Readers
Rich Horton's Market Summaries:
Summary: Futurismic, 2005
Futurismic is a website focussed on the impact of technology on the world, particularly in the near future. I find it consistently interesting. They have been striving to publish one story a month, on very much "on-topic" subjects: near future SF, that is to say, driven mostly by considering the impact of technological advances on people's lives. They didn't quite manage monthly stories in 2005, publishing 10, one a novelette, coming to just over 60,000 words of fiction.
My clear favorite story was Tom Doyle's "Consensus Building", intelligent and creepy stuff about an ambitious businesswoman testing a brain implant that offers not just memory enhancements but behavioral suggestions: pep talks, etc., plus of course advertising. And what if it was hacked?
I also quite liked included Jay Lake and Ruth Nestvold's "The Rivers of Eden", about a future divided between nasty Christians and nasty Muslims, with the latter having the upper hand thanks to a plague engineered to compel belief in Islam. A researcher in a Fundamentalist Christian enclave is urged to find a counter-plague -- but is it any better to reprogram people's minds with Fundy Christian beliefs? And stories from Jason Stoddard, Terry Hayman, and Jay Campbell were also fine.
