Blog

Friday Free Fiction for 29th August

2 Comments

Happy Friday, free fiction fans! This week’s selection may be missing a few items, because I’ve had to precompile it on Thursday (I’m off on holiday, don’t you know). For the same reason, there won’t be a Friday Free Fiction next week, but I’ll be saving up the links as per usual for a bumper edition on 12th September.

If you’re worried about going hungry for new material, though, bear in mind that there’ll be a fresh new Futurismic story out on Monday 1st… keep watching the skies! Now, on with the list…

***

From ManyBooks.net, a classic pulp “Hitler won” novel: The Sound Of His Horn by Sarban

***

Feedbooks.com are still catching up on the Futurismic back catalogue:

***

Project Gutenberg drags out Anthem by the enduringly controversial Ayn Rand.

***

At Tor.com, a new story from Steven Gould: “Shade”

Xareed had been waiting for the water truck for two days, seated in the dirt at the edge of the camp, his family’s plastic ten-liter water-jug tied to his ankle.

He didn’t like being on the edge of the camp. Except for the piece of cardboard he carried impaled on a stick there was no shade. The poet Sayyid had said, “God’s Blessing are more numerous than those growing trees,” and Xareed hoped so, for there were no trees in the camp or outside. So the blessings had better be more numerous, not less.

Also via Tor, we hear that Mur Lafferty has released an electronic version of her new novel Playing For Keeps in parallel with the dead-tree launch.

***

More heads-up notices from the SF Signal posse:

***

From Apex Online: “Scenting the Dark” by Mary Robinette Kowal

***

Via the Scalzi, an excised chapter from an early version of The Last Colony goes up at Subterranean Online: “The Secret History of the Last Colony“.

***

The Shadow Unit never sleeps: the latest DVD extra is called “Mirror Writing“.

***

From Gary Reynolds:

Issue #2 of the Concept Sci-fi ezine is now available to download in both PDF format and Mobipocket format. This issue includes short fiction from; Walter Jon Williams, Susan Murray, Ben O’ Neill, Andrew Males and Michael Kechula. We also have a piece of poetry (our first one!) and an interview with Marianne De Pierres.

I really hope that you enjoy reading it – feel free to subscribe and get future issues delivered directly to your Inbox.

You heard the man – go check it out.

***

Jayme Lynn Blaschke is up to instalment #22 of Memory:

“Lassie, I’m nae a performing dog what’ll sit up and do tricks on command for ya,” Flavius growled. “Nae matter what ya ken of me, with all this talk about ‘lesser sentients’ and the like, I’m more than a plaything for the women of the Eternal Dominion. I’m descended of Bellona’s bridgroom and Sajal be damned, I’ll nae jump to when ya snap yer fingers. I’ll thank ya to remember that!”

***

And finally, Greg O’Byrne missed the Friday Flash Fiction boat last week, so here’s his micro-flash of “Hard Luck on Mars“. I’m sure the other Fictioneers will supply their own links in the comments in my absence!

***

And that’s your lot, folks. Keep the tips and plugs coming in as usual, and I’ll cobble them into a post in a fortnight’s time. Until then, bon voyage!

Blog

Print-a-house

2 Comments

substrate_printDevotees of rapid prototyping technologies like the RepRap Project will be pleased to hear that construction equipment manufacturer Caterpillar is funding research into scaling the technology up so that it can be used to produce concrete structures:

Behrokh Khoshnevis, a professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, says the system is a scale-up of the rapid prototyping machines now widely used in industry to “print out” three-dimensional objects designed with CAD/CAM software, usually by building up successive layers of plastic.

…
Instead of plastic, Contour Crafting will use concrete,” said Khoshnevis.

I suppose that rapid prototyping technologies are going to be a change of web/Internet/genetic engineering proportions over the next couple of decades, affecting everything and leading to unpredictable social changes.

[story on Physorg][image from jared on flickr]

Blog

Viropiracy – because safeguarding ‘intellectual property’ is more important than saving lives

7 Comments

embroidered flu virus cross-sectionThis is just a *face-palm* of epic proportions – welcome to the concept of “viral sovereignty“.

This extremely dangerous idea comes to us courtesy of Indonesia’s minister of health, Siti Fadilah Supari, who asserts that deadly viruses are the sovereign property of individual nations — even though they cross borders and could pose a pandemic threat to all the peoples of the world.

Before anyone jumps down my throat, yes, there is a precedent for developing nations protecting the intellectual property implicit in their native biome – the West has shafted them in the past, after all. But as Jamais Cascio points out:

… it’s extraordinarily important for information about potential pandemic diseases to be made as open as possible, if we want to avoid a global health disaster. Withholding viral data, and refusing to provide samples of the viruses, out of a misplaced fear of viropiracy (or more paranoid fantasies), is simply criminal.

I think you’d have to be very paranoid to not see the logic there, really. But anyway – if you catch a virus, it replicates in your body, right? So if viropiracy became a part of international legislation, would you technically be infringing the IP of a nation if you caught a unique disease there but crossed the border before the symptoms started to show, and end up liable to be prosecuted for piracy as well as smuggling? Probably not… but it highlights just how bloody stupid an idea it is, doesn’t it? [image by Noii]

Blog

New evidence for subliminal learning (Patrick Nielsen Hayden buy my novel)

headshop

Neuron presents evidence that subliminal learning occurs in humans. The researchers observed how people perceived differences in new, unfamiliar symbols.

The researchers collected scans of the brain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging, to investigate the specific brain circuitry that is linked to subliminal instrumental conditioning. “The ventral striatum responded to subliminal cues and to visible outcomes in a manner that closely approximates our computational algorithm, expressing reward expected values and prediction errors,” says Dr. [Mathias] Pessiglione [U. College, London]. “We conclude that, even without conscious processing of contextual cues, our brain can learn their reward value and use them to provide a bias on decision making.”

[Image: Dublin Head Shop by kyz Patrick Nielsen Hayden buy my novel]

Blog

Future talk: how will we speak in the future?

2 Comments

talkingAn interesting look at the changes in language over time – and a science-fictional look at what languages of the future might be like in 1000 years time:

… some factors do show long-term directional influences.  An obvious one is ease of use: people won’t bother saying “omnibus” when “bus” will do, or “environment” when their friends are getting away with “emviromment”.

…

Children forming their initial mental model of how English works don’t want to believe it’s a mess of random idioms; any regularities they notice (like “past tenses end in -ED”) are extended by analogy as far as their peers will let them (“bended”).  All these consistent “trends” in language change make prediction more feasible, or at any rate, less obviously hopeless.

A slightly different comment on language-change is provided by Erin McKean in the Boston Globe, pointing out that there is nothing wrong with changing the English language if you can get your point across clearly (I tend to be pedantic about word-use – a tendency I’m trying to remove):

Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I’m vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I’ve ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that fetch is now the word I want to use to mean “cool.” By the same token, readers and listeners can decide to adopt or ignore any of these uses or forms.

[both links via Boing Boing][image from katiebate on flickr]

Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001