Big things are afoot at Tor – major sf publisher goes web2.0

Tor-Books-logo If you went through last week’s Friday Free Fiction, you’d have noticed me mention Tor Books’ new email newsletter/giveaway program.

As good as that appeared in its own right, it seems much more is in the pipeline at Tor – Simon “Bloggasm” Owens has the scoop on this one, complete with anonymous tip-offs from within the organisation. The Tor site will have simple social networking features in addition to original content (fiction and non-fiction) from authors both on and off the Tor roster.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden confirms the rumours:

“The free digital books are exactly what we say they are: an inducement to get people to pre-register as users and allow us to send them emailed progress reports,” Nielsen Hayden said. “The book-length freebies are a temporary program slated to run from now until when we launch.

Although the site will be ‘giving away’ a lot of content – indeed, all of its content, as we don’t anticipate any part of it being DRMed or paywalled – the core of the site will not be built around a program of free novel giveaways. That said, we reserve the right to give away free digital books any time we think it’s a good idea to do so. (With the cooperation and consent of their authors, naturally.)”

Best go get signed up, if you haven’t already!

Bespoke hotels of the future

There’s nothing quite like a good daily mixture of RSS feeds for generating some great serendipitous synchronicity. Today’s topic-from-the-blue – unique hotels!

Ice-hotel-interior When Geoff Manaugh isn’t cranking out what are arguably the posts most worth reading at io9, he’s churning out great posts about mad architecture-related stuff at his own BLDGBLOG … like this one about a hotel in Sweden made entirely from ice, or this other Swedish “hotel” – which is in fact just a bunch of fishing shacks on a frozen lake where you can stay to watch the Northern Lights. [Image: Photo by Ben Nilsson of Big Ben Productions, lifted from BLDGBLOG]

Geodesic-tree-house Aiming for slightly warmer climates, Warren Ellis’ grinders point us toward some impressive treehouse designs from around the world, delivered in the web-ubiquitous top-ten list format. The ice palace is pretty, but I think I’d rather be sleeping in one of these if I was to be resident for more than one night. [Image lifted from WebUrbanist]

The ice hotel reminds me of a scene from Julian May’s Galactic Milieu series, and I’m pretty sure there have been tree-cities in a number of books – Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos, for a start, and a Brian Aldiss novel whose title eludes me for now.

What’s your favourite environmentally-tailored residence – fictional or otherwise?

Friday Free Fiction for 15 February

Roll up, roll up – get your free fiction right here!

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A short selection this week from ManyBooks.net:

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In connection to Manybooks.net, I received an email from the intriguingly-named Argonautica:

“I’ve been reading and reviewing the free fiction released at Project Gutenberg and Manybooks.net (Futurismic’s Free Friday Fiction turned me on to it!) at Free Speculative Fiction.

I became frustrated when I couldn’t find out any information about the (often forgotten) stories online, and consequently had a difficult time picking out stories to read, so I’ve been reviewing them and providing a synopsis as a guide for readers. I only have time to catch maybe 2/3 of them, and I don’t claim my reviews are great literature, but I figure something is better than nothing.

Anyway, I hope you find the site useful.”

Sounds like an interesting resource – thanks, Argonautica!

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Issue 12 of Apex Digest has been posted and features fiction from Sara King and Jason Sizemore, interviews with Jeremy Shipp, Sara King, and David Wong, and a handful of reviews.

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You probably already know about Tor‘s free ebooks mailing list, as it has been blogged by many sites more eminent than Futurismic, plus dugg, slashdotted and all the rest.

You might not have heard about the sweepstake to win an Asus EEE that you get entered into by signing up, though – I’ll let Scalzi explain the details, as it’s one of his books going out next week.

Apparently the prize is only on offer to US residents – the rest of us just have to settle for totally free DRM-clean PDF versions of some bestselling science fiction novels every week.

I don’t feel too cheated, myself – but if someone wants to send me an Asus EEE anyway, that would be very kind. 🙂

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An email arrived from Jetse de Vries, one of the Interzone Fiction Editors. He’s a writer in his own right, too, and Hub Magazine have just republished his story “Transcendence Express” as part of their most recent free downloadable issue.

Hub Magazine will email you their weekly PDF zine, if you like – go sign up on their website.

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I had a brief email from Shira Lipkin to say that she occasionally posts short fiction pieces on her LJ. How often, and what sort, she didn’t mention – so you’ll just have to go and see for yourself!

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A new arrival in the sidebar listings of other places that provide free fiction is Dog Versus Sandwich, which tags itself as “a webbed zine”. It looks pretty new, but they seem to be publishing stuff at a pretty fast clip. Go see what you think!

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Free science fiction comics action! The endearingly irascible Warren Ellis launches Freakangels today.

Freakangels is a completely free web-published comic written by Ellis and (beautifully) drawn by Paul Duffield.

As if a free comic written by Warren Ellis wasn’t inducement enough, here’s three more reasons to go take a look:

  • it’s set in a flooded near-future London;
  • it stars a tough but pretty girl who wears fishnet stockings;
  • the girl in fishnets FLYS A STEAM-POWERED GYROCOPTER.

That last bit is what the marketing people call the USP, I believe. Works for me – here’s episode 1.

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Before we delve into the weekly flash fiction selection, I should take the time to point out another new addition to the sidebar of justice – 365 Tomorrows publishes a sub-600 word science fiction story every single day, and has been doing so for a couple of years now.

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And here we have the Friday Flash Fictioneers!

For your delectation and delight this week, we give you:

Jay Lake‘s in convention mode, so he gets a free pass! But here’s his piece from last week: “Feghoot in Uruk

And finally, Dr Ian Hocking has another little slice available in the form of “Stone Sun” – but again with the random timing. I think I’ll email him and get him on board with the schedule …

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That’s your lot for this week. Do remember we’re always looking for your tip-offs and blatant self-plugging efforts; the Staff page is temporarily devoid of email addresses (in an attempt to cool down the Futurismic servers from an overload of Russian \/14gr/\ spam), but we’re going to have a neat little contact form set up in a few days time.

Until then, happy reading!

Making carbon-neutral fuel from air and water

CloudColors Los Alamos National Laboratory in the U.S. says it has developed a practical method for producing fuel and organic chemicals using only air and water as raw materials. (Via PhysOrg.)

Green Freedom,” as they’re calling the proposal, is a process for extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and making it available for fuel production through a new form of electrochemical separation. The new process can be integrated with existing technology to produce fuels and organic chemicals.

Of course, the process itself takes energy. Los Alamos’s proposal envisions using nuclear power, but notes that hydroelectric, wind, or solar power could also be used to ensure the process remains carbon-neutral. As a result, they say:

The primary environmental impact of the production facility is limited to the footprint of the plant. It uses non-hazardous materials for its feed and operation and has a small waste stream volume. In addition, unlike large-scale biofuel concepts, the Green Freedom system does not add pressure to agricultural capacity or use large tracts of land or farming resources for production.

F. Jeffrey Martin of the Laboratory’s Decisions Applications Division, principal investigator on the project, will be presenting talk on the subject at the Alternative Energy NOW conference in Lake Buena Vista, Florida, on February 20.

The full nine-page concept paper is available online here in PDF format.

It’s almost like a recycling scheme for hydrocarbons: first you burn them, then you suck the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, recreate the hydrocarbons, and burn them again. Very intriguing and potentially transformational idea, if it pans out.

(Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

[tags]energy, alternative energy, fuel, nuclear power[/tags]

Vaccine worms to spread virus patches?

Despite being used for nefarious purposes, “worm” viruses are clever little bits of self-distributing code. Microsoft researchers here in the UK are considering fighting fire with fire, and using the same replication methods deployed by malicious viruses to spread software patches.

It’s an interesting approach – using the weapons of the enemy against them, so to speak. But one wonders whether the effort wouldn’t be just as well spent on, y’know, making sure the software had less holes in need of patching before it got released?

Just a thought.

[Guess who’s been helping a friend clean viruses off their computer this week …]

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