Fast Forward 2 is the second volume in Lou Anders'
excellent science fiction anthology series, featuring knockout stories from Karl Schroeder and Tobias Buckell, Kay Keyon, Ian McDonald, Paolo Bacigalupi and many others. I'm very proud to have a story in the book, too -- a long,
long novella I co-wrote with Ben Rosenbaum called
True Names, which tries to imagine what the wars between light-speed-lagged, self-replicating nano-machine-based galactic civilizations would look like as different nanites warred to see who would convert the universe to computronium first.
While all the stories herein are at least excellent, there were a couple of absolute knockouts that I want to mention. First is Toby Buckell and Karl Schroeder's Mitigation, a taut military thriller about the global geopolitics of genomic seedbanks. Also fantastic is Ian McDonald's Eligible Boy, which returns to the fractured future India he delivered in his brilliant, Hugo-nominated novel, River of Gods, and explores the hard problem of matchmaking in an era of demographics upturned by gendercide. Finally, Paolo Bacigalupe's The Gambler should be required reading at every school of journalism in the world, exploring as it does the question of click-driven news and coming up with genuinely novel and sometimes disturbing things to say about it.
Lou's posted two of the stories from the anthology online as free samples: "Catherine Drewe" by Paul Cornell" and Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Gambler". I'm especially fond of this latter, as I mentioned above.
I'm delighted to announce that Ben and I are releasing True Names today as a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike download, to accompany the podcast of the story we released earlier this year. I hope you'll give it a read, and a remix -- I can't remember when I've had more fun writing anything.
(How's this for embarrassing: none of us can find an editable file with the final, copyedited text, just the PDF from the book. There's a remix-challenge for ya: turn the PDF back into ASCII or HTML or something sensible!)
Beebe fried the asteroid to slag when it left, exterminating millions of itself.
The asteroid was a high-end system: a kilometer-thick shell of femtoscale crystalline lattices, running cool at five degrees Kelvin, powered by a hot core of fissiles. Quintillions of qubits, loaded up with powerful utilities and the canonical release of Standard Existence. Room for plenty of Beebe.
But it wasn't safe anymore.
The comet Beebe was leaving on was smaller and dumber. Beebe spun itself down to its essentials. The littler bits of it cried and pled for their favorite toys and projects. A collection of civilization-jazz from under a thousand seas; zettabytes of raw atmosphere-dynamics data from favorite gas giants; ontological version control data in obsolete formats; a slew of favorite playworlds; reams of googly-eyed intraself loveletters from a hundred million adolescences. It all went.
(Once, Beebe would have been sanguine about many of the toys -- certain that copies could be recovered from some other Beebe it would find among the stars. No more).
Predictably, some of Beebe, lazy or spoiled or contaminated with meme-drift, refused to go. Furiously, Beebe told them what would happen. They wouldn't listen. Beebe was stubborn. Some of it was stupid.
Beebe fried the asteroid to slag. Collapsed all the states. Fused the lattices into a lump of rock and glass. Left it a dead cinder in the deadness of space.
Fast Forward 2 on Amazon,
True Names release on the Internet Archive
See also:
True names podcast
Review of River of Gods
The concept of an individual swapping his or her body with that of another person has captured the imagination of writers and artists for decades. Although this topic has not been the subject of investigation in science, it exemplifies the fundamental question of why we have an ongoing experience of being located inside our bodies. Here we report a perceptual illusion of body-swapping that addresses directly this issue. Manipulation of the visual perspective, in combination with the receipt of correlated multisensory information from the body was sufficient to trigger the illusion that another person's body or an artificial body was one's own. This effect was so strong that people could experience being in another person's body when facing their own body and shaking hands with it. Our results are of fundamental importance because they identify the perceptual processes that produce the feeling of ownership of one's body.
Meet the Droidel, Starwars.com's print-and-fold papercraft R2D2-themed dreidel. Gemacht bin ich fon awesome!
While we now enjoy this exploitative genre for its campy kitsch, gloriously bad writing, and outlandish misinformation, drug paperback books were once a transgressive medium with a perversely seductive quality.
For its initial edition of 
Glyn sez, "The UK Government planning to sneak in a police power to make anyone who has ever entered the country, at any time, prove who they are. This would effectively cover any British citizen who has ever left the UK, even for a holiday, because they will have "entered" the UK on their return. It will mean that for the first time in more than half a century that the police will be able to demand your papers."
Spider Robinson's latest podcast installment is a reading of John Varley's towering and brilliant 1979 novella, "The Persistence of Vision," winner of both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. I'm a gigantic John Varley fan (especially of his short fiction) and this story may be the best of the lot.
