A detailed study of a supernova could tell scientists an awful lot of useful things … but there are obvious reasons why, even if we were able to travel the distances involved, we’d not want to just blast on over to check one out up close and personal. So, we do the next best thing – we recreate a some of the phenomena of a supernova under laboratory conditions.
Friday Free Fiction for 24th August
The times, they are a’changing, as Dylan once whined. Nowhere is that more true than in genre fiction publishing, it seems, with some interesting examples of new delivery systems among this week’s free reads:
At Manybooks.net, they’re rocking the old-school sf novels for free: Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Randall Janifer’s The Impossibles and Supermind, to be precise.
Free Speculative Fiction Online list a whole batch of newly available works; go and see, and give the gift of traffic.
Pete Tzinski (of Blood, Blade and Thruster magazine fame) is blogging an online fiction serial called God in the Machine. (As a side note, I reckon this will be one of the fiction formats of the future, so I’ll be watching closely to see how this does.)
The webzine Byzarium returns from the metaphorical wastelands of the intarwebs, complete with their archive of previous material. All new material will be for paid subscribers only – another interesting potential business model for short fiction online.
Classic free pulp-era science fiction: Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved”.
Don Sakers is inviting people to subscribe to his latest ongoing Scattered Worlds novel, Hunt for the Dymalon CygnetHunt for the Dymalon Cygnet. You can read everything that’s been published already for free, and then sign up to get the latest parts before anyone else.
Here’s Paul McAuley’s short story “Gene Wars”.
The first stages of Subterranean Magazine‘s Fall 2007 issue have started to appear – columns, audiobooks and fiction by the big guns of the genre, costing you nix.
Electric Velocipede’s John Klima has Ezra Pines’ story “Antevellum” available as a PDF – read about this satire on Hal Duncan at the EV blog, then grab the file.
And a few bonus tidbits for the writers among the readers:
Nick Mamatas on the scene break, and why you shouldn’t overuse it.
Futurismic’s own Jeremiah Tolbert shares a nugget of wisdom on “the holy math of story”.
Enjoy!
Writers, editors and anyone else – if you want something you’ve written or published on the web for free mentioned here, drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address listed for me on the Staff page, and I’ll include it in next week’s round-up.
IBM faces virtual strike in Second Life
Big Blue has been cheerfully reiterating its commitment to the metaverse as the platform of the future by crewing its Second Life based Business Center with full time attendants. However, you may want to avoid the area for a while – the union that represents Italian IBM employees is somewhat peeved at a recent pay restructuring package, and has called a strike to picket in SL instead of meatspace.
Keep watching the skies!
I’m late to the party as far as announcing the arrival of the new Google Earth features that let you explore the sky as well as the ground, but I’m not going to let that stop me. Once the excitement of roaming the real stars has faded, however, you can skip on over to Galaxiki – which, as the name suggests, is a wiki-based community that is building a fictional galaxy by describing the star systems within it.[BoingBoing]
I quite like the idea of being able to create my own solar system … for one thing, I’d make sure that I avoided picking a sun that does freaky stuff to its planets with low-frequency waves. We’re all doomed! Possibly. [Image by jesiehart]
Mixed messages: Wired in two minds over Estonian “cyberwar” story
For me, the most interesting thing to come out of the so-called cyberwar DDoS attack on Estonia back in May this year is the different ways that different media have approached the story. Nowhere is this more obvious than with Wired; the magazine ran a long and beautifully written piece that completely overstates the issues for the sake of sensationalist warnings about potential risks to the US, while blogger Kevin Poulson cheerfully dissects and deflates all the hyperbole while sitting in an office at the same company headquarters.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that bloggers are inherently less prone to sensationalising a subject … but I’m increasingly finding the web is a better news source, precisely because I can get a broad selection of angles on a story with ease. How about you?