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What will become the next non-monetary economy?

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Chris “Long Tail” Anderson has an interesting guest post from Adam Gurri that discusses non-monetary economies, like the acting profession:

The thing about acting is that the labor force (actors) actually value the ability to do work in that field that they are willing to take on work for nothing and take on other jobs as a sort of cross-subsidy.  There is a sort of demand for employment in theater, which makes competition among actors so fierce as to actually drive down wages (at time of entry at least) to zero or near zero.

His argument continues that many content-creation jobs (like blogging about your profession, for example) have such low overheads that they’re cutting the feet out from under journalists, who were paid to have the time to research topics they probably didn’t know much about to start with. There’s still ‘room at the top’ for good writers with deep knowledge (whether they started as journalists or experts), but the old career path from copyboy upwards seems to be gone for good.

Whether you see that as a good thing or a bad thing probably depends on what sort of work you do, but I think we can all agree it’s happening. The question is – after journalism, what will be the next to fall? And might the flow of money be supplemented by some sort of reputational currency, like whuffie?

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Friday Free Fiction for 2nd January

Well, here we are in a brand new year – how did that happen so quickly?

Some of you will have been back at work today, while some of you are probably still trying to shake off hangovers from the last few days, (and some of us are caught between the two)… but you can all rest easy in the knowledge that I’ve been collecting free science fiction links for the last two weeks!

Your weekend reading starts here, ladies and gents:

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Here’s a bunch from Feedbooks:

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A couple at Manybooks:

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And a singleton at Project Gutenberg:

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Here’s another freebie from Jay Lake: “Lux Fiat”

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Strange Horizons presents “Engines of Survival” by Larissa Kelly

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Hub Magazine presents “The Watchers at the Window” by Marie Faye Prior

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Clarkesworld presents:

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Via the SF Signal gang:

The good folks over at Snowbooks have posted a free short story from George Mann called “The Shattered Teacup”. It’s subtitled “A Maurice Newbury Investigation” which means it’s set in the Steampunk/Doctor Who world of his awesome novel The Affinity Bridge. Snowbooks has made the story available in both PDF and audio formats for your choice of reading and/or listening enjoyment.

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Madeline Ashby has a five-part speculative story over at the excellent Worldchanging site: “βoyfriend” follows a high-school girl of the near future in the run-up to Prom night, and is well worth a look.

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Some new titles have cropped up in Baen Books‘ free library

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Among a trio of new poems at Polu Texni is a subtly sf-nal piece called “Unruly Harvest” by friend-of-Futurismic Shira Lipkin.

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A note from Jake Freivald:

New free flash is up on Flash Fiction Online: “The Fallen Angel” by Mike Resnick and “As Their Eyes Touched God” by Robin Gillespie are the speculative fiction pieces for the month.

Cheers, Jake!

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Via the newly-revived Genre Files:

Stumbled across a new webzine the other day that looks rather interesting. It’s called Three Crow Press and it’s produced by relatively new independent genre publisher Morrigan Books.

Predominantly dark fantasy and horror according to the strapline, so not really prime Futurismic fodder… but it certainly deserves a place in the Free Fiction Sidebar of Justice. 🙂

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If you want to catch up with the latest fiction publications over at Book View Cafe, you can check out the lists of short stories, novellas and novel excerpts, which are updated on a weekly basis.

By the way, there’ll be more news to come regarding Futurismic and Book View Cafe – watch this space!

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And here’s the inevitable collection of goodies that SF Signal caught:

  • Mindflights presents “Gaming Real Life” by K C Shaw and “Santa Is My Homeboy” by Rachel V Olivier
  • Afterburn SF presents “Ismay’s Run” by Joanne Hall
  • “Kat and Mouse: Guns for Hire” is a new, weekly web serial by Abner Senires about a pair of guns-for-hire trying to eke out a living in the 2042 in the California Free State metroplex of Bay City.
  • Grantbridge Street & other misadventures presents: The Unknown Worlds of Science Fiction comic book adaptation of Michael Moorcock‘s Behold the Man [editor’s note – I’m not entirely sure this work is out of copyright; also, the page features a rather annoying autoplaying flash music gizmo which you’ll probably want to scroll down and deactivate right away. Why anyone would choose to make their site *more* like MySpace is quite beyond me, but there you go; it takes all sorts.]
  • The latest issue of Ray Gun Revival has fiction from Clinton Lawrence, Alice M Roelke, Drew Arrants, Richard S Levine, Timothy A Sayell, Martin Turton, M Keaton, Keanan Brand, and Sean T M Stiennon
  • AntipodeanSF has its latest issue up with short speculative fiction stories by David McVeigh, Richard Kerslake, Mark Farrugia, Mark Tremble, Marian Stone, Shaun A Saunders, Anna Potts, KJ Hannah Greenberg, David Such, and Simon Petrie
  • Issue #14 of The Future Fire presents stories by John Kratman, Rick Novy, and Richard Thieme
  • The Scientific Indian presents: “Live and Exclusive” by Aditya Sudarshan

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And finally, some Friday Flash: since the last round-up, Neil Beynon has published “Beats” and “New Space“, while Gareth D Jones has delivered – appropriately enough – “Another Year“, and Shaun C Green – even more appropriately – brings us “Two Thousand and Eight“.

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And that’s the lot – more than enough to keep you busy there, I’m thinking. Don’t forget we’re always open for your tip-offs and plugs, so keep ’em coming… but for now, Happy New Year to you all!

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Why you shouldn’t rush to get your auto-erotic implant

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orgasmatron settings dialImagine, if you will, what it might be like to have a kind of switch wired into yourself that triggered tiny electrical shocks in your orbitofrontal cortex, giving you what would effectively be an “orgasm button”. Well, this isn’t science fiction any more. [image by bbaunach]

Transhumanist thinker George Dvorsky takes a look at the history of pleasure-centre brain-tweaking, and considers the implications of the technology becoming affordable and readily available:

So, should these devices be banned?

Yes and no.

Like the current prohibition on both soft and hard drugs, there’s a certain efficacy to a patriarchal imperative that works to protect citizens from themselves. Sex chip junkies wouldn’t be unlike other kinds of junkies. Highly addicted and dysfunctional persons would find themselves outside the social contract and completely dependent on the state.

But what about the pursuit of happiness and other freedoms? And our cognitive liberties? A strong case can be made that we all have a vested interest in the quality of our own minds and the nature of our subjective experiences. Ensuring access to these sorts of technologies may prove to be a very important part of struggle for psychological autonomy.

Is the best society the one that protects its citizens from all potential pitfalls, or the one that educates them as best it can and lets them take care of themselves?

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Rudy Rucker defines UFO science fiction

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lenticular cloudMaverick mathematician Rudy Rucker is thinking about topics for his next novel, and it looks like UFOs might get a look-in. Partly in response to a recent Loving the Alien column by our very own Mac Tonnies, Rucker is at pains to define the subgenre carefully:

I think we should distinguish between, on the one hand, SF UFO novels and, on the other hand, alien invasion novels along the lines of, say, Greg Bear or Larry Niven. I think, for instance, Neal Stephenson’s recent Anathem, is more of an alien invasion novel, although it’s close to being an SF UFO novel as well.

So, with that distinction made, what should an SF UFO novel contain?

I’d say the essence of an SF UFO novel is point (a) below. Points (b) through (f) all follow from (a).

(a) The novel includes flying saucer alien encounters similar to those described in lowbrow tabloid newspapers, but is neither ignorantly credulous nor mockingly parodistic.
(b) The aliens use a fuzzy technology that might amount to psychic powers. The saucers, in other words, aren’t machines.
(c) The aliens are surreptitiously observing or infiltrating Earth rather than overtly invading—at least for now.
(d) We have some creepy human/alien sex acts.
(e) The aliens aren’t necessarily evil, they may be bringing enlightenment and transcendence.
(f) The aliens might be from somewhere other than a distant planet, that is, they might come from small size scales, from a parallel world, or might be made of some impalpable substance like dark matter.

Part of the game in writing an SF UFO novel is making up scientific reasons why the tabloid-level UFO phenomenon could in fact relate to something real…

As Mac’s essay pointed out, there is a distinct paucity of novels that deal with the UFO phenomenon – maybe 2009 could be the year for a UFO renaissance? [image by sabertasche2]

Hell knows it would make a refreshing change from sexy vampires.

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