Does Not Equal is a webcomic by Sarah Ennals – check out the pre-Futurismic archives, and the strips that have been published here previously.
Futurismic readers in or near Toronto, take note: Sarah is going to be at the Kelp Queen Press table at the Royal Sarcophagus Society‘s bazaar on October 19th with her serialized novella, “Supervillain,” and she’s been accepted into Speakeasy’s one-night Comics Show at the Gladstone on November 6th.
In a slight reiteration of some of his more recent design-related riffs, this brief article by Bruce Sterling compares the iPhone to the Leatherman multitool:
Like all digital technologies, the iPhone has yet to achieve the hard-grained, Spartan elegancies of the steely Leatherman. It makes up for this with its cannibal appetite for other tools. Leathermans will disappear—I commonly give mine away—but iPhones devour other tools, digesting them into virtualized application services: phone, camera, e-mail, Web browser, text-messaging, music and video players, whole planet-girdling sets of urban Google maps, house keys, pedometer, TV remote, seismometer, Breathalyzer, alarm clock, video games, radio, bar-code scanner … the target list grows by the day.
It does indeed. Plus you can take an iPhone on a plane without anyone accusing you of being a terrorist… for the moment, at least. [via Warren Ellis]
Web/SF/transhumanist-crossover titans such as Warren Ellis, Charles Stross, and gerontologist Aubrey de Grey are interviewed in this free 1st edition pdf of H+ Magazine.
Whatever your thoughts on transhumanism, it’s all well worth reading.
About 2000 tons of mercury from human-generated sources enter the environment every year, but tracing natural versus human sources, and sorting out local pollutants from distant sources, has been been a problem. University of Michigan scientists say they’ve taken a big step towards reading mercury “fingerprints.”
“For some time, we weren’t sure that it was going to be technically possible, but now we’ve cracked that nut and have shown significant differences not only between mercury from coal and, say, metallic forms of mercury that are used in industry, but also between different coal deposits,” [ecologist Joel] Blum said.
How it works:
The fingerprinting technique relies on a natural phenomenon called isotopic fractionation, in which different isotopes (atoms with different numbers of neutrons) of mercury react to form new compounds at slightly different rates. In one type of isotopic fractionation, mass-dependent fractionation, the differing rates depend on the masses of the isotopes. In mass-independent fractionation, the behavior of the isotopes depends not on their absolute masses but on whether their masses are odd or even. Combining mass-dependent and mass-independent isotope signals, the researchers created a powerful fingerprinting tool.
[Image: Christopher Gruver]
Is it just me, or are the weeks speeding up? Seems like only yesterday I compiled the last Friday Free Fiction post, but here I am again with a big batch of free-to-read science fiction from the far reaches of the hyper-clogged intertubes…
***
A couple of oldies at Manybooks.net:
***
A whole bunch of stuff from Feedbooks:
***
Via Karl Schroeder:
You can try out Metatropolis, the shared world anthology from Audible.com, before buying. There’s a sample from my own story, “To Hie from Far Cilenia”, or if you want you can listen to Jay Lake’s excellent story, “In the Forests of the Night” in its entirety.
***
Paul McAuley seems intent on sharing pretty much the whole of his new novel The Quiet War; here’s chapter 8 and chapter 9.
***
Via pretty much everywhere, it seems that although you can’t read it, you can hear the entirety of Neil Gaiman‘s new YA novel The Graveyard Book… as read by Gaiman himself on his just-finished tour of bookstores and lovingly video’d by his people.
The videos are embedded in different posts on his blog, but this category collects them all together. I know it’s not sf, but it deserves inclusion because it’s good to see that even as big a name as Gaiman can see the merits in giving free access to his work.
Plus he’s a very nice chap, don’t you know. 🙂
***
Scotland-based Finnish author Hannu Rajaniemi just sold a trilogy to Gollancz, but the first book isn’t even finished yet, so there’ll be a while to wait until you can read it.
Some of you may have read his story in the latest Interzone… the rest of you can make do with the free stories stashed on Rajaniemi’s website:
***
This week at Strange Horizons: “The Lion and the Mouse” by Kaolin Imago Fire
***
Ray Gun Revival has a new issue available to download (comes as a PDF, y’see).
***
Two new pieces at SpaceWesterns:
They’ve just upped their rates for fiction, by the way, so sf writers with a Clint Eastwood jones should get over there and submit something.
***
A message from Ben Rawluk:
A couple weird/SF postcard stories available on my blog: #1 and #2.
As well, the first issue of Future Earth is available for free as a pdf, with lots of fiction and poetry inside.
Thanks, Ben!
***
Jayme Lynn Blaschke has found the twenty-sixth fragment of his Memory.
***
Finally, some Friday Flashing from a few of the usual suspects:
***
And here’s a novelty non-fiction bonus via BoingBoing whose title explains itself:
The 35 Articles of Impeachment and the Case for Prosecuting George W. Bush by Congressman Dennis Kucinich
Perhaps that should be filed under fantasy? 😉
***
That’s all for this week, boys and girls. Keep those tip-offs coming in – deadline is 1800 GMT every Friday. Have a great weekend!