Category Archives: Blog

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Friday Free Fiction for 6th March

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Is it springtime yet? It keeps trying to act like it here, but then winter comes bounding back in out of nowhere and letting my hopes down. Still, at least I’ve got plenty to read while I’m sat inside with the heating running… and so have you, because it’s Friday free fiction time at Futurismic!

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Just the one from ManyBooks:

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A couple more pieces of fiction round off the winter issue of Subterranean Online:

Tim Pratt fans (and you should all be Tim Pratt fans) should keep a close eye on this here website in the weeks to come! 😉

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New month, new issue of Clarkesworld:

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Likewise with Apex Online:

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Strange Horizons presents “Diana Comet” by Sandra McDonald

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Rudy Rucker curates the seventh issue of his delightfully-named Flurb webzine, which contains all this:

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Guess who’s back? Yup, you guessed it – Shadow Unit is ramping up for Season 2 wirh “Lucky Day”

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Courtesy of Chris Roberson, here’s his story “Two Birds”

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Via pretty much everyone, Random House’s Suvudu genre fiction webhubsitecommunitythingy has a bunch of free full-novel PDFs to download. It’d be rude not to, wouldn’t it?

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Via Nick Mamatas comes news of a new super-short fiction outlet; Brain Harvest has kicked off with a super short piece from Mamatas called “Patmos Like Pink Elephants“.

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A message from the intriguingly named Kirk Ultra:

Hi, our website Electric Children has five short stories on it that I thought would be great for Friday Free Fiction. The first and newest is a sci-fi story called “Connector” by Dean Verheyen.

The second two are by Hillary Ferris: “Valentine” and “The Key“. And finally we have two short stories by Barbara Ann Crumm, “The Acid Journal” and “The General Store“. Hope you enjoy!

Cheers, Kirk!

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Via SF Signal we discover that Pyr is now offering The Crooked Letter by Sean Williams available as a free PDF download.

Speaking of SF Signal, it seem’s they are sticking with the bulk-posting of free fiction links, which if nothing else makes things a little easier for little old me…

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Time constraints once again mean that I’ll be unable to catch all the Friday Flash Fiction offerings, but here’s a few carried over from last week. From Sarah Ellender we have “The Torture Orchestra“, while Sumit Dam has been churning ’em out: there’s “Damocles“, plus five microfictions under the title “Running Without Scissors“.

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And there’s your lot! Don’t forget to drop us a line if you have any tip-offs; in the meantime, have a great weekend!

Blog

Wisdom in strange places – Dinosaur Comics on predicting future technology

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Dinosaur Comics - 5th March 2009Some of you may already follow Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics; those who don’t should give it a go for a few weeks. The po-mo mock philosophy isn’t to everyone’s taste, but it usually gets at least one genuine LOL a week out of me.

The latest iteration made me grin, because it seemed so apposite to yesterday’s post about the Stross/Anissimov disagreement. So click through and see the whole thing. Philosophy and dinosaurs – what more could you ask for on a Friday?

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Gold-farming still big business

World of Warcraft gold vaultVia BoingBoing, here’s a Guardian article on the MMORPG gold-farming phenomenon:

These virtual industries sound surreal, but they are fast entering the mainstream. According to a report by Richard Heeks at Manchester University, an estimated 400,000 Asian workers are now employed in gold farming in a trade worth up to £700m a year. With so many gamers now online, these industries are estimated to have a consumer base of five million to 10 million, and numbers are expected to grow with widening internet access.

As I mentioned last time, what interests me most about gold-farming is that it seems to be comparatively immune to the economic slump. WoW gold or weapons are surely luxury items by any economical definition, but for some reason they’re not going the same way as bling and gas-guzzler cars. Is this due to the low ticket price, combined with the fact that gaming is a comparatively recession-friendly pastime? Is it also a recognition that the one thing we value more than our money is the time to achieve what we want (virtual or otherwise)? [image by fernashes]

Looking forward, though, how soon before the market saturates? The collapse of Chinese manufacturing has resulted in an expanded pool of labour, but that just means more competition for the work. If, as some economists have suggested, the recession is a prelude to greater financial parity on a global scale, will gold-farming or its equivalents become an increasingly attractive employment option in the West as the traditional options for blue-collar work erode?

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DARPA to fund really tiny UAVs

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navLike something out of an early Neal Stephenson novel: DARPA have agreed to fund a coin-sized one-bladed nanocopter[1], from the Defense Sciences Office design brief:

The Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) Program will develop and demonstrate an extremely small (less than 7.5 cm), ultra-lightweight (less than 10 grams) air vehicle system with the potential to perform indoor and outdoor military missions.

The program will explore novel, bio-inspired, conventional and unconventional configurations to provide the warfighter with unprecedented capability for urban mission operations.

The nanocopter, called the Katana and designed by Lockheed Martin, is in addition to DARPA’s other micro-ornithopter robot concept (pictured here). Read here for more in depth background to the Katana’s progenitor, the Samurai.

[1] Although there doesn’t seem to be anything especially “nano” about it apart from being, y’know, really small.

[image and article from The Register]

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Are religious skeptics bound for demographic doom?

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fertility goddess In science fiction, there has long been an assumption (not present in all stories, but certainly present in many) that in the future religion will have been consigned to the dustbin of history; that it simply cannot continue to withstand the onslaught of scientific evidence against the existence of a deity.

Demographically, however, it is the believers who have the edge, at least in the U.S. Drawing on data from the General Social Survey, “widely regarded as the single best source of data on societal trends,” blogger The Audacious Epigone notes that believers out-breed non-believers (Via FuturePundit):

From GSS data, I looked at the reported ideal family size* and the actual number of children had, by theistic confidence, among those who had essentially completed their total fertility (age 40-100):

Theistic confidence Desired Actual
Don’t believe 2.26 2.23
No way to find out 2.25 1.95
Some higher power 2.18 1.98
Believe sometimes 2.37 2.34
Believe with doubts 2.34 2.31
Know God exists 2.58 2.64

He also finds among younger people, between the ages of 18-30, the number of children desired is also higher among those who “Know God exists” than any of the other categories, and says:

It is not that secular people cannot keep up with religious folks. They simply do not want to. In the numbers game, though, the results are what matter. The question regarding Steve Sailer’s suggestion that the future may belong to groups who are able to procreate the most is whether or not secularizing social trends are able to overcompensate for greater fertility among the religious.

Does the future, then, belong to believers, or will secular society suck the religion out of their children’s souls before they themselves grow old enough to breed? And how would/should this demographic data impact the fictional futures of SF writers?

(Image: Goddess of Fertility, Museum of Anatolian Civilisations, Ankara, Turkey, via Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]religion,atheism,demographics,population[/tags]