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Introducing guestblogger Gareth L Powell

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Please give a warm welcome to a new guest blogger here at Futurismic!

Gareth L Powell will need no introduction to some of you, but for those who don’t recognise the name, he’s a science fiction writer with a growing list of short story publication credits in magazines such as Interzone; his first collection, The Last Reef, was published by Elastic Press in the summer of 2008. He’s also a jolly decent chap, as we Brits say – you can find out more about him at his website.

By day, Gareth is a professional copywriter and publicist, and this week-long series of guest posts will lay out some tactics for authors, editors and publishers on the genre fiction scene to increase the profile of their writings and publications using the same techniques he deploys for big corporations and other organisations. Feel free to leave feedback; both Gareth and Futurismic would love to get your input.

Gareth’s first post will arrive tomorrow, so keep ’em peeled.

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Artificial telekinesis!!!1

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mindflexgameFun and games from the Consumer Electronics Show with Mindflex, a toy that uses theta waves to move balls around (see video here):

Focusing on the ball causes a fan in the base of the game — called Mind Flex — to start up and lift the ball on a gentle stream of air. Break your concentration and the ball descends.

Once a player has the ball in the air they need to try to weave it through hoops, towers and other obstacles.

“It’s a mind-eye coordination game,” said Mattel’s Tim Sheridan. “As you relax you’ll find that the ball drops.”

Mind Flex relies on EEG technology to measure brain wave activity through a headset equipped with sensors for the forehead and earlobes.

[via Physorg and The Guardian][image from Physorg]

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Military kids to be issued virtual stand-ins while parents on deployment

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soldier and babyOK, file under “hearts in the right place, brains possibly not”: the US military has noted that having parents away from their kids a long time on active duty (and hence not exactly able to call home regularly) probably isn’t so great for the kids’ well-being. [image by SoldiersMediaCenter]

Their potential solution? Virtual parental avatars powered by chatbots. Here’s a snippet from the DoD’s solicitation for proposals:

“The child should be able to have a simulated conversation with a parent about generic, everyday topics,” the solicitation says. “For instance, a child may get a response from saying, ‘I love you,’ or ‘I miss you,’ or ‘Good night mommy/daddy.’ This is a technologically challenging application because it relies on the ability to have convincing voice-recognition, artificial intelligence, and the ability to easily and inexpensively develop a customized application tailored to a specific parent.”

So many potential responses, so little time… I guess I’m mostly surprised that it was thought up as a request from the DoD rather than at a DARPA coffee-break bull session.

Also – how many old sf stories does this sound like? I’m sure I remember a PKD short featuring something very similar. [via Gizmodo; tip-off from the Whitechapel Massive]

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Friday Free Fiction for January 9th

So how’s the first full working week of the year been treating you? Yeah, me too… still, the weekend’s nearly here, and the weekend means free science fiction links at Futurismic! So here we go, fiction-fans:

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Here’s a bunch from Feedbooks, including the latest Futurismic reprint:

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Just the one over at Project Gutenberg:

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And one at Manybooks:

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Here’s the latest issue of Apex Online:

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Strange Horizons presents “Sisters of the Blessed Diving Order of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew” by A C Wise

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Subterranean Online‘s Winter quarter kicks off with “Clinic” by Kris Nelscott

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Shira Lipkin strikes again! – this time with a story called “The Angel of Fremont Street” at ChiZine

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Chris Roberson‘s free stories are like buses; you wait for ages, then two come along at once::

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We received a message from Kit O’Connell:

The Continuous Coast project – a Creative Commons-licensed shared world – just released three works of fiction as a preview of the world. The fiction is by Steven Brust, Reesa Brown, and myself.

We’ll keep you posted on the project as it develops (we’re in our beta/prologue phase now), but in the
meantime you can check out a few of our other online presences:

Bravo – Futurismic loves Creative Commons projects! Go take a look and show your support.

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From EOS Books:

We’re a couple of weeks away from the release of Jonathan Barnes‘ next book, The Domino Men. And we’re so excited about it, that we are offering his entire first book, The Somnambulist, [to read] online for free.

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Here’s part 30 of Memory by Jayme Lynn Blaschke

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And here’s all the other stuff captured by the diligent hearts of SF Signal:

  • Afterburn SF presents “The Carrion Monster” By Tim McDaniel
  • Best SF presents “Bean There” by Jack Skillingstead
  • Weird Tales presents “The Last Great Clown Hunt” by Chris Furst
  • Planet Magazine presents “The Tears of Lakshmi” by Ian James
  • St. Martin’s Griffin presents “Countdown” by Jonathan Maberry [PDF download, sign-up required]
  • MindFlights presents “Quanruzaman’s Gateway” by Peter Simon
  • Big Pulp presents “Two Ravens” by Michael Turner
  • Behind the Wainscot issue #9 presents fiction and poetry by Neil Ayres and E Sedia, Mariev Finnegan, Berrien C Henderson, Nicole Kornher-Stace, James Owens, Genevieve Valentine, Alvaro Zinos-Amaro, Ann Walters, F J Bergmann, and Marion Boyer
  • The latest update at ChiZine presents fiction and poetry by Kurt Dinan, Shira Lipkin, Daniel A Rabuzzi, Jonathan Wood, M Frost, Maurice Oliver, and Jacqueline West
  • Here’s the first excerpt from The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters Volume One by Gordon Dahlquist; Bantam are serialising the whole thing, apparently.

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And here’s a little bit of Friday Flash Fiction for you to finish with:

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And there you have it! As always, we have our ear to the ground for the rumble and thump of your tip-offs, gratuitous self-plugs and projects, so send ’em in – deadline is 1800 GMT every Friday. In the meantime, have a great weekend!

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Russia blasting biomass at Martian moons

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Earth-Mars montageWhile the Western world waits to see what President-Elect Obama does with the US space program, the Russians are getting busy with a Mars mission of their own.  Due for launch in October, the charmingly-named Phobos-Grunt mission will be robot-manned, of course, but there will be earth lifeforms aboard, albeit very tiny ones:

LIFE [Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment] is intended to help better understand the nature of life, its robustness, and its ability – or not – to move between planets. The journey will be a test of one facet of the “transpermia” hypothesis. That is, the possibility that life can voyage from planet to planet inside rocks blasted off one planetary surface by impact, to land on another planetary surface.

Don’t worry, though; they’re not going to break the 1967 Outer Space Treaty by infecting Mars with Earth biology. Or at least they’re not going to do it deliberately – but that’s not stopping a few NASA types getting a bit hot under the collar about the whole business:

… I am uncomfortable with sending native tundra samples so close to Mars, because this is a location on Earth that could possibly contain organisms capable of adapting to Martian conditions,” and to do so “seems ill-advised,” Conley told SPACE.com.

Well, we surely don’t want to corrupt Mars with Earth microbes if we can avoid it. But how much of that discomfort is rooted in the Planetary Society using a Russian mission arther than a NASA one, I wonder? [superb montage image by Bluedharma]

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