The science fiction blog-vine is twitching vigorously today in response to a Bloggasm interview with Peter Watts and Nick Mamatas, two genre authors who’ve released their books as freely-available Creative Commons downloads on the internet with some degree of success. But is this a viable future for fiction as popular media, or is it a blip on the cultural radar? Only time will tell, I guess. But I can say with certainty that life is too short to make yourself finish reading a book you’re not enjoying, whatever format you got it in.

Perhaps it’s a mark of maturity when a species starts planning ways to cope with what futurists refer to as ‘existential risks’. Those risks don’t come much bigger than that of a big asteroid impacting the planet, which would devastate us ecologically and economically if it didn’t kill us out right. Maybe we could just launch projectiles made of the compacted remains of much-loved sci-fi actors at the oncoming rock?

If you’re considering investing in property overseas, it pays to think ahead about risks that may not apply at home – so perhaps you should take a look at a self-healing earthquake-proof Greek villa? Meanwhile, us Brits may end up solving our growing landfill waste issues by building homes from rubbish.

It looks like Second Life, home of the weird, just got a little bit weirder. The PR agency Centric have just found their island build taken over by a rogue corporation from another timeline that has been trying to develop an alien world into a human colony. No one seems entirely sure what that means, but Winfinity, the temporally displaced company in question, is offering a bounty of L$100k to the person who goes in, scopes the scene and brings back the best report of what’s going on. So dress your avatar up in your best enviro-suit, and get investigating – that’s a hefty prize.

The solar sail isn’t a new idea, especially not to anyone well read in science fiction. But even old ideas can be improved upon – like this new twist on the solar sail concept by a group of Finnish engineers that will make them cheaper, more efficient, and faster. And if you think that it sounds too complex to work, bear in mind we’ve already got satellites that can repair themselves and others. Many things are just within our grasp, if only we’d bother to reach.