Tag Archives: science fiction

Blog

New market for near-future mil-SF stories! Erm, US Central Command?

Major General (retired) Robert Scales is a big fan of Orson Scott Card, and he’s found a receptive market for his own fictionalised visions of the future: the guy who may well end up in charge of US Central Command.

Earlier this year, Scales and Mattis were sharing ideas about the next generation of small units — something the two iconoclastic senior officers have done repeatedly over the last six years.

But rather than codify the notions into a formal policy paper or into a PowerPoint briefing, Mattis asked Scales to write him a story. “One of his favorite pieces is Ender’s Game,” Scales says, referring to the science-fiction classic. In that spirit, Scales penned “Jerry Smith’s War: 2025.”

I’m not sure he’s quite up to the prose standard we choose to publish here at Futurismic… 😉

In truth, Scales has been doing futurist work for the US military for years, and this latest effort is part of his push to upgrade small in-the-field units with networked technologies: head-up displays, multiple channels of communication between memebers of the unit as well as between the unit and the command and support infrastructure, so on and so forth.The sort of stuff we’ve been reading about in novels for decades, in other words.

In fact, I wonder just how many ideas Scales has pitched which were thought up by (proper) sf writers first? I hope he does his due diligence searches on Technovelgy so he can give credit where it’s due… after all, I bet he’s raking down much more than SFWA professional per-word rates from his buddies at the Pentagon.

Blog

Tobias Buckell story and interview at Lightspeed Magazine

Veteran readers of this ‘ere blawg may remember that, back when yours truly joined up as a blogger and started posting short starry-eyed blurts about nanotech*, the regular contributors included a man now much better known as the novelist he was working hard to become. That man is, of course, Tobias Buckell… and new-sf-zine-on-the-block Lightspeed has his short story “Manumission**” available for reading at no cost wahtsoever to you, my fiction-hungry friends.

There’s a short interview with Tobias as well, in which he talks about the horrifying implications of memory editing that underly the story (a theme that crops up in a more Mundane-SF context Marissa Lingen’s “Erasing The Map”, published right here around a year and a half ago), and how it connects to the universe in which his novels have been set. Smart guy, great writer; there’s no Futurismic column this week, so spend that half hour on our Tobias, why don’t you?

[ * – Yeah, I know, big change since then, AMIRITE? ]

[ ** – Almost certainly not named after the mid-90s Ibiza superclub. ]

Blog

Read this story: The Guy Who Worked For Money by Benjamin Rosenbaum

I know, I know I keep linking to Shareable of late, but I promise I’ll stop… just as soon as they stop publishing stuff worth reading. Today’s extremely heart-felt recommendation is another Benjamin Rosenbaum story called “The Guy Who Worked For Money”, and while there are bits of it I’m not so keen on (some of the the characters feel a little 2D, for instance), it’s one of the most detailed fictional visions that I’ve ever read of a near-future society based on reputation rather than wealth.

It’s the sort of story that makes me think of how many revisions and changes I’ll now need to make to some of my own, in order to even come close to keeping up… and it’s the sort of story that takes a lot of interesting contemporary ideas about the socioeconomics of the future and strips them of their utopian gloss. It’s well worth the twenty minutes it’ll take you, so go and read it right now.