Sarah Jane (sobbing): “He’s so young!”
[Thanks, Bad Astronomy]
Category Archives: Blog
Bookstore chains: What you can and can’t read
A disturbing number of writers are apparently being effectively blacklisted by bookstore chains, even though some of these writers’ books sell pretty well. Gregory Frost witnessed this first-hand when good sales and repeat printings for his novel Shadowbridge weren’t enough to induce a U.S. chain to stock the sequel, Lord Tophet (actually the second half of what should have been one long single volume, but that’s another story). Greg rises above the level of rant to explore why this might be so:
The publisher is required by its owner to turn out bestsellers with assembly line regularity. The dying megastores need the extra income at the same time that they have begun to winnow other titles by those already handicapped authors. In the frenzy of rewards and discounts and product placement, the entire industry has completely lost sight of what it once was in business to provide: Good books. We the readers are the ultimate losers in this rigged game.
My solution is no different than all the writers who’ve shouted from the battlements before me: Buy your books from independent bookstores; the ones that have survived the onslaught, the ones that we hope will arise to fill the gap.
Writers pre-published and otherwise, of course, have an even better motive to support indies. The chains are not our friends. They limit your choices — and your purchases pour money into a dying business model anyway. Whatever chains may be today, they are not the future.
[In my next life, I’d like to be a cat in a bookstore by Glynnis Ritchie]
I for one, welcome our new robodog overlords…
Obligatory shout-out to Pentagon boffins for their most recent bout of world-domineering mad-scientica. The Pentagon proposes to:
…develop a software/hardware suit that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.
According to Prof Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University:
“What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.
We can also expect such systems to be equipped with human detection and tracking devices including sensors which detect human breath and the radio waves associated with a human heart beat. These are technologies already developed.”
Like a PACK OF DOGS I SAY! Muahahahahahaaa!
You gotta laugh, right? 😉
[from New Scientist, via KurzweilAI.net][image from this New Scientist blog post]
Friday Free Fiction for 24th October
Friday rolls round once again, like some perpetually mobile ball-bearing in the supermarket aisle of life… so best grab onto a stack of free fiction to break your fall, eh? Let’s see what we’ve got…
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There’s a big batch of pulp-era classix at Feedbooks:
- “The Gallery” by Rog Phillips
- “Advanced Chemistry” by Jack G Huekels
- “Alien Offer” by Al Sevcik
- “Star Mother” by Robert Franklin Young
- “Wanted – 7 Fearless Engineers!” by F Orlin Tremaine
- “The Coming of the Ice” by Green Peyton Wertenbaker
- “A Place in the Sun” by Stephen Marlowe
- “Summer Snow Storm” by Stephen Marlowe
AntipodeanSF‘s new issue has ten micro-flash stories waiting to be read.
There’s a new issue of Behind the Wainscot, too:
- “Faster Than a Speeding Bullet” by Becca de la Rosa
- “Some Notes on the Eisenberg Estate” by Willow Fagan
- “Birdhouse” by Kristine Ong Muslim
- “Exoskeletal” by Laura Ellen Scott
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This week’s fictional offering from Strange Horizons: “Just After Midnight” by Christie Skipper Ritchotte.
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Tor.com are offering a free ebook version of Brian Francis Slattery‘s Spaceman Blues. The only catch is that you have to be a registered member of the site to get at them, but I imagine the bulk of you are already.
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Here’s a bit of a break from science fiction, if you fancy it, via a tip-off from Futurismic‘s own Tom Marcinko:
Literary agent Lucienne Diver declared “Urban Fantasy Week” and has posted some short stories by some of the series authors in her stable on her Livejournal.
Cheers, Tom!
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Via Nick Mamatas, the summer issue of Weird Tales is available as a free PDF download, for an unspecified limited period…
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Peter Watts has a snippet of fiction up at his blog that comes with spoiler warnings, the title of which appears to be “Good News for Modern Man“. Peter Watts being Peter Watts, it probably isn’t good news at all…
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Via the indispensable SF Signal, there’s an excerpt from Alastair Reynolds‘ The Six Directions of Space at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist.
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The latest news from Subterranean Online:
The Fall 2008 issue is well under way, with the serialized “Celestial Empire” novelette by Chris Roberson now complete…
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More leather-slappin’ sharp-shootin’ fiction at SpaceWesterns.com:
- “The Mound (Part VI)” by H P Lovecraft & Zealia Bishop
- “Last Taste of Manna” by T J McIntyre
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Jayme Lynn Blaschke is still dredging through a sea of Memory – here’s part 27.
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To close things off, here’s a handful of Friday Flash Fiction:
- Greg O’Byrne is down with “Cats These Days“. You dig it?
- Phred Serenissima has an appointment at “The Surgery“
- Sarah Ellender swears “Till Death Do Us Part“
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And that’s about your lot, folks… for this week, anyway. Keep those tip-offs coming in; I need ’em before 1800 GMT if they’re to make the cut on Friday! In the meantime, have a great weekend.
Exchanging mugshots to make crypto passwords
A Romanian computer scientist has come up with a new way to generate secure communications pairing between devices like PDAs: get their owners to take photos of one another, and use the biometrics of their faces to generate the password. [image by James Jordan]
The PDA compares the two photos and generates a security code for making a safe connection. The users can then use this connection to exchange confidential information. The photos are stored as a template that contains the essential features for recognition.
I haven’t read the full paper, but it strikes me that there’s an obvious flaw here – in that anyone stealing one of the two devices can use the pre-generated connection key, meaning it’s still only as secure as whatever password or locking system its owner has installed on it (clever crypto types, please feel free to explain why I’m wrong about that). But even so, an interesting proof-of-concept.