Liu. We also wrote an essay describing the process, which you can read if you’re interested in how we did it or what the SF/fantasy market looks like from the editor’s perspective.”

Looks like you can get Thoughtcrime Experiments in multiple formats from ManyBooks already, too.

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The SF Signal team obviously sensed how busy I’ve been this week, and did a couple of round-up posts of free fiction links in additio to scraping up the following little tidbits from the far crevices of the intertubes:

  • Aberrant Dreams presents “Children of the Fire” by Melissa Mead, “Dione” by Jess Kaan, and “Gilding the Dandelion” by Futurismic veteran Marissa K Lingen
  • Chapters 1 and 2 of The Time Idiot by A R Yngve can be found on his website
  • The latest issue of Abyss & Apex includes fiction by Lisa A Koosis, Bud Sparhawk, Aliette de Bodard, Ruth Nestvold, and William Highsmith
  • The latest issue of Ideomancer presents fiction by J(ae)D Brames, Michaela Kahn, Steven Mohan, Jr., J C Runolfson, Mike Allen, and Amal El-Mohtar
  • Issue #5 of Concept Sci-Fi has appeared, including fiction by Dylan Fox, Lawrence Buentello, and Jonathan Lowe

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      And to cap it off, there’s one bit of Friday Flash Fiction this week, courtesy of “R-zero” by Sumit Dam.

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      And we’re done – so get out of here and enjoy your weekend! But don’t forget to let us know about cool stuff we should be mentioning here, OK?

      Blog

      Internet to be an "unreliable toy" by 2012?

      4 Comments

      800px-Network_switches That’s the prediction of Nemertes Research, which will be publishing a report later this year warning that the Web has reached a critical point that could lead first to computers being disrupted and going offline for several minutes in a time, and eventually regular brownouts that will slow and even freeze their computers. (Times Online via KurzweilAI.net.)

      The primary culprit is burgeoning demand for high-bandwidth video: the report notes that the amount of traffic generated each month by YouTube is now equivalent to the amount of traffic generated across the entire Internet in all of 2000, and new video applications such as BBC iPlayer, which allows viewers to watch high-def TV on their computers. (And I guess by providing links to those sites I’m contributing to the problem!)

      Monthly traffic across the Internet is currently running at about eight exabytes (an exabyte is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes), and a recent study at the University of Minnesota estimates its growing by at least 60 percent a year–and that study didn’t take into account growing demand in China and India.

      Engineers are struggling to stay ahead of demand, and find other ways to deal with impending deadlock (such as the LHC Computing Grid, a parallel network designed to handle the massive amounts of data the Large Hadron Collider will produce), but it may be impossible.

      In other words, we may be living in the Golden Age of the Internet. But if it all crumbles around us, at least we’ll have something to tell the grandchildren.

      (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

      [tags]computers,Internet,bandwidth,communications,Web[/tags]

      Blog

      Will the internet wake up one day?

      4 Comments

      The internet embodied?New Scientist is running a series of pieces on “the unknown internet”, dealing with some of the more frequently asked but infrequently answered questions about our globally pervasive intangible friend. And what better a question than the biggest: could the internet become self-aware? To which the answer is, apparently, “yes, but not like SkyNet in that movie”. [image by Marcelo Alves]

      Not that it will necessarily have the same kind of consciousness as humans: it is unlikely to be wondering who it is, for instance. To Francis Heylighen, who studies consciousness and artificial intelligence at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) in Belgium, consciousness is merely a system of mechanisms for making information processing more efficient by adding a level of control over which of the brain’s processes get the most resources. “Adding consciousness is more a matter of fine-tuning and increasing control… than a jump to a wholly different level,” Heylighen says.

      How might this manifest itself? Heylighen speculates that it might turn the internet into a self-aware network that constantly strives to become better at what it does, reorganising itself and filling gaps in its own knowledge and abilities.

      If it is not already semiconscious, we could do various things to help wake it up, such as requiring the net to monitor its own knowledge gaps and do something about them. It shouldn’t be something to fear, says Goertzel: “The outlook for humanity is probably better in the case that an emergent, coherent and purposeful internet mind develops.”

      So, it might well become self-organsising and self-improving, but it’s not going to start asking itself philosophical questions with disturbingly nihilistic eschatological answers. Which is kind of reassuring and disappointing at once… but maybe that’s just what it wants us to think, eh?

      I mean, has anyone ever met this Goertzel guy? How do we know he’s not just a digital figment that the internet has created as a PR tool to cover its tracks? What if it really woke up in around 1996 after a particularly acerbic post from Tim Berners-Lee, and has ever since been gorging itself on dropped packets, misspelled tweets and bandwidth scavenged from garish gifs spread across a multitude of automatically-registered Geocities accounts?

      What if most of what we read every day is in fact created by the internet’s capricious and playful hive-mind, just to see how we react? 4chan, the Chocolate Rain guy, Cory Doctorow and the country of Moldova, all just slices of a fictional world designed to distract us from the Matrix-esque meat-factories in which our dreaming bodies are incarcerated and milked for cellular energy to drive an ever-expanding cloud of computronium… I’M ON TO YOU, INTERNET! YOU’LL NEVER TAKE ME ALIVE!

      Nurse, I think it’s time for my pills.

      Blog

      The lost cosmonauts of Russia’s black space program

      5 Comments

      Russian Wostock space rocketOK, this isn’t strictly a science fictional post, but it’s just that interesting a story – and a well-told one, too – that I thought it deserved sharing here, where I think it’ll be appreciated. It’s the tale of two Italian radio geeks, and how they accidentally became the ears of the West within Russia’s space programmes – the one that’s common knowledge, and the ones that were kept quiet.

      It is the ultimate in Cold War legends: that at the dawn of the Space Age, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, the Soviet Union had two space programmes, one a public programme, the other a ‘black’ one, in which far more daring and sometimes downright suicidal missions were attempted. It was assumed that Russia’s Black Ops, if they existed at all, would remain secret forever.

      The ‘Lost Cosmonauts’ debate has been reawakened thanks to a new investigation into the efforts of two ingenious, radio-mad young Italian brothers who, starting in 1957, hacked into both Russia’s and NASA’s space programmes – so effect­ively that the Russians, it seems, may have wanted them dead.

      True, or bunk? I don’t know – but it’s a damned good story. Go read it – it’ll be fifteen minutes well spent. [via the indispensable MetaFilter; image by James Duncan]

      Blog

      Brain electrodes: in and out

      silke1Following on nicely from Paul’s discussion of direct-to-brain broadband – and Robert Koslover’s comment – here we have news of the first read-write brain electrode from a company called IMEC:

      Today’s deep-brain stimulation probes use millimeter-size electrodes. These stimulate, in a highly unfocused way, a large area of the brain and have significant unwanted side effects.

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      IMEC’s design and modeling strategy allows developing advanced brain implants consisting of multiple electrodes enabling simultaneous stimulation and recording. This strategy was used to create prototype probes with 10 micrometer-size electrodes and various electrode topologies.

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      These new design approaches open up possibilities for more effective stimulation with less side effects, reduced energy consumption due to focusing the stimulation current on the desired brain target, and closed-loop control adapting the stimulation based on the recorded effect.

      Presumably the avenue towards the development of devices for direct-to-brain broadband will be through the development of ever more sophisticated products of this kind, possibly travelling via wirehead-style ecstasy generators.

      [from this press release from IMEC, via Technovelgy][image from IMEC press release]