Category Archives: Blog

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Friday Free Fiction for 25th April

Greetings, fiction fans – Friday means freebies!

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Before we get going with the linkage, it’s worth pointing out that Wednesday was the first anniversary of International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. What that means in real terms is that there’s bucket-loads of extra free fiction from all manner of writers spattered all over the intarwebs, and it’s all collected in one convenient LiveJournal Community.

I’ve not checked it out yet (I kinda phear t3h LiveJournal, as I imagine it has the power to erode the last few precious hours of free time I have), but I think we can safely assume that’ll be a real rabbit-hole for fiction fans. Please report back if you find anything particularly good in there that deserves a link of its own!

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OK, so back to the usual suspects. It’s just the one from Manybooks.net this week:

  • “Daughters of Doom” by Herbert B. Livingston (“Deep in space lay a weird and threatening world. And it was there that Ben Sessions found the evil daughters . . .” Mwuah-hah-hah-haaaah!)

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Nathan Lilly dropped me a note to remind us all that part 2 of A R Yngve‘s “A Man Called Mister Brown” is online at SpaceWesterns.com this week, along with some non-fictional stuff about BSG.

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Another new piece goes up over at Subterranean Online – “Your Collar” by Elizabeth Bear.

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I have stumbled upon (and added to the sidebar) another online fiction outlet called Lone Star Stories, which I discovered thanks to the effusive praise Jeremiah Tolbert had for “The Wreck of the Grampus” by Jeremy Adam Smith.

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There’s another teaser/deleted scene piece (which all seem to get filed under the excellent ‘WTF BBQ’ category) over at Shadow Unit:

“Lau was a Valley Girl, dammit. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill.

And that was half the problem. She could figure out how to use a simple gas grill, and that was not what this was. This looked like the navigation panel on the Starship Enterprise, and not the Sulu-era one with the slider and a couple of nonfunctional push buttons in primary colors, either.”

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Small Beer Press have evidently developed a taste for this free Creative Commons downloads business. This week they’ve set free Maureen F McHugh‘s short story collection Mothers & Other Monsters:

“… in her luminous, long-awaited début collection, award-winning novelist Maureen F. McHugh wryly and delicately examines the impacts of social and technological shifts on families. Using beautiful, deceptively simple prose, she illuminates the relationship between parents and children and the expected and unexpected chasms that open between generations.”

Sounds good to me! That said, so does a small beer … it is Friday, after all!

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I got an email from a chap called Michael Roberts, who says:

“Back in January I wrote a little novelette which is probably not too publishable (or so I read; at 8743 words it’s really too long to put in a magazine). So I figured, why not put it online? And so I finally got off my figurative butt and did so. Now if I could only think of a good title …”

For future reference, Michael, there’s plenty of venues for fiction that length – so you’ll know for next time. If you go and read it, be sure to drop Michael a suggestion for his title!

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Which brings us round to the march of the Friday Flash Fictioneers!

  • Martin McGrath just missed the post last week with “King Rook“
  • Mind you don’t cut yourself on Jay Lake’s “Shard“.
  • Greg O’Byrne has an “Interstellar” fragment.
  • Neil Beynon‘s forty-second piece (he’s only ever missed roll-call once, IIRC) is called “Precious“.
  • Shaun C Green has reached a “Turning Point“.
  • Gareth D Jones gets all nostalgic in “Gone With The Window“.
  • And finally yours truly humbly offers you “Magic Eyes“.

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And that’s about your lot – I reckon the IPSTPD community should provide more than enough material to be going on with. So until next week, keep your eyes and ears peeled for more free fiction on the web, and drop us a line with your tips!

Have a great weekend, too.

Blog

The future of English

7 Comments

cat price Ooh, this combines two of my favorite things:  languages and the future.  John Scalzi’s grammar bitch of the day (granted, that day was a while ago) touches on one of those small spelling differences, specifically ‘alright’ vs ‘all right’.  While I disagree with Mr. Scalzi on this point (‘alright’ is  usable as that Lichtenstein art he has up, though I’d ask somebody “Are you all right?”), it’s something to think about when discussing the differences between English spellings.  I’ve spent all day today trying to explain to Japanese eight-year-olds why I say “zee” and my co-worker says “zed.”

Garance wonders if the proliferation of an unedited Internet might not bring about a return to the writings of previous centuries, when men wore hose and words were spelled phonetically:

As blogs move us into a less heavily copy-edited world, I sometimes wonder if we’re moving back into a more 16th and 17th century form of writing, where the idea of correct spelling was less important than the communication of meaning — which, in reality, can be accomplished just as well with incorrectly spelled words and homonyms as with a more perfect language. And also: as we move ever deeper into this new world of speech-like writing, will the perfect, formal language of the page one day seem as antique and elaborate as Victorian silverware?

What say you all?  I’m a stickler for spelling and grammar (though I muck it up a fair bit), but I can definitely see a return to a more homonymic age. (funny, lowercase ‘internet’ doesn’t pass my spellchecker, but ‘homonymic’ does just fine)

(image from lolcats, of course)

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Prosthetic “fluidhand” raises the bar

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Fluidhand - prosthesis prototypeVia Warren Ellis’s grinders, I present to you: the Fluidhand!

“The flexible drives are located directly in the movable finger joints and operate on the biological principle of the spider leg – to flex the joints, elastic chambers are pumped up by miniature hydraulics. In this way, index finger, middle finger and thumb can be moved independently. The prosthetic hand gives the stump feedback, enabling the amputee to sense the strength of the grip.”

Prosthetics and exoskeletal tech are really making strides (arf!) at the moment. I don’t think it’s science fictional to suggest that we’ll be seeing prosthetic limbs that equal the functionality of the organic originals within a decade. [image borrowed from linked Physorg article]

But there’ll still be a stigma attached to having one, because of the aesthetic issues; it’ll be longer than a decade before there’s a false limb that would pass for a real one.

Maybe they’d become a badge of pride in certain industries or regions – among veterans of ideological conflicts, perhaps? And what about the possibility of elective prosthetics – people choosing to replace limbs that had nothing wrong with them?

Blog

Safer, saner cities

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city park The more I go through life, the more I find that other people have very different experiences.  But if you’re from middle America, or any major city, much of Nature you’ve seen in your adult life has been through a car window going somewhere else.  And the traditional view of future cities has been a bigger and better version of the concrete jungle, like a bad SimCity where everyone lives in one area, commutes to work in another and goes shopping in a third.

A recent study found that more “walkable” neighborhoods bode well for the elderly, not merely for exercise and physical health, but also for their mental wellbeing.  Specifically,

Berke speculates that walkable neighborhoods might be so important because they promote social connection and reduce isolation, a major predictor of depression. “If people are out walking to destinations, they run into each other”, he says. “And then they talk, or interact, or share ideas”.  He adds that city streets with their shorter blocks, more direct routes, and greater number of intersections—can be more walkable than suburban ones. They also have greater population density, which increases the probability that people meet one another by chance.

This sort of connection between people in a neighborhood is something that has been lost in modern American cities and towns since the rise of the automobile and long-distance commuting became regular.  At least, it’s something that I’ve seen and heard about, but have never actually experienced.  But, with rising gas prices and actual debates going on about changing the way our cities grow, this is something that could impact our perception of futuristic cities.

(via SciTechDaily) (image from Andreas.)

Blog

Web wars – white hats versus black in botnet battles

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CPU chip pinsThey may be off the news radar at the moment, but botnets are still a serious bugbear for computer security professionals – it’s hard work trying to defeat something that fights back, after all. [image by Rodrigo Senna]

So here’s a new idea from the University of Washington – why not fight fire with fire, and build a white hat botnet to defend against the DDoS attacks af the black hat botnets?

“Their system, called Phalanx, uses its own large network of computers to shield the protected server. Instead of the server being accessed directly, all information must pass through the swarm of “mailbox” computers.

The many mailboxes do not simply relay information to the server like a funnel – they only pass on information when the server requests it. That allows the server to work at its own pace, without being swamped.”

Sounds like a good plan. It’s beyond my knowledge levels, but the guys at Techdirt seem to think it’s a creative approach.

As a recent convert to Linux, this is the part where I smugly remind everyone that if certain commercially ubiquitous operating systems weren’t so riddled with security flaws, botnets wouldn’t be a problem anyway …