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Friday Free Fiction for 19th December

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait for the days to start getting longer again. Still, we’re nearly there now, and it’s holiday time for most of us – so put your feet up and enjoy some free science fiction stories, why don’tcha?

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Here’s a few from Feedbooks:

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A reminder from EOS/HarperCollins:

For November and December only, click to download a free eBook of Adam Troy Castro’s Emissaries From the Dead.

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Strange Horizons presents “How to Hold Your Breath” by Meredith Schwartz

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Tor.com presents “Firstborn” by Brandon Sanderson (the guy who’s finishing off the Wheel of Time series, apparently).

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Mindflights presents “The Void Test” by Therese L Arkenberg.

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Polu Texni presents part 2 of “Running Free” by Mark Sherwood

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It’s been a while since the last instalment, but things are back on track with Memory #29 from Jayme Lynn Blaschke

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Something more than a trifle blasphemous from Hal Duncan:

See, y’all know Revelation, right? The last book of the New Testament, the one with all the Antichrist and Armageddon gubbins, all the Rapture and wrath of God malarky? You may not have read it, but you’re bound to be familiar with its zany eschatological content, even if only by way of horror movies and heavy metal lyrics. Well, if you have read it, you may recall the lines where a curse is laid out on anyone that fucks around with the text. Add to the words of this book, we’re told, and that’s bad news, baby. Take away from the words of this book, and that’s just as bad. We’re talking biblical plagues, baby, a pointy reckoning upon anyone who adds to or takes away from the words of this book.

Course, it doesn’t say anything about changing the order of those words.

Which is exactly what he has done; violent eRa is a story told using all the words from the book of Revelation in a different order, featuring God as the villain of the piece. Not that Duncan seems particularly bothered by the risk of a curse, anyway…

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SpaceWesterns presents:

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Here are the extras that the SF Signal crew picked up:

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And here’s some Friday Flash Fiction, some of which has a festive flavour:

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And that’s about your lot. Friday Free Fiction is going to go into hibernation until the new year (because most everyone will be too busy to pay any attention, AMIRITE?), but your tip-offs and plugs are always welcome for the next instalment on January 2nd. Adios!

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Milgram obedience experiment replicated

About 50 years ago Stanley Milgram conducted controversial experiments showing that seemingly normal people, when ordered by an authority figure, were willing to administer what they thought were painful electric shocks. Now the flagship journal of the American Psychology Association carries a paper claiming that Milgram’s results have been replicated.

Jerry M. Burger, PhD [at Santa Clara U.] … found that compliance rates in the replication were only slightly lower than those found by Milgram. And, like Milgram, he found no difference in the rates of obedience between men and women.

…”People learning about Milgram’s work often wonder whether results would be any different today,” said Burger, a professor at Santa Clara University. “Many point to the lessons of the Holocaust and argue that there is greater societal awareness of the dangers of blind obedience. But what I found is the same situational factors that affected obedience in Milgram’s experiments still operate today.”

Burger’s participants were 29 men and 41 women. His experiment was done in 2007 but the results have just been officially published. Milgram’s experiments showed that 79% of participants would administer “shocks” even after their “victims” protested; Burger found an obedience rate of 70%.

[Image from Abu Ghraib: Wikimedia Commons]

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"Hypermusic Prologue: A projective opera in seven planes"

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warped passages I like to post here (and yes, I do still post here, despite my occasional protracted absences…darn deadlines!) about those odd occasions when the theatrical world intersects with the science fictional or the scientific. But I don’t think I’ve ever run across anything quite like this: Lisa Randall, a theoretical physicist in Harvard’s Department of Physics, is writing an opera. (Via IdeaFestival.)

Randall is the author of a 2005 book called Warped Passages that, in the word of Samuel P. Jacobs, writing for the Boston Globe, “introduced nonscientific readers to the possibility of additional dimensions beyond the three we see, and how their existence could account for many of the physical world’s most perplexing phenomena.”

In response to that book Spanish composer Hector Parra, asked Randall if she would try writing a libretto for an opera about her work. Jacobs writes:

The resulting piece, a collaboration with the artist Matthew Ritchie, is scheduled to debut in Paris at the Georges Pompidou Centre this summer, then travel throughout Europe in the fall.

The opera is an intimate work – an hourlong show written for two performers – that carries uncomfortable ideas about our world and how we experience it. The piece has the puzzling title of “Hypermusic Prologue: A projective opera in seven planes,” the seven planes referring to space and to the opera’s seven acts. The work’s broader goal is to suggest new approaches to both science and art. The old-fashioned form of opera, Randall and her colleagues hope, can become a vehicle for modern science, using sound and voice to re-create the many dimensions that physicists now explore.

“It’s kind of mathematical, it is geometrical, and it is looking towards the future,” Randall, 46, says of the title.

Read the whole interview with Randall.

And if anyone actually sees the opera, let us know what you think!

(Image: Barnes & Noble.)

[tags]physics,opera,books,music[/tags]

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Only the smart die young

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You’d probably think that intelligence would be an asset in the modern battlefield, and hence the smart soldiers would be the ones to survive, right?

Well, as logical as that sounds it may not be the case: a study of records from Scottish army units from WW2 and from the education system about a decade before suggests that the average IQ of those who survived the war was lower than those who lost their lives.

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Down the co-op: wind farms in the UK

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Good news on the alternative energy front: researcher Baidya Roy has found solutions to some problems with wind energy. There’s also an article here on wind-farm co-operatives in the UK:

The cooperative, which began production in March, is the first wind farm to be wholly owned by individuals in Britain, which with gales sweeping in from the Atlantic has the best wind resources in Europe.

“We have produced energy every day since then,” Adam Twine, a farmer who started the project 15 years ago on his plot of land by installing five wind turbines 49 metres (160 feet) in height.

Overall, the project cost eight million pounds (8.9 million euros, 11.9 million dollars), nearly 60 percent of which came from individual shareholders, with the remainder being funded by a bank loan that is to be repaid over the next eight to 10 years.

CO2 emissions resulting from the production, installation and the lifetime of the turbine, which stretches 25 years, will be offset in just six months.

This is quite a heartening story: it combines the best elements of top-down (government subsidy) and bottom-up (locally-owned co-operative organisation) energy solutions.

[from Physorg][image from pierreyves0 on flickr]

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