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Friday Free Fiction for 27th February

Cheer up – the weekend’s here! Well, near enough, if not quite for US readers… but I digress. It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for your weekly round-up for free science fiction stories on the web. Let’s rock.

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Just the one from FeedBooks:

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It’s Nebula nomination season, so expect more announcements like this in coming weeks; Asimov’s Magazine has made all their stories and novelettes that were nominated available online.

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You can download a PDF of the Ken Scholes story “Last Flight of the Goddess” for free… provided you’re a registered member of Tor.com, that is.

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Jason Stoddard has posted chapter 2.1 of his unpublished novel Eternal Franchise.

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Kim Lakin-Smith has released “The Killing Fields” – her story from the recent BSFA anthology, Celebration – on her website. There are downloadable formats for them what don’t like reading on no web page, too.

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More new fiction at Subterranean Online:

“A Four-Sided Triangle” is the latest pulp excursion by Mike Resnick’s singular creation, the Honorable Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones.

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Strange Horizons presents “Sometimes We Arrive Home” by K Bird Lincoln

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Polu Texni presents the concluding part of “Very Truly Yours” by Seth Gordon

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Hub Magazine presents “Montgolfier Winter” by Alasdair Stuart

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SF Signal has a massive list of free stories recently added to the Free Speculative Fiction Online site. A couple of other bits they pointed out:

  • the new issue of Australian sf webzine Antipodean features J D Brames, Liam Thorpe, Steve Duffy, Jan Napier, Mick Dawson, Shaun A Saunders, Mark Farrugia, Houston Dunleavy, Houston Dunleavy, and Felicity Dowker
  • Author and game designer Greg Costikyan has a bunch of free-to-read stories from the bibliography page of his website..

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Due to events in the reality beyond the interwebs (where I am genuinely known to manifest from time to time, contrary to popular belief) I’m not going to be able to catch all the bits of Friday Flash this week, but rest assured they’ll be carried over into next week’s round-up, just as with “Tongue“, Neil Beynon’s offering from last week

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Non-fiction bonus – via BoingBoing (and a slew of other venues) comes news of the second issue of H+, the transhumanist magazine edited by R U Sirius. As you can see, there’s plenty of stuff for science fiction readers:

… “First Steps Toward Post Scarcity or Why It’s the End of the World as We Know it and You Should Feel Fine” by Jason Stoddard…

… John Shirley on Cyberpunk for the 21st Century…

… Paul McEnery talking to “Bio Gunk” SF writer Peter Watts…

H+ is free to download in PDF form from the magazine’s website. So get to it!

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And that’s your lot! As pointed out above, I’ll raise my hand to any errors and ommissions of lateness, as I’ve compiled this post a good few hours than I would normally, but anything that I’ve missed will be added into next week’s post. Until then, keep your tip-offs coming in and have yourselves a great weekend!

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The depression as a stress-test for nation-states

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Does the financial implosion mean the end of the road for nation-states as we know them? John ‘Global Guerillas’ Robb seems to think it might be, as they’re now caught between two increasingly powerful forces:

1. A dominant, turbulent, and uncontrollable global super-network, that is pressuring/weakening/buffeting nation-states from above.
2. Super-empowered individuals/groups rising up from below that are ready to pounce on or exploit any demonstration of nation-state weakness.

As Robb points out, many of the responses to the situation thus far have been based in the same sort of political thinking that dominated the early 20th Century, and suggests that decentralisation is more likely to be a successful tactic:

… decentralization that both improves resilience and accelerates (parallelizes) innovation offers a greater chance of success.   Nation-states that ease the process of decentralization will likely have both the easiest transition to the new fluid environment and the best long term prospects (wealth creation).

In other words, nation-states are most likely to survive by becoming less like nation-states; whether those massive institutions will be able to let go of the reins that easily remains to be seen.

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Is geoengineering our last worst hope?

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Whatever you think might have caused global climate change, you’d be hard pressed to claim that we don’t need to do something about it – after all, we don’t yet have another planet to go to, and the results are going to have real effects on real people.

But what are our options? Emissions controls would be a great start, but we’re struggling to get any political agreement on how much and how soon, and the clock is ticking all the while. Hence the increasing prevalence of suggestions from the field of geoengineering – planet-hacking, in other words.

New Scientist has a lengthy article looking at the potential pitfalls of geoengineering, which include not just the risk of tweaking something the wrong way and making things worse (whether for everyone or just a certain locality) but the inevitable geopolitical hazards. Not every nation has the resources to take direct action at the required scale, and – because that action could affect the rest of the planet in unexpected ways – no one’s going to be happy with any nation (or group or individual) that decides to jump the gun and take matters into its own hands.

It’ll be a while before these questions work their way into mainstream politics (especially considering the rather more immediate  issues of the financial implosion), but I doubt it’ll be all that long in real terms – nor does Jamais Cascio, who has been beating the drum about geoengineering for a good few years already. That the scientific field is starting to consider geongineering as a serious option is a sobering thought – these are the guys who know the system best, and if they’re suggesting jury-rigging might be our only way out then things may be grimmer than anyone is willing to admit.

[Yes, this post is predicated on the notion that climate change is a genuine phenomenon, a genuine threat and likely human in origin. As much as I respect your right to disagree with any or all of those three statements, if that’s all you have to bring to this discussion I’d like to ask you to sit it out for once. Cheers.]

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Obama budgets for moonshot

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Space Shuttle Endeavour launchingWell, at least one sector of the web is in a cheery mood at the moment – the space buffs are pretty stoked that President Obama’s budget includes a nice boost for NASA:

The budget calls on NASA to complete International Space Station construction, as well as continue its Earth science missions and aviation research. Yet it also remains fixed to former President George W. Bush’s plan to retire the space shuttle fleet by 2010 and replace them with the new Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, which would fly astronauts to the space station and return them to the moon by 2020.

Good news for extropians and forward-thinkers, then – though it’s almost surprising to see a spending increase on something that, by definition, doesn’t garner immediate tangible results at home. Perhaps Obama”s  gang are thinking that this is the ideal time to sneak by a budget increase that might otherwise cause much angst and wailing; US$19billion may sound like a lot, but it’s a tiny fragment of that bailout package… [image by jurvetson]

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What English words are dying out?

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lettersLinguists at the University of Reading have developed a computer model of the development of the English language:

Reading University researchers claim “I”, “we”, “two” and “three” are among the most ancient, dating back tens of thousands of years.

Their computer model analyses the rate of change of words in English and the languages that share a common heritage.

The team says it can predict which words are likely to become extinct – citing “squeeze”, “guts”, “stick” and “bad” as probable first casualties.

This reminds me of another exploration of the future of language.

[at BBC News][image from AYUMi ~ PHOTOGRAPHY]

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