Tag Archives: Futurismic

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Happy new year!

By the time this post goes live, I (and doubtless most other Brits) will be preparing to celebrate the turning of another year… so I thought I’d take this opportunity to thank you all for following Futurismic in 2009, and to wish you all a great 2010.

The new year promises – by pretty much any metric you care to use – to be even more full of big changes and wild stories, as the line between us and the unevenly distributed future becomes ever more fuzzy and ill-defined. We’ll be doing our best to map it here at Futurismic; I hope you’ll come along for the ride.

Happy new year! 🙂

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Everybody else is doing a top twenty posts list, so why can’t I?

To infinity and beyond! Or not...There’s no reason at all, as it happens. And believe it or not, I don’t actually look at the site stats for Futurismic very often, as I prefer to judge the material we publish by the feedback it receives. But as the title suggests, everyone’s doing retrospectives of the year at the moment, and it got me to wondering what the twenty most popular URLs on Futurismic have been in 2009. [image by kevinzhengli]

So, for the sake of my curiosity (and perhaps yours too), here’s the rundown. I’ve removed any blog index pages from the list (ie. the homepage/root URL, and the second and third pages of most recent content) so that it deals only with unique pages of real static content and specific categories.

  1. A cure for radiation sickness?
  2. AN EDUCATION OF SCARS by Philip Brewer
  3. Futurismic fiction submission guidelines
  4. Futurismic fiction index
  5. Stephen King, Amazon’s Kindle and the death of publishing as we know it
  6. Where are the sexy computer games? (this one explains the high click-through on the search terms “sexy games”; heck of a bounce rate there, I’m happy to say)
  7. World’s largest nuclear explosion video (a classic post from 2007 that still brings people in on a daily basis… maybe more video of big explosions is the way forward?)
  8. Those hacked climate e-mails: Good scientists, poor conspirators (no prizes for guessing why this one did so well on pageviews…)
  9. Looming digital dark age
  10. 2009 – the year the physical bookstore lays down and dies? (written almost a year ago to the day, and oddly prophetic when read in parallel with Seth Godin’s post from a few days ago)
  11. Futurismic fiction submission form
  12. WiFi flu (another oldie whose popularity holds up well)
  13. Dune roleplayers in Second Life squelched by IP takedown notice
  14. One-way ticket to Mars, redux
  15. Futurismic columns index
  16. Nietzsche on science fiction
  17. Alpha Centauri ’should have an Earth-like planet’ (check the comments for some bizarre Christian nutjobbery)
  18. SPIDER’S MOON by Lavie Tidhar
  19. ‘Ghost’ Photos through Quantum Physics (nothing like vaguely-explained speculative science to rake in the spiritual techgnostic demographic, it seems)
  20. Moore’s Law gets a new lease of life

So, there you have it. It would be interesting to compare these stats to similar data for material read via the RSS feed (which doesn’t show up on Google Analytics because the content is stored on other servers), but sadly I can’t seem to find a way to do that with Feedburner… so we’ll have to do a sort of straw poll!

What was your favourite (or least favourite) post, column or story of 2009 here at Futurismic?

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Festive downtime

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Hi folks; just a quick note to apologise for the radio silence here over the last week! I’ve been off doing that family thing for the festive season alongside finishing up all the fiddly details of my recent house move (an experience I’m glad to have seen the end of), and there simply hasn’t been time to update here at Futurismic. I hope you’ve found plenty of other good stuff to read around the web… or been busy enough with your own seasonal visits to not notice the absence!

And here we are a few days before Christmas – meaning that most of you will be spending some well-earned time away from your computers, as will I. Futurismic will be back up and running next week in the run-up to the New Year, so I hope you’ll pop back and join us then. In the meantime, here’s wishing you all whatever will make you happiest, wherever you may be located and whatever belief system you may subscribe to. 🙂

Happy holidays! – Paul R

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Unplugged: the Web’s Best SF/F anthology now available!

Unplugged: The Web's Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy 2008Almost exactly a year ago I had the pleasure of announcing that a story originally published here at Futurismic – Jason Stoddard’s “Willpower”, to be precise – had been selected by Rich Horton for reprinting in his inaugural Unplugged: The Web’s Best Sci-Fi & Fantasy anthology.

And now I have the pleasure of announcing that copies of said anthology are now available from Wyrm Publishing (the people who bring you the excellent Clarkesworld online magazine, and much more); US$14.95 nets you fourteen stories from newcomers and luminaries of the genre fiction scene alike, which strikes me as pretty decent value… not to mention a great way to support the writers who contribute to online publications just like this one.

A recent Publisher’s Weekly review of Unplugged suggested that “[a]fter reading this 14-story compilation, online publishing naysayers may rethink their position.” I suspect we have a way to go before that happens, but anthologies like this are certain to help things along… not to mention reminding us web publishers that we’re doing something worthwhile!

So why not go buy a copy of Unplugged, and show some support for the writers (and publishers) who’ve provided you with great stories that you could read for free?

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Low activity alert

boxesJust a quick note for regular readers – things will be a little quiet here at Futurismic for the next few days, as I’m moving house and won’t be able to spend any time blogging until it’s all done. [image by garethjmsaunders]

However, I’ve set up a few posts to keep things ticking over in my absence, and Jonathan’s latest Blasphemous Geometries column (about Assassin’s Creed II) will be up on Wednesday as usual. I should be back in the saddle (or rather the swivel chair) by Thursday, but there’ll be some catching up to do… so expect a slow week overall!

Things will be back to normal (or as normal as they ever get around here, I guess) next week, so in the meantime why not visit some of the other free-to-read genre fiction sites in the Sidebar Of Justice? After all, it’s nearly Christmas, and everybody else in the office is probably slacking off too… 😉