Heads up, writers! Leonard Richardson – the chap who wrote the rather excellent story “Mallory” that we published here at Futurismic last year – has decided to put together his own anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments, and he’s looking for five stories to populate it.
The full submission guidelines are on the Thoughtcrime Experiments webpage, but the basics are as follows: the stories should be between three thousand and ten thousand words in length, and accepted pieces will be bought for $200; Leonard would “prefer you send [him] a story you’ve already written and pounded the pavement for and acquired a couple rejection slips for.”
And as to style… well, this is why he’s asked us to announce it here at Futurismic:
I like science fiction at lot, especially science fiction set within fifty years of the present. It’s not as likely I’d pay $200 for a fantasy story, but if you’ve got a fantasy story set between 1959 and 2059, send it in. I’m not going to pay $200 for a horror story, unless it’s a really original parody or something.
More specifically, I like stories that engage with the pop culture of the past, present, or future. I like stories that use the alien to illuminate the everyday, or vice versa. I like hard SF that requires a degree to understand, provided it’s the computer science degree I actually have. I like farcical ridiculous gonzo pastiche.
So there you go. Check your trunk of stories and send something in – what have you got to lose? Good luck!
A nice confluence of Clarkian techno-positivism and 21st century orbital solar power 
We’re all fairly accustomed to the idea of counterfeit goods made in the far East being passed off as the real thing in Western countries, but we tend to think of them as being things like designer clothing brands or consumer electronics.
One of the most curious aspects of the United States for an outsider like myself is the way that different states – and even counties, so I believe – can have their own legal framework in supplement to the one that governs the whole country. It makes a lot of sense from a sociological point of view, though; different regions will inevitably have different political characters, and the law should logically accommodate that.