Tag Archives: science fiction

Blasphemous Geometries

Genre and storytelling in video games

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This month in Blasphemous Geometries, Jonathan McCalmont takes a look at the roles of genre narratives and storytelling in the still-young media of computer and video games, questioning the received wisdom that that the form has matured noticeably from is simple puzzle-solving and goal-reaching roots.

Blasphemous Geometries by Jonathan McCalmont

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We exist in a world of brands. These days you can watch a film, read a book or comic, play a game, drink a cup of coffee and even have sex without ever leaving the vice-like economic grip of your favourite brand. As the darling of the monstrous cultural artefacts that are summer blockbusters, science fiction is at the cutting edge of what Media Studies theorists call Remediation.

Remediation is the idea that, rather than existing along a fixed technological time-line with new forms emerging fully-formed from new technology, new forms of media are produced via a process of back-and-forth between new technology and older mediums. As video game designers draw more and more hungrily upon literary and cinematic works of science fiction, it is important to think about what the process of remediation does to these works and how the process might be improved. Continue reading Genre and storytelling in video games →

Fiction

NEW FICTION: AN EDUCATION OF SCARS by Philip Brewer

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This month’s fresh fiction at Futurismic is another examination of the ways small and alarmingly plausible advances in science and medicine might affect people’s lives in the near future. This time out, Philip Brewer delivers a dark and touching take on the classic love triangle in “An Education of Scars”. Let us know what you thought in the comments – and enjoy!

An Education of Scars

by Philip Brewer

I was just two steps from escaping the party by slipping out onto the terrace when I spotted Hostess and Investment Banker Pickering watching me. She didn’t say anything, but her expression of reproach stopped me. I ducked my head.

“Oh, stop it, Peter,” she said. “I invited you to the party to cheer you up, not make you miserable.”

I did my best to look happy.

Hostess Pickering sighed. “Is there anybody here you actually want to talk to? I’ll introduce you.”

I looked around.

The floor was a shimmering sea green. Forty or fifty people drifted back and forth in couples and small groups. Outside it was night, but the terrace was lit just enough to keep the windows from turning into mirrors.

“Peter? I’m not going to introduce you to the terrace.”

I snapped my head back and looked again at the people.

Then I saw a woman. Continue reading NEW FICTION: AN EDUCATION OF SCARS by Philip Brewer →

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Friday Free Fiction for 27th February

Cheer up – the weekend’s here! Well, near enough, if not quite for US readers… but I digress. It’s Friday, and that means it’s time for your weekly round-up for free science fiction stories on the web. Let’s rock.

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Just the one from FeedBooks:

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It’s Nebula nomination season, so expect more announcements like this in coming weeks; Asimov’s Magazine has made all their stories and novelettes that were nominated available online.

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You can download a PDF of the Ken Scholes story “Last Flight of the Goddess” for free… provided you’re a registered member of Tor.com, that is.

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Jason Stoddard has posted chapter 2.1 of his unpublished novel Eternal Franchise.

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Kim Lakin-Smith has released “The Killing Fields” – her story from the recent BSFA anthology, Celebration – on her website. There are downloadable formats for them what don’t like reading on no web page, too.

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More new fiction at Subterranean Online:

“A Four-Sided Triangle” is the latest pulp excursion by Mike Resnick’s singular creation, the Honorable Right Reverend Doctor Lucifer Jones.

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Strange Horizons presents “Sometimes We Arrive Home” by K Bird Lincoln

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Polu Texni presents the concluding part of “Very Truly Yours” by Seth Gordon

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Hub Magazine presents “Montgolfier Winter” by Alasdair Stuart

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SF Signal has a massive list of free stories recently added to the Free Speculative Fiction Online site. A couple of other bits they pointed out:

  • the new issue of Australian sf webzine Antipodean features J D Brames, Liam Thorpe, Steve Duffy, Jan Napier, Mick Dawson, Shaun A Saunders, Mark Farrugia, Houston Dunleavy, Houston Dunleavy, and Felicity Dowker
  • Author and game designer Greg Costikyan has a bunch of free-to-read stories from the bibliography page of his website..

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Due to events in the reality beyond the interwebs (where I am genuinely known to manifest from time to time, contrary to popular belief) I’m not going to be able to catch all the bits of Friday Flash this week, but rest assured they’ll be carried over into next week’s round-up, just as with “Tongue“, Neil Beynon’s offering from last week

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Non-fiction bonus – via BoingBoing (and a slew of other venues) comes news of the second issue of H+, the transhumanist magazine edited by R U Sirius. As you can see, there’s plenty of stuff for science fiction readers:

… “First Steps Toward Post Scarcity or Why It’s the End of the World as We Know it and You Should Feel Fine” by Jason Stoddard…

… John Shirley on Cyberpunk for the 21st Century…

… Paul McEnery talking to “Bio Gunk” SF writer Peter Watts…

H+ is free to download in PDF form from the magazine’s website. So get to it!

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And that’s your lot! As pointed out above, I’ll raise my hand to any errors and ommissions of lateness, as I’ve compiled this post a good few hours than I would normally, but anything that I’ve missed will be added into next week’s post. Until then, keep your tip-offs coming in and have yourselves a great weekend!

The Adam Roberts Project

Power of Ten Billion Butterfly Sneezes – To Our Children’s Children’s Children by The Moody Blues

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The Adam Roberts Project

The Moody Blues‘ 1969 album To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children employs the full tidal panoply of 1960s hippy musical effects (guitars, full orchestra, a forty-strong choir going ‘ahh! ahh! ahh! ahh!’ in the background, the sounds of rockets launching and various galactic boingings, plus lyrics spoken ponderously rather than sung) to celebrate the Apollo 11 moon landing. And what a tremendous achievement for humanity it was. The moon landing, I mean. Not the Moody Blues’ album. The Moody Blues’ album is really very bad, a walnut-whirling, quintuple-choc, bathful-of-treacle, gag-reflex confection that embodies all the most sicky-sicky aspects of 1960s music. The opposite of an achievement. A zchievement, perhaps.

The Moody Blues - To Our Children's Children's ChildrenThis is an album that takes the listener, via the Apollo programme, on a tour of the future solar system up to the year 1,000,000. The main themes are love, peace, children, innocence, children, our children, hope and our children. It’s as if the various members of the band were in competition with one another to put in as many heartfelt references as possible to ‘the eyes of a child’ and ‘the innocence of our children’, to ‘the web of love and peace’ and to ‘the eyes of a child’ again. Track 2 is called “The Eyes of a Child”. So is track 4. Actually track 4 is called “The Eyes of a Child part 2” but it amounts to the same thing. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m a father. I consider my children’s eyes to be perfectly lovely, thank you very much. It’s just that I don’t think it likely that either the beauty of my child’s eyes or the cause of world peace will be materially improved by wibbly hippy meanderings of the calibre of, say, the chorus to track 10 “Candle of Life”:

So Love!
Everybody!
And Make Them!
Your Friend!
So Love!
Everybody!
And Make Them!
Your Friend!

Two things are going to strike the listener as he or she wades through the goo that is To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children. One, inevitably, concerns the name of the band itself. The Moody Blues. The Moody Blues? At some point one of the founding members must have been listening to Blind Lemon Jefferson or Robert Johnson or some other great Blues musician singing about their dirt-poverty, the misery and hopelessness of their existence, about selling their souls to the devil or being crossed-in-love and shooting down their rivals-and they must have thought to themselves: ‘blimey! he’s a bit moody.’

One word to that: no.

The second thing that strikes the listener is the frankly odd mathematical principle at work throughout the album. Track 12 is called “I Never Thought I’d Live To Be A Million”. This is Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children we’re talking about. Three generations, or an average life expectancy of over three hundred thousand years each. Is it that people in the future will live so long, or only that it will seem to be so long, because they’ll be listening to tar like this?

Then there’s the album’s first track, “Higher and Higher”, which begins with the sound of a Saturn V Launch. Then drummer Graeme Edge intones:

Blasting, billowing, bursting forth with the
Power of ten billion butterfly sneezes,
Man with his flaming pyre has conquered the wayward breezes.

Now every schoolchild knows that, breathing as they do through spiracles (those tiny holes in their flanks), butterflies don’t actually sneeze. But putting that on one side for a moment.

At launch a Saturn V rocket puts out about 35 million newtons of thrust. Dividing by ten billion gives us 0.0035 newtons per butterfly sneeze. This is the power to accelerate about a third of a gram (a paperclip, say) one metre per second squared, which I consider impressive sneezing power. You could probably flick a paperclip with your finger such that it accelerates at one metre per second squared. But you are much bigger than a butterfly. Butterflies vary in weight from 0.0003 to 3 grams. Even if we take a median figure the song is suggesting that a butterfly can accelerate something weighing, let’s say, a tenth of its own bodyweight simply by contracting its spiracles. Scaling up, this would be equivalent to a grown man sneezing so hard than an artificial leg flew off the table in front of him with the velocity of a greyhound out of the starting gate. Which, now that I come to think of it, is a suitable image with which to round-up this account of the Moody Blues 1969 SF album To Our Childrens’ Childrens’ Children.

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Friday Free Fiction for 20th February

Roll up, roll up – all the fun of the science fictional fair can be found in Futurismic‘s Friday Free Fiction roundup! Step right inside, and don’t mind the geeks, ma’am…

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Here’s a couple from ManyBooks:

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And here’s a bunch from Feedbooks:

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News of a free anthology from Mike Brotherton:

The anthology of astronomy stories I’ve been working on for the last year or two, off and on, is finally completed and available: Diamonds in the Sky.

The anthology is free and you can go there now and read the stories, most of which are original but a few of which are reprints from Analog or Asimov’s. Contributors include Hugo and Nebula award winning authors. Each story focuses on one or two key ideas from astronomy and should have some educational value, but are hopefully first and foremost simply entertaining and good quality stories. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation as a public education and outreach effort, and I’d like to reach as many readers as possible so please spread the word!

Via Jeremy Tolbert, who made the anthology website… and who you should seriously consider hiring to make yours, if you’re in need of one. Or maybe even if you’re not.

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Tor.com presents “A Weeping Czar Beholds the Fallen Moon” by Ken Scholes

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Strange Horizons presents “The First Time We Met” by Maria Deira

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Hub Magazine presents “A Little Mystery” by Len Bains

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COSMOS Magazine presents “Letting Go” by David Walton

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A message from Nancy Jane Moore:

I’ve put “Thirty-One Rules for Fulfilling Your Destiny” – the one piece of flash fiction in my PS Publishing Showcase collection, Conscientious Inconsistencies – up on Book View Cafe this week.

Thanks, Nancy!

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Issue #2 of Arkham Tales is now available for free download!

This issue contains fiction by K.S. Clay, Dev Jarrett, Jason Hardy, Bric Barnes, Bret Tallman, Matt Finucane, Catherine J. Gardner, John Jasper Owens, Diane Payne, and Garrett Calcaterra, and poetry by K.S. Conlon.

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Looks like I missed a few of the recent free chapters of Jason Stoddard‘s Eternal Franchise, so here are parts 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 for you to get stuck into.

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SF Signal play host to the fourth and final of their excerpt chapters from David Moody‘s Hater. See also: Chapter 1, Chapter 2 and Chapter 3;

Furthermore, and perhaps in an effort to make things easier for your humble collator, most of SF Signal‘s free fiction listings for the week that aren’t featured here individually can all be found in one convenient post. Result!

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Finally, let’s see what the Friday Flash Fiction gang have been up to this week:

  • Gareth L Powell has another excerpt in lieu of Friday Flash; this one is from a story called “The Winding Curve” which he co-wrote with Robert Starr.
  • Gareth D Jones has another of his translations, namely “Yn Aavuilley Moal” – “Delayed Reaction” in Manx, no less.

And delivering the more regular format, we have the following:

Plus Dan Pawley gets back in the saddle with a double dose: “The Folksinger” and “Lost in the Supermarket“.

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And that’s your lot, once again. Please forgive any typos or errors, as I’m trying to set up a new computer and have hence hurried through this round-up a little more than I should – I’m sure some eagle-eyed commeter will bring my attention to any mistakes! In the meantime, keep us posted with tip-offs and plugs, and have yourselves a great weekend.