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Friday Free Fiction for 11th April

It’s a thin week for free fiction, which probably shouldn’t be entirely surprising after last week’s mammoth batch. There’s still a little for you to get your teeth into, though:

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Only the one from Manybooks.net, but it’s by a classic author: “The Happy Unfortunate” by Robert Silverberg. (“Dekker, back from space, found great physical changes in the people of Earth; changes that would have horrified him five years before. But now, he wanted to be like the rest–even if he had to lose an eye and both ears to do it.” Sheesh – the price of conformity, eh?)

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Lesley Smith dropped us a line to let us know about ElectricSpec, an three-times-yearly online speculative fiction webzine that has now been added to the Futurismic Sidebar Of Justice. Cheers, Lesley!

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Via the Iain (M) Banks website comes news that UK newspaper The Independent has teamed up with Audible.co.uk to provide a free-to-download audiobook version of Iain Banks‘s first published novel, The Wasp Factory.

I will point out that it’s not a science fiction novel, but go on to say that it’s an excellent story anyway and well worth your time. It also has one of the best twist endings EVER. Go get it!

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The irrepressible Hal Duncan has, in addition to some audio content, a long short story for you to download. In the man’s own words:

“Well, what we have is a previously unpublished novella, “Die! Vampire! Die!”. It’s 15,000 words (cause I don’t do anything by halves) of black humour, featuring some characters ye might well recognise from [Duncan’s novels] VELLUM and INK, my gay Orpheus punk rock musical NOWHERE TOWN, and every other f*cking story they refuse to let me write without them worming their way into it.”

Roughly translated, that means it should be a riot to read.

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Warren Ellis‘s free Freakangels comic is up to episode 9, and is starting to get some good character complexity developing.

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The ranks of the Friday Flash Fictioneers are filling out again. I’m pleading external obligations this week, but Dan Pawley is back (from the deepest internet-devoid reaches of, er, Bournemouth) with an extra-length piece called “Doing The Islands“.

Elsewhere, Gareth D Jones says “Now You See Me“, while Gareth L Powell lurks in the “Victoria Rooms“; Neil Beynon is watching “Pixies“, and Greg O’Byrne‘s in the mood for “Tekepathic Love“; Jay Lake muses on “The Inertia of Corpses” while Clive Birnie has developed a serious fear of the UK healthcare system – “The NHS Was Trying To Kill Him“.

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And that’s all for this week, boys and girls … but for me to remind you to keep sending us your tip-offs and plugs, of course. We’d rather people told us about things we already knew than miss out on something we didn’t, so drop us a line even if you think we’re already on the case!

In the meantime, have a good weekend.

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As food prices rise, Opium fields in Afghanistan change to Wheat

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Rice in India is hitting record pricesFood prices are at historic highs, thanks to a number of factors including increased biofuel use. Rice prices are causing shortages and inflation problems in India, Bangladesh and the rest of Asia, with prices of many grains double what they were this time last year.

UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown today called for action about the price rises at the next G8 meeting, with the incentives for making biofuel having unforeseen consequences leading to the shortages.

“For the first time in decades, the number of people facing hunger is growing. Food prices have risen sharply leading to food riots in several countries,” Brown wrote.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the Telegraph reports that farmers who had been producing opium for the illicit trade of heroin have begun to switch from the poppy to wheat because the grain fetches higher prices than the drug. Unforeseen consequences, indeed!

[via Russ Winter and Paul Krugman, image of rice at Colaba Market, Mumbai by Dey]

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Urban mapping – prepare for the cartographolution!

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SkyscrapersVia the one and only Bruce Sterling, here’s a post that’s remarkably bullish about the potential of web-reality mash-ups like Google Transit to revolutionise urban life:

“… once the knee-jerk paranoia passes, the benefits begin to sink in. With live-feed transit information, Google Maps and Google Earth could eliminate the need for standing on a windy or snowy street corner for twenty minutes, waiting for a late bus. Outside it could be pouring rain, but you’d know exactly when to leave the house to catch your train.”

But it just gets better!

“At City Hall a few weeks later, the general happiness trend of your neighborhood is noticed to be on the rise. Civic officials study the area to learn why this spike in aura has been occurring, and use this people-powered live information to liven up some less brightly-colored spots on the map.”

It’s interesting to see this sort of positive spin on matters, as opposed to the usual privacy FUD. Even so, utopias rarely work out the way they’re meant to – how would this sort of urban planning affect the disenfranchised and the poor? [image by eyeliam]

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Black Holes in the sky, Black Holes in the internet

Three black holes interact in complex waysA mix of two stories about completely different types of Black Holes today. First, researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology found that interactions between three black holes should produce gravitational waves that detectors like LISA or LIGO could detect within the next ten years. Gravitational Waves are ‘ripples’ in Space-Time caused by massive objects and events and could tell us a great deal about the big bang.

Another kind of black hole in the news is the ‘internet black hole’. Researchers for the Hubble internet project found distinct pathways on the internet where data was lost for unexplainable reasons. The project, which you can see the results of at their website, was intentionally named after the famous astronomer and telescope. The researchers say they are performing ‘internet astronomy’, looking for events in the cosmos of data that is the internet.

[image by M Campanelli/L Carlos/Y Zlochower/H-P Bischof, that plus space story via New Scientist, internet story via TG Daily]

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