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Encyclopedia Britannica sez “if you can’t beat ’em, imitate ’em”

Old encyclopediasI consider it one of the greatest privileges of my childhood that we had a full Encyclopedia Britannica in the home, and I spent many rainy-day hours just leafing through it and soaking up data about the world. Ah, happy days! [image by Goran Zec]

Had Wikipedia been available back then, I’d have probably developed myopia, RSI and a bad posture far earlier in my life; hyperlinking and universal access are the two “killer apps” of encyclopedias, as anyone who has fallen down the Wikipedia rabbit-hole will know.

Indeed, it appears that even the mighty Encyclopedia Britannica, after years of bitching about Wikipedia’s openness and inaccuracies (the latter complaint, it transpires, being somewhat hypocritical), has realised that locking material away doesn’t work in the new information economy, and they’re granting people the ability to link directly to their content with their WebShare program. [via Phil Bradley]

It’s not quite free yet; they’re granting access to “anyone who publishes material on the web on a regular basis” (bloggers, in other words) and you have to apply for an account (so only bloggers they like), but it’s a step into the Twentyfirst Century for a hidebound institution. Heck, they’ve even got a blog and a Twitter feed.

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Friday Free Fiction for 18th April

Here we go again with your weekly round-up of free fiction on the web …

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From Manybooks.net:

  • “Space Platform” by Murray Leinster (“When young Joe Kenmore came to Bootstrap to install pilot gyros in the Platform he hadn’t bargained for sabotage or murder or love. But Joe learned that ruthless agents were determined to wreck the project. He found that the beautiful girl he loved, and men like The Chief, a rugged Indian steelworker, and Mike, a midget who made up for his size by brains, would have to fight with their bare hands to make man’s age old dream of space travel come true!” Can you fight political disinterest with your bare hands, then?)
  • “The Penal Cluster” by Gordon Randall Garrett (“Tomorrow’s technocracy will produce more and more things for better living. It will produce other things, also; among them, criminals too despicable to live on this earth. Too abominable to breathe our free air.” O NOES!)
  • “The Planet Strappers” by Raymond Z Gallun (“The Planet Strappers started out as The Bunch, a group of student-astronauts in the back room of a store in Jarviston, Minnesota. They wanted off Earth, and they begged, borrowed and built what they needed to make it. They got what they wanted – a start on the road to the stars – but no one brought up on Earth could have imagined what was waiting for them Out There!” No kidding, they have Starbucks here too?)
  • “Trouble on Titan” by Arthur K Barnes (“When the Queen of the Spaceways meets the King of the Interplanetary Wilds, there’s a checkmate in the stalking of Saturn’s most dangerous game!”)
  • “The Delegate From Venus” by Henry Slesar (“Everybody was waiting to see what the delegate from Venus looked like. And all they got for their patience was the biggest surprise since David clobbered Goliath.”)
  • “No Moving Parts” by Murray F Yaco

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News from Small Beer Press:

“To celebrate the publication of his first new collection of short stories in ten years, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories, John Kessel and Small Beer Press have made it available as a free download in various completely open formats with no Digital Rights Management (DRM) strings attached. An astonishing, long-awaited collection of stories that intersect imaginatively with Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Wizard of Oz, and Flannery O’Connor. Includes John Kessel’s modern classic “Lunar Quartet” sequence about life on the moon.”

Sounds good to me.

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Two updates from John Joseph Adams from beneath his F&SF hat. Firstly there’s news about Daryl Gregory:

“Daryl’s website features a number of pieces of free fiction, including several F&SF stories – such as his first pro sale, “In the Wheels,” “The Continuing Adventures of Rocket Boy,” and “Free, and Clear.””

And then some news about Peter Beagle:

“Peter S. Beagle is the author of many novels and stories, including the beloved classic The Last Unicorn. In 2005, F&SF published Beagle’s Nebula Award-winning sequel to The Last Unicorn, the novelette “Two Hearts”.”

I adored the movie of The Last Unicorn as a child (I can still get surprisingly emotional over it now), and I was gutted when I found out how badly shafted Beagle was on the deal. Go read his story.

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The gang at Subterranean Press are churning out the Spring 2008 issue of Subterranean Online. Available so far:

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An email arrived from Nathan Lilly:

“Just a brief note to announce SpaceWesterns.com‘s first full year of publication. The new year brings:

  • a creative refresh of the home page
  • the launch of our blog, The Sideshow
  • the creation of a (nearly) complete Space Western list.

All that in addition to the publication of Space Western stories and articles. This week we’ve [re-]published “Craphound” by Cory Doctorow, and part 1 of an eight-part serial titled “A Man Called Mister Brown” by A.R. Yngve. Next week we have an interview with David Weddle, screenwriter for Battlestar Galactica.”

Sounds like it’s all go over there – good luck, Nathan!

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The still-websiteless-but-eternally-diligent-and-superbly-monickered Cole Kitchen continues to keep us abreast of webzine developments:

  • [link expunged]
  • Abyss & Apex has done the same with their twenty-fifth issue.

Also a couple of new titles (now added to the Sidebar Of Justice)

  • RevolutionSF (tag-lined “Tough Love for Sci-Fi” … there’s no tougher love than that horrible contraction, surely? 😉 )
  • Bewildering Stories (which, once you get past the bewildering pre-millennial web-design, appears to have a great deal of content stored away)

Cheers, Cole!

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Shadow Unit is up to episode 5 with “Ballistic“, a team effort from Sarah Monette, Emma Bull, Elizabeth Bear & Amanda Downum.

“You aren’t supposed to be in Grandma’s room when she isn’t there. It’s dark inside, the heavy curtains drawn tight, and the air smells of camphor and lavender potpourri and furniture polish. Your stomach feels too small as you peer through the cracked-open door, like it did when Tommy Wilson dared you to crawl into that abandoned woodshed all full of spiders. Making Grandma mad scares you more than spiders, but this morning she went to the store and left you alone watching cartoons and eating Cocoa Puffs.”

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Jayme Lynn Blaschke has the tenth instalment of the irregular yet intriguing “Memory”.

“Chaos erupted among the moironteau. The predatory discipline organizing the creatures broke down in the face of thirty quarry. Moironteau lunged and slashed, footheads choming wildly at the darting green Parrics flying to and fro. Those hanging above dropped into the fray, the lure of the chase too tempting to resist. The carefully-constructed trap collapsed into itself.

“Stupiding otherwhereians,” muttered Parric from his coiled position in the middle of it all. “All muscle, no finessing.””

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Sir John of Scalzi is getting all DOS-prompt-retro on us by going the shareware route with a piece of fiction:

“Starting right this very second, a (zipped) pdf version of “How I Proposed to My Wife: An Alien Sex Story” is available for you to read and enjoy. I’m offering it as shareware – that is, it’s free to read, but if you like it, you’re encouraged to send a little money my way. How much? Up to you (but, you know. Not too much. It’s a short story, not a novel).”

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Via SFCanada, we hear that Nina Munteanu has posted her short story “A Butterfly in Peking” online.

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Jay Lake dips into his seemingly bottomless pit of previously published short fiction once again:

“The current installment in this series is my short story “Small Magic“. At 5,600 words, this originally appeared in Weird Tales #340 (May/June 2006). It has never been reprinted elsewhere. If you like the story, please consider supporting Weird Tales. Trivium: the initial inspiration for this story was the Sting song “All This Time”.)”

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The Friday Flash Fictioneers are back in action once again – though yours truly is using double shifts at the day-job as his cop-out excuse once again.

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A final non-fiction bonus – and if Futurismic has any creationist readers, they may wish to skip ahead right over this one. Via Cosmos Magazine, we hear that the complete collection of Charles Darwin’s papers are online. SRSLY – all of them:

“”This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,” said John van Wyhe, the director of The Complete Work of Charles Darwin Online project.”

Blimey.

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Well, that’s your lot for this week – there should be more than enough there to keep you busy over the weekend, I figure. Don’t forget that we’re always looking for tip-offs and plugs from you, our readers, so just drop us a line via the contact page.

In the meantime – have a great weekend, folks!

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Uncrashable cars…and one that definitely isn’t

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Uncrashable Car graphic “Uncrashable” cars are the long-term promise of the largest road safety research project ever launched in Europe (Via Science Daily):

A truck exits suddenly from a side road, directly into your lane only dozens of metres ahead. Suddenly, your car issues a warning, starts applying the brakes and attempts to take evasive action. Realising impact is unavoidable; in-car safety systems pre-tension the safety belts and arm the airbag, timing its release to the second before impact.

The research project, called PReVENT, has 56 partners and a budget of more than €50 million, and it’s main focus is on relatively cheap and simple technologies like parking sensors and satellite navigation that can be adapted to enhance safety, but some of the more experimental systems being studied in some of its sub-projects, with catchy names like WILLWARN (which uses wireless communication with other vehicles to alert drivers about potentially dangerous situations), LATERALSAFE (which uses active sensing to eliminate the dangers of the blind spot) and COMPOSE, which can automatically brake if a pedestrian steps onto the road, or extend the bumper and raise the hood to keep occupants safer.

Some of these technologies could start to show up on cars within just a few years’ time. (Image: PReVENT.)

North American Eagle If, on the other hand, the idea of an uncrashable car somehow takes all the fun out of driving for you, you might want to follow up on this lead (Times Online via Gizmodo):

Are you fearless? Do you have razor-sharp reactions and the sponsor-friendly good looks of a young Robert Redford? Think you’ve got what it takes to drive a supersonic jet car at speeds of more than 800mph?

If so, you might be just the man (or woman) to take the wheel of the North American Eagle, a 42,500bhp jet car with everything it takes to smash the land speed record, says its maker, except one thing – a driver.

Last week the team behind a joint American-Canadian attempt to win the world record back from the British launched an open contest to find that person.

Read more about the team here, then send a 400-word e-mail listing your credentials and a photo of yourself to landspeedracing@gmail.com.

Tell ’em Futurismic sent you. (Image: landspeed.com.)

[tags]transportation, automobiles, safety[/tags]

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Cloning technique could bring species back from extinction

This Northern White Rhino lives at San Diego ZooIt seems to be a week for biological-related stories here on Futurismic. Using skin cells from the nearly extinct Northern White Rhino, scientists can reprogram them back to an embryonic state, from which they can create sperm and eggs with the animal’s genes. An animal can then be created in vitro or through a surrogate mother from the Southern species of White Rhino. There are only 3 or 4 of the Northern variety left in the wild.

Professor Robert Millar, the director of the Medical Research Council’s Reproductive Sciences Unit at Edinburgh University, who is leading the study, said: “There are a lot of African animals under the threat of extinction. We want to protect their genomes, but you have to protect their habitats as well. This is one of the ways of dealing with the problem, especially when the animals get to such low numbers in the wild. It is a method we need to start to get into place as an insurance policy – it’s clearly do-able according to the laboratory work.”

This poses an extremely interesting moral dilemma. Is it worse to clone an animal or to let its species go extinct? And if the animal was cloned, does that make it a legal member of the species?

[via the Independent, Northern White Rhino in San Diego Zoo picture by Eliya]

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Meat futures redux – just leave the brains out

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BullThe best thing about science is the same as the best thing about science fiction – it’s the lively debates and differing opinions. The vat-grown meat story got some fairly wide coverage beyond science fictional circles, so here’s legendary biology-blogger PZ “Pharyngula” Myers’ angle on the issue:

“The more I think about it, the more I think people are going at it backwards. We shouldn’t be thinking about building muscle from the cells up, to create a purified system to produce meat for the market, we should be going the other way, starting with self-sustaining meat producers and genetically paring away the less commercially viable bits, like the brain. Instead of test-tube meat, we should be working on more efficient organisms that generate muscle tissue with the properties we want.”

OK, now I’m fairly easy with the idea of eating meat that’s just a lump of stuff grown in a petri-dish. But animals engineered to not have a nervous sytem? That really is a pretty queasy thought, even though I can see why (rationally) it shouldn’t be. [image by TwoBlueDay]

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