A fact of life underused in sf is vehicle insurance. Your characters will thank you if you insure them on a pay-as-you-go basis, which should provide a disincentive to rack up the mileage. Good for the environment, good for safety. (Your characters are rational economic actors, aren’t they?)
[“The Future?” by Randy Read; updated to add story tip: Atrios]
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that hard-workin’ Chris East, Futurismic‘s fearless Fiction Editor, has got himself all caught up with the slush pile, and is hungry for you to send him more…
Yup – the fiction submissions webform is back in action. So scroll down through the guidelines, giving them one last read-through while you’re at it, and then click through to send us your masterpiece. We look forward to seeing what you’re made of!
If you check out Futurismic‘s Friday Free Fiction posts, you’ll have noticed that we link regularly to FeedBooks, a site that aims to supply free-to-read ebooks in convenient portable formats. FeedBooks themselves have noticed, and we’ve been working with them to make Futurismic‘s fiction more accessible.
All stories published here at Futurismic are released under a Creative Commons license, so anyone can republish them provided they credit the authors and make no profit in the process. FeedBooks make stories more useful to the reader on the move by making them available in portable device-friendly formats like ePub, MobiPocket and iLiad, as well as printable PDFs.
So, if you keep an eye on the special Futurismic list at FeedBooks, you’ll see our back catalogue of fiction cropping up as time goes by. New stories will remain exclusive to Futurismic for the first three months, after which you’ll be able to pick them up in whatever format suits you best. The following titles are already available, with more to come in the future:
The FeedBooks team seem genuinely interested in getting good fiction into the hands of readers, and I recommend getting in touch with them if your webzine operates a similar model to Futurismic – it’s a great way to give your authors greater exposure.
When I first heard the news about Russia’s invasion of Georgia last Friday (not coincidentally via Twitter rather than the mainstream media), my immediate thought was “well, you timed that neatly, didn’t you?”
I then shrugged it off as paranoid cynicism on my part, but it appears I’m not alone in suspecting that Russia quite deliberately waited until the world was busy watching the Olympic Games before launching their strike on Georgia. [Via Sentient Developments]
And the more I think about it, the more likely it seems – after all, DDoS cyberwarfare is part of the military game-plan now, so why not use current events to enhance the fog of war a little bit?
Listening to this morning’s typically vapid radio news bulletins here in the UK (fifteen seconds on Georgia, two minutes on the Olympics, two minutes on soccer) it appears to be a pretty effective tactic, albeit one that exploits our natural tendency to ignore bad news unless we feel it affects us directly.
The only remotely pleasant side to this line of thought is the possibility that one day wars will be fought entirely through media channels, obviating the need for the death and displacement of thousands of innocent people. Yeah, so I’m a dreamer. Sue me. [image from Wikimedia Commons]
A week without a dose of quantum weirdness? I don’t think so. University of Utah physicists say they’ve found hints that Newtonian-based chaos theory might have something to do with how subatomic particles behave. Nuclei have a property akin to charge called “spin,” and Utah prof Brian Saam and team zapped xenon atoms to see what happens to that property.
Despite differing initial configurations, the “dances” of the xenon spins evolved so they eventually were in sync with each other…. As an analogy, imagine billions of people in a huge, unfamiliar city. They start walking around in different places and directions, with little conversation among them. Yet, eventually, they all end up walking in the same direction.
Comments Saam: “”That’s never been seen before in a quantum mechanical system. These guys are dancing together.” So? “When you look at all the technology governed by quantum physics, it’s not unreasonable to assume that if one can apply chaos theory in a meaningful way to quantum systems, that will provide new insights, new technology, new solutions to problems not yet known.”
[Chaos Cafe by St_A_Sh]
