Category Archives: Blog

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Friday Free Fiction for 30th May

It’s that time of week again, when thoughts turn to leaving the office, not working for a few days … and reading some stories. Here’s a whole bunch of good stuff to get your eyeballs tucked into.

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The weekly selection from Manybooks.net, including a couple of early pieces from sf legend Robert Silverberg:

  • “Impact” by Irving Cox – “They were languorous, anarchic, shameless in their pleasures . . . were they lower than man . . . or higher?”
  • “The Nothing Equation” by Tom Godwin – “The space ships were miracles of power and precision; the men who manned them, rich in endurance and courage. Every detail had been checked and double checked; every detail except …”
  • “Postmark Ganymede” by Robert Silverberg – “Consider the poor mailman of the future. To “sleet and snow and dead of night”–things that must not keep him from his appointed rounds–will be added, sub-zero void, meteors, and planets that won’t stay put. Maybe he’ll decide that for six cents an ounce it just ain’t worth it.”
  • “The Hunted Heroes” by Robert Silverberg – “The planet itself was tough enough–barren, desolate, forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and dedicated. But they had to run head-on against a mad genius who had a motto: Death to all Terrans!” NOOOOO!
  • “The Man Who Hated Mars” by Gordon Randall Garrett – “To escape from Mars, all Clayton had to do was the impossible. Break out of a crack-proof exile camp–get onto a ship that couldn’t be boarded–smash through an impenetrable wall of steel. Perhaps he could do all these things, but he discovered that Mars did evil things to men; that he wasn’t even Clayton any more. He was only–THE MAN WHO HATED MARS.” NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!1

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Via SF Signal we discover another what seems to be some sort of alternative or addition to services like Manybooks.net that has a much slicker front-end, plus charts and all that web2.0 stuff.

The titles all look pretty familiar (lots of Doctorow and Stross) but you might want to go poke around the science fiction section of Feedbooks anyway. Just in case. 😉

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Via a number of places, but I think I spotted it at Scalzi‘s first (so that’s who I’m quoting):

“Australian science fiction writer Simon Hayes and Freemantle Publishing have posted the first of Hayes’s satirical Hal Spacejock novels online for you to download and try. Simon sends me copies of the series from time to time […] and they’re definitely fun, and (intentionally) humorous science fiction is hard enough to find as it is. Give it a look and if you like it, they’ll arrange to send you some actual books, at a discount of both the cover price and […] international postage.”

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Via Friday Flash Fictioneer Gareth D Jones:

“… a ‘Fiction Special’ issue of Wales-based ezine Estronomicon is now online for you to download, featuring ten short stories.”

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Missed this one last week: Captain Bruce Sterling recommends heading over to HarperCollins, where you can currently read the entirety of Invisible Armies by Jon Evans:

(((That’s a pretty good book, actually. It’s kind of a tough-as-nails technothriller from a leftie Seattle 99er perspective. People who aren’t morons and like thriller novels ought to read this.)))

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Elizabeth Bear and Emma Bull have released the “season finale” novel Refining Fire over at Shadow Unit this week in daily instalments; I think the whole thing should be there by the weekend. If you’ve not checked it out yet, there’s quarter of a million words of free fiction there now – and that’s just the first season.

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Via Lou Anders, there’s a neatly collated selection of free-to-read sample chapters over at Pyr Books.

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Michael Roberts slips in just behind the cut-off deadline with another Tale of the Singularity: “Lord Cthulhu Walks the Desert“.

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And finally, your selection from the Friday Flash Fictioneers:

  • Phred Serenissima‘s story from last week is “Garden Variety“; this week’s is called “Choices“.
  • Gareth D Jones decries the ravages of war (and drugs) in “The Hastening of Battle“.
  • Neil Beynon proves that you can get inspiration from blog posts here at Futurismic in “Touched“
  • Don’t worry; Shaun C Green‘s “Spaceman” isn’t a cover version of the old 4 Non Blondes track.
  • Gaie Sebold gets all po-mo with “Little Red Hoodie“

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That’s your dose for the week, folks – should be enough to keep you going. Don’t forget to feed us your tips, plugs and suggestions as always. Have a great weekend!

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That Smoke Ring Thing

Fans of Larry Niven’s superlative Integral Trees series will recognise the gas torus surrounding the red supergiant star WOH 64, located in everyone’s favourite neighbouring dwarf galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. From The Scientific Frontline Observers Gallery:

Comparisons with models led them to conclude that the star is surrounded by a gigantic, thick torus, expanding from about 15 stellar radii (or 120 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun – 120 AU!) to more than 250 stellar radii (or 30 000 AU!).

Everything is huge about this system. The star itself is so big that it would fill almost all the space between the Sun and the orbit of Saturn,” says Ohnaka. “And the torus that surrounds it is perhaps a light-year across! Still, because it is so far away, only the power of interferometry with the VLT could give us a glimpse on this object.

In The Smoke Ring, as in much of Niven’s work – the environment is as big a part of the story as the characters. Niven describes a group of humans living within a vast “smoke ring” surrounding a neutron star.

smoke ringA gas giant orbiting the star has had it’s atmosphere stripped off by the tidal forces of the neutron star, leaving a long, ring-shaped trail within which organisms have evolved to live in a weightless, three-dimensional world, where the only meaningful direction is “out”.

There are some beautiful artists impressions of WOH 64 – unfortunately there is no suggestion that the gas cloud would be anything less than monstrously uninhabitable, like almost everywhere else in the universe.

That said, it is splendid that the VLT Interferometer is working out so well. [via PhysOrg] [image by R’Yes’]

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“If social media is your home, a phone is you”

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Android / Open Handset Alliance logoNo, it’s not the gibberish it might initially look like. It’s an observation by Jason Stoddard who, in addition to being a damn fine science fiction writer*, runs a futurist-minded publicity agency called Centric.

Jason had a major squee over the iPhone as a platform back in March, but it would appear Google’s recently unveiled Android mobile OS has impressed him even more:

“Combine two highly capable mobile platforms, each with a sales channel for applications and significant incentives for developers to, well, develop on, and you have the beginnings of the next computing revolution. You can hear Bruce Sterling outline all the devices the mobile phone has already eaten, but the number is only going to increase in coming months.”

I can hear your objection coming, because it’s the same one that leapt to my mind – “yeah, like I’ll be able to afford the data charges to make use of mobile computing“.

So what if – and I’m guessing it’s a big ‘if’, because there’ll be a lot of big companies who’ll object to the idea – there was a free-to-use wireless broadband spectrum?

Changes things a little, doesn’t it? [image by OpenHandsetAlliance]

* We’re unashamedly rather biased about Jason’s ideas and writing, as we’ve published him twice here at Futurismic.

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Monkey robot thought control!

robot-monkeyFully aware of the fact that its sounds like something pulled from the mind of an overcaffeinated Japanese TV executive, this week, scientists were revealed to “have trained monkeys to control a robotic arm using the power of their thoughts.”

The team … first trained the macaque monkeys to retrieve marshmallows — a favourite treat — by using a joystick to control the prosthetic arm. Once they had mastered this, the team inserted electrodes into the animals’ motor cortex and used brain signals … to control the arm’s movement.

During the trials, the animals’ limbs were restrained in plastic tubes so that they could not reach for the food themselves. After some errors, the animals learned to perform subtle movements using the robotic arm, which has a jointed shoulder, elbow and wrist, as well as a gripping hand.

But where the Guardian is distracted by the future implications for “controllable prosthetic limbs for patients with stroke, spinal cord injuries or neurodegenerative conditions”, the BBC report remains relatively grounded in the specifics of the actual lab experiments;

The monkeys were able to use their brains to continuously change the speed and direction of the arm and the gripper, suggesting that the monkeys had come to regard the robotic arm as a part of their own bodies.

The success rate of the experiment was 61%.

“The monkey learns by first observing the movement, which activates its brain cells as if it was doing it. It’s a lot like sports training, where trainers have athletes first imagine that they are performing the movements they desire.”

Of course, the only way you’re going to get the full monkey-mecha-wow! impact is by checking out the video footage.

[2nd story from BBC; image by d&e]

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Hello Everyone!

My name is Thomas James, I am 19 years old and as such have the rest of my life ahead of me.

I love science fiction. I love it for it’s escapism and sense of wonder. I love it for the quirks and eccentricities of the characters and storylines. I love the marching Martian war machines, the stellar sweep of the Vault of Heaven, the dead-channel sky, the nine billion names, Source Victoria, the crushed-coral sands of new beaches and the mysterious pools and endless horizons of this most bountiful of genres.

You get the idea.

What I don’t like is pedestrian plots, cardboard characters, and glaring implausibility. This is why I read Futurismic, and why I’m honoured to be allowed to blog here.

As I mentioned, my biographical details are scant: I was born 19 years ago. I went to school. I dropped out of university (chemical engineering is an extremely difficult subject – plus I was bored).

Now I am trying to decide if I want to go back to university, get a proper job (at the moment I’m working in a call centre – everything you’ve heard about those places is true, a rich seam of science fictional material methinks…) or become a penniless hippy.

My blog is TJ’s Place. It mostly consists of rants about this and that.

Um. Peace out ya’ll!