All round e-publishing genius Pablo Defendini sez,

Fireside Magazine is a multigenre fiction magazine. Our goal is twofold: to publish great storytelling and offer fair pay for writers and artists. We published three issues last year, each funded by its own Kickstarter. That wasn’t really a sustainable way to make a magazine, and we want to create more certainty for our readers and for the magazine.

So we came up with a new plan for Year Two: a monthly subscription website and ebook (epub and mobi). Each issue in Year Two will have two pieces of flash fiction (1,000 words or less), one short story, and one of 12 episodes of a serial fiction experiment by Chuck Wendig. Each issue will also have artwork by Galen Dara. The website is being rethought and is being designed responsively, which means it will adjust to display an optimum reading experience on screens of any size. We are aiming to provide a clean, simple way to read our stories without any clutter or distractions, just the words and the artwork. But in order to do all this work up front and pay the creators their fair share, we need to raise the money ahead of time, so it's back to Kickstarter!

Fireside magazine: Year Two ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/15/kickstarting-a-fiction-magazin.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/24/fun-science-fact-anne-of-gree.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/24/fun-science-fact-anne-of-gree.html#comments Thu, 24 Jan 2013 20:42:39 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=208060 From Chapter 40 of Anne of Ingleside:

Anne sneezed. She began to be afraid she was taking a cold in the head. How ghastly it would be to sniffle all through dinner under the eyes of Mrs. Andrew Dawson, nee Christine Stuart! A spot on her lip stung . . . probably a horrible cold-sore was coming on it. Did Juliet ever sneeze? Fancy Portia with chilblains! Or Argive Helen hiccoughing! Or Cleopatra with corns!

Yes, Anne of Green Gables, by the time she reached middle-age, had apparently joined the majority of adults who test positive for the virus herpes simplex type 1 — the cause of the painful, little mouth blisters known colloquially as "cold sores". Estimates vary when it comes to how many of us are HSV-1 carriers. A 2006 study found evidence of HSV-1 infection in 57.7 percent of American adults, ages 14 to 49.* Bryan Cullen, a virologist at Duke University, told me he's seen studies showing that closer to 70 percent of adults are infected — although only something like 1/3rd of those will ever get cold sores.

Don't judge Anne of Green Gables. Chances are good that you're in the same boat.

But why is this virus so common?

Unlike herpes simplex type 2 — the virus you probably think of when you think "herpes" — HSV-1 isn't necessarily a sexually transmitted disease. Most people are infected when they're still little kids. And they're infected by really common behaviors that nobody wants to stop anytime soon — namely, the practice of adults kissing little kids because they're just so darn kissable. (There are several scenes in Anne of Ingleside where Anne probably passes HSV-1 on to her own offspring.)

Lots of people get it as kids. Lots more get it as teenagers when they start kissing the people who caught it in childhood. There's not an easy way to stop that spread. At least, not any way that doesn't make you look sort of stern, unaffectionate, and anti-social. With HSV-2, there are increasingly social influences in place that discourage the spread of the disease. For HSV-1, it's exactly the opposite. Our societal norms make the spread of the virus almost inevitable.

Worse, the virus has some quirks that allow it to really take advantage of those social norms. Young Anne might not have been willing to kiss Marilla right on a gross, weeping blister. But Marilla didn't need a blister to spread the virus.

In fact, the symptoms described in Anne of Ingleside — feeling a tingling pain in the lip where the sore would eventually appear — are a hallmark of herpes blisters. That's because, when it's not hard at work making obvious blisters, the herpes virus can live, silently, in your nerve cells. The virus bunkers down and releases a type of RNA that prevents the host cell from dying. Nobody is entirely sure what causes relapses to happen, but the appearance of new blisters has been associated with any number of things — from other illnesses to stress. (It's worth noting that, in this passage, Anne is on the way to have dinner with her husband's old girlfriend and has, in general, been feeling pretty emotionally distraught about the state of her and Gilbert's relationship.)

Whatever the cause, when a new outbreak happens, the virus begins replicating itself and travels along nerve fibers called axons to reach the epithelial cells — the cells that make up your skin. This is where the showdown happens between the herpes and your immune system, and it's kind of a messy battle. The pain Anne is experiencing is a byproduct of the inflammatory immune response, Cullen told me.

Anne would be most contagious when she has a cold sore on her lip. But that doesn't mean she wouldn't be contagious the rest of the time. The virus is always there. Even if you can't tell a person has HSV-1, they could still be shedding viruses and infecting you.

Which brings me to one final point. I don't want to speculate on Anne and Gilbert's sex life, or yours. But everybody should be aware that "oral herpes" isn't confined to the mouth. Truth is, HSV-1 can pass from one host to another via any mucus membrane, and that includes the ones on your genitals. If somebody with oral herpes goes down on you, there's a possibility that they could give you oral herpes in a place that is most definitely not your mouth. And cases of this happening are one the rise. The virus is common, but the social side-effects can be pretty awkward. So this is a reason to at least consider condoms and dental dams for oral sex.

There is one bit of silver lining to the bummer that is orally transmitted herpes on your genitals. It's possible that someone infected this way wouldn't have recurrent outbreaks on their junk. "Some studies have reported that genital HSV1, and oral HSV2, cause fewer lesions in the non-traditional location," Cullen told me. "But again," he added, "fewer is not always none."

Children's literature is about the wonder of discovering new worlds, the power of imagination, and the all the little triumphs and defeats that make up a life.

It's also an excellent place to find hypothetical questions that test the laws of physics.

For instance, presupposing that one could grow a peach to the size of a house, could one also really sail that peach across an ocean? And then, presupposing that one could harness the power of 501 seagulls, would that number of seagulls be sufficient to carry said peach through the air?

These are the questions posed in "James' Giant Peach Transport Across the Atlantic", a paper published last fall in the Journal of Physics Special Topics.

The paper was written and researched by four physics master's students from the University of Leicester in the UK — Emily Watkinson, Daniel Staab, Maria-Theresia Walach, and Zach Rogerson. Based on the events in Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, the four set out to discover whether the book's fictional account of an adventure could stand up to serious scientific inquiry.

Turns out, it can. Mostly.

The team's analysis relied on two sets of equations — one to test the buoyancy of the peach and another to determine whether the 501 seagulls could produce enough lift force to overcome the weight of the peach and get it airborne.

In order for something to float, it needs to be less dense than the liquid it's meant to float on. Say you have the same amount — the same volume — of water and of rubber. That rubber will only float if it weighs less than the water, volume-to-volume. That's true whether you're talking about a rubber duckie or a giant peach. Or, for that matter, a boat. And this is where Roald Dahl made a very smart plot choice.

Turns out, the flesh of a peach is actually more dense than seawater. Technically, it should sink. But Dahl took advantage of the same trick that allows steel boats to float even though the metal they're made of is more dense than water — you just hollow out the inside. That's because air is less dense than water, and a boat is just a shell of steel surrounding a pocket of air. Taken together, air and steel are a lot less dense than just the steel by itself. So the boat floats. And, as the Leicester team found, so does the peach — provided that, for a peach with a radius of 6 meters, the flesh was no thicker than 1.24 meters.

Next, the team turned their attention to the skies. Could 501 seagulls really airlift a peach that large? The answer: No. To make it work, James would have needed approximately 2,425,907 seagulls. (Assuming we're talking about Common Gulls. Different birds, different numbers.)

That's because of lift force — a calculation that compares the pressure over and under each bird's wings with the area of those wings and the density of the air. (You might also know it as Bernoulli's Principle) To get off the ground, just by themselves, each seagull has to have a lift force greater than their own weight. Subtract the weight from the lift force and what you have left over is the amount of lift each bird can put towards carrying other things. The sad fact is, 501 Common Gulls don't have enough leftover lift force to get that peach to rise. Two and a half million gulls, though? That'll do just fine.

So why does science care?

What's the point of all this? That's the really interesting part.

You're right in thinking that the plausibility of fictional scenarios isn't exactly a great problem of our time. But nobody ever said it was. That wasn't the point of this paper, or any of the other eight papers Watkinson, Staab, Walach, and Rogerson published last year.

Instead, this was about teaching them how to be better scientists.

The Journal of Physics Special Topics is, itself, a pretty special journal. It's written, edited, peer reviewed, and published by students of physics professor Mervyn Roy. Throughout the course of a semester, teams of students come up with problems they can use physics to solve. They get a week to research and write each two-page paper. Then they hand those papers off to their peers, who put them through a rigorous peer review process — critiquing the physics, demanding edits in grammar and style, and sending the students back over and over until they've polished up something that is worthy of publication.

It's a microcosm of the way academic publishing is done in the real world and it gives the students a chance to learn through trial and error both how to write a paper AND how to peer review one. That's important. Remember the story I wrote here a couple years ago, explaining how the peer review process works? One of the big critiques that scientists have of that system is that nobody is really taught how to peer review. You're just kind of tossed into it. Some people figure out how to do it well. Others ... not so much. The Journal of Physics Special Topics is an attempt to solve that problem by having physicists learn peer review before they actually have to do it for real.

They also learn how to handle the social fallout of peer review. "There were some awkward moments. One of my housemates was in a different group and when I was writing reviews of what he'd written it was sometimes a bit difficult," Daniel Staab told me.

The research also forced the team to learn how to research subjects far outside their own specific field. For instance, the density of peach flesh. As you learned earlier in this article, knowing that number is a pretty important part of knowing whether a giant peach would float or sink. But it's also not a number that your average physics student in England has easy access to. At one point, Staab said, they thought they might actually have to do their own study, opening and analyzing a bunch of peaches. But in the end, they found a reference — a 1948 paper by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

So, in the end, we learn the physics of giant peaches, students learn how to be better scientists, and it's pretty much a happy ending for everybody. Except, you know, magic and wonder and suspended disbelief. But Emily Watkinson isn't too worried about that.

"When we were writing this paper, some people wondered whether it would take away from the magic of the story," she said. "But, for me, Roald Dahl keeps the magic. We just wanted to see whether you could actually implement his ideas, because if you could it would be even more fascinating."

Read the fully study on the physics of James and the Giant Peach

Read all the papers from the fall 2012 edition of the Journal of Physics Special Topics — including papers on the physics of "Breaking Bad", Spiderman, lightsabers, and Katrina and the Waves' 1983 song "Walking on Sunshine".

As a writer, I know that there’s a point in the writing when the engine of the story really seems to roar to life, and at that moment, the characters start feeling like real people. When you start working on a story, the characters are like finger-puppets, and putting words into their mouths is a bit embarrassing, like you’re sitting at your desk waggling your hands at one another and making them speak in funny, squeaky voices. But once those characters ‘‘catch,’’ they become people, and writing them feels more like you’re recounting something that happened than something you’re making up. This reality also extends to your autonomic nervous system, which will set your heart racing when your characters face danger, make you weepy at their tragedies, has you grinning foolishly at their victories.

In some ways, this is even weirder. For a writer to trick himself into feeling emotional rapport for the imaginary people he himself invented seems dangerous, akin to a dealer who starts dipping into the product. Where does this sense of reality – this physical, limbic reaction to inconsequential non-events – spring from?

Where Characters Come From ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/03/where-characters-come-from-an.html/feed 9 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/30/the-social-science-of-middle-e.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/30/the-social-science-of-middle-e.html#comments Fri, 30 Nov 2012 17:43:57 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=197508 The Lord of the Rings Project collects and analyzes data on all the characters inhabiting Middle Earth, to produce statistical comparisons of life expectancy, age distribution, population, and more. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/30/the-social-science-of-middle-e.html/feed 12 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/the-last-day.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/the-last-day.html#comments Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:21:15 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=195541 flash fic about the last minutes of a failed startup. [Pando Daily]

He opened his wallet and took out his business card. It said “CEO.” He realized that was another lie, that he was never really the boss. Math was the boss, the math of a shrinking bank account. The math of expenses bigger than revenue. Math was always in charge. Whatever his business card said was meaningless. He picked up a pen and crossed out “CEO” scribbling over it “unemployed.”

My Complete Stories Online ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/08/07/every-one-of-rudy-ruckers-sh.html/feed 4 http://boingboing.net/2012/06/29/how-physicist-jim-kakalios-inv.html http://boingboing.net/2012/06/29/how-physicist-jim-kakalios-inv.html#comments Fri, 29 Jun 2012 20:54:26 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=168424

Scientific advising for science-fiction films is a really fascinating topic for me. It's a weird, weird world, where the goal is not necessarily extreme accuracy, but extreme believability. That can be a stress point for science, a field that is, generally, all about striving for accuracy. The scientists that help directors create believable worlds have to balance the goal of educating the public with the goal of entertaining same. That can be tough, and it leads some creative solutions—and little educational Easter Eggs buried in the background of blockbusters.

Take the work University of Minnesota physicist Jim Kakalios recently did for the new Spider-Man reboot. The film's creators asked him to invent a complicated-looking equation that, in the context of the story, would relate to cell regeneration and human mortality.

How do you invent a fictional equation? Start with a real one.

In this video, Kakalios explains where his imaginary equation came from, starting with the Gompertz Equation, a very real function that describes mortality rates and can be used to model tumor growth.

Video Link

What will the future of artificial intelligence actually look like? We're getting some clues already from projects like Hiroshi Ishiguro's Geminoid series with its incredibly realistic bodies, writes my friend Dennis Cass at io9. But we're also seeing hints of what real-life androids won't be like.

In a post last week, Cass talks about some common fictional tropes that have shaped our expectations of androids, but probably won't be present in the real thing.

The android that finds humanity to be a deep, abiding mystery

We flatter ourselves: A machine could never understand jokes. Then IBM's Watson uses natural language processing to understand the punning intent behind Jeopardy! questions, and we're proven wrong. If anything, the android will see us more clearly than we see ourselves. Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab, used the Xbox Kinect to analyze body language during student-teacher interactions to "mathematically uncover subtle movement patterns, many of which would not be noticed by the human eye." Psychologist Paul Ekman has discovered the "micro-expressions" the human face flashes during a lie-if facial recognition software can read it, then the android can know it.

Ultimately, as "big data" gets bigger we'll ask ourselves what we want our androids to share. Do we charge them with stopping us from making bad life decisions? Or do they help us maintain our innocence? Fiction has its Rikers, the wise humans who preside over the sentient machine, often with a whiff of bearded condescension. Maybe the android will be the one who wears the bemused smile.

Meet the other five androids that will never exist in Dennis Cass' full post on io9.

A work of fiction doesn't have to be scientifically accurate. It just has to make sense. All it has to do is maintain an internal logic and consistency strong enough that you, the reader, aren't inadvertently thrown out of the world. If you're frequently frustrated by detail accuracy in fiction, that's likely your problem, not fiction's. Chill out. Breath deep. Smell the flowers. Experience some imagination and wonder.

I fully endorse all the sentiments outlined above. And yet. And yet. There are some fictional details that drive me crazy. Like the seasonal shifts in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, where winter and summer last for years—sometimes decades—and nobody knows exactly when the seasons will change. It's not that I feel a burning need to prove to Martin that this can't work. Instead, it makes me ravenously curious. I keep wondering whether, given what we know about astronomy, there's any way that this could actually work somewhere, in a galaxy far, far away.

A couple of weeks ago, io9's George Dvorsky put together a little round-up of five possible scientific explanations that would make Westeros' magical reality make more sense. I chatted about Dvorsky's list with Attila Kovacs, an actual astronomer who has a postdoc position at the California Institute of Technology. They've got differing perspectives on how unpredictable and ridiculously long seasons might work. Thanks to both these sources, I feel like I better understand our universe, and can read Martin more comfortably.

Dvorsky's list starts with planetary tilt. Specifically, what would happen if the planet Westeros is on had a particularly wobbly tilt.

Earth's seasons are caused by the tilt of its axis of rotation - a 23.4° offset of the axis to be exact. The direction of the Earth's rotational axis stays nearly fixed in space despite the fact that we're also revolving around the Sun. As a result, depending on the Earth's location during its orbit, the northern hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, causing us to experience summer. Half a year later, when the Earth is on the opposite side of the Sun, the northern hemisphere is tilted away from the Sun, resulting in — yes, you guessed it — winter. The seasons are, of course, reversed for the southern hemisphere.

The seasons themselves are the result of shifting daylight exposures. In temperate and polar regions, the seasons are marked by changes in the intensity of sunlight that reaches the Earth's surface. The less sunlight, the colder it is. Makes sense. It's important to note that the Earth's axis of rotation is extremely stable. If it wasn't, the Earth's tilt would be very wobbly, resulting in inconsistent and unpredictable seasonal lengths like the ones portrayed in Game of Thrones.

But thankfully we have the Moon. Or more specifically, we have a very large moon. The Earth's moon is disproportionately large compared to other planetary satellites in the solar system. And without it, there might not be any seasons, or the seasons could be very different than what we're used to. The Moon has the effect of stabilizing the tilt of the Earth's rotational axis. Without it, Earth would be a wobbly mess.

Kovacs, though, says Dvorsky has this backwards. Our Moon isn't a stabilizer at all.

Rotational axes of planets are almost impossible to nudge (IO9's #1), unless by a powerful tidal force — such as the one exerted by our large and close Moon (short of a catastrophic collision with another planet). IO9 has this completely upside-down. Earth's rotational axis would be extremely stable were it not for the Moon. Because of the Moon, it is constantly changing — precessing — with a 26,000 year period.

Basically, Earth does experience some erratic, hard-to-predict changes to its orbit which probably result in changes to observable weather/climate patterns. In fact, it's a big part of some theories on why Ice Ages happen. It's just that, here, unlike on Westeros, those changes happen over thousands of years, not tens or dozens. Instead, Kovacs offers two potential causes for unwieldy seasons that weren't mentioned in the io9 piece at all. First, he says, you could get a very irregular orbit—and thus, irregular seasons—just by having there be two suns.

IO9's list is missing my favourite explanation, that of a disrupted planetary orbit, a.k.a the 3-body problem. Earth goes around the Sun on a nice regular orbit, only because the effect of all other planets on Earth's motion is tiny, so one really only needs to consider the Earth orbiting the Sun (2 bodies) or the Moon orbiting Earth (2 bodies again). However, things get hairy with more large bodies close by — such as with planets orbiting binary stars. Around binary stars, most orbits would be chaotic. So much so, that in the long run planets would tend to be either ejected or collide with one of the stars. But, perhaps, Westeros got lucky, and stayed around long enough by slim chance... And, the second object in the binary could be a brown dwarf (essentially a very large planet, that is just short of becoming a star itself), which would explain why it still only has one real sun still...

And, here is one more possibility, just for fun: What if Westeros' sun has a variable energy output? It could have structural instabilities (resulting from changes in its stellar structure, or from recently swallowing a large inner planet). Or, it could have a close binary companion from which it accretes material at an unsteady rate...

Of course, Kovacs' "three-body problem" explanation has implications for the seasons on Tatooine, as well. But that's a whole 'nother issue.

Read the full io9 piece on the theoretical astronomy that could cause weird seasonal changes like the ones depicted in Game of Thrones.

Read astronomer Attila Kovacs full response to that piece.

Image from a T-shirt Of the Day on RIPT Apparel

About a week before his passing, Mickey called to ask a favor. He was very ill and knew it. He was working on what would be the last Mike Hammer novel, chronologically -- The Goliath Bone, Mike taking on terrorists in post-9/11 Manhattan.

Mickey had been working hard on Goliath Bone but was afraid he wouldn't have time to finish it. If need be, would I step in? Then a few days later, he asked his wife Jane to turn over any unfinished material from his several offices to me, saying, "Max will know what to do."

All told there were half a dozen substantial Hammer manuscripts among a wealth of unpublished, unfinished material. I began with Goliath Bone, and followed with a mid-'60s novel, The Big Bang, and a '70s one, Kiss Her Goodbye.

But the most exciting discovery was the earliest of the manuscripts, brittle, yellowed pages that I had initially set aside, thinking it was a draft of the published novel, The Twisted Thing (1966).

Reading the manuscript it became clear that -- apart from having some character names and the setting in common with Twisted Thing - this was a wholly different story. This was the second Mike Hammer novel, the sequel to the famous I, the Jury. The manuscript of Lady, Go Die! dated to about 1945, in fact two years before I, the Jury was published itself.

Buy Lady, Go Die! on Amazon

Book description: When Hammer and Velda go on vacation to a Long Island beach town, Hammer becomes embroiled in the mystery of a missing well-known New York party girl who lives nearby. When the woman turns up naked -- and dead -- astride the statue of a horse in the town square, Hammer feels compelled to investigate.

Mickey Spillane's lost 1940s Mike Hammer novel was written between I, the Jury and My Gun Is Quick and is never before published! Completed by Spillane's friend and literary executor Max Allan Collins, Lady, Go Die! is finally making its way into print almost 70 years after its inception.

Lady, Go Die! -- Excerpt

They were kicking the hell out of the little guy.

Halfway down the alley between two wooden storefront buildings, shadows in the moonlight did an evil dance, three goons circling around a whimpering pile of bones down on the gravel. The big guys seemed to be trying for field goals, their squirming prey pulled in on himself like a barefoot fetus in a ragged t-shirt and frayed dungarees. Blood soaked through the white cotton like irregular polka dots, and moans accelerated into ragged screams whenever a hard-toed shoe put one between the goal posts.

"Mike," Velda whispered, grasping my arm.

Two of the baggy-suit bastards had hats jammed on their skulls, the other one, the biggest, was bare-headed with a butch cut so close to the scalp he might have been bald.

I said a nasty word, took a last drag on the cig and sent it spinning into the deserted street. I slipped out of my sportcoat and handed it to my raven-haired companion, who was frowning at me, though those big beautiful brown eyes stayed wide. I held up a hand to her like a crossing guard, and she just nodded.

"Where is the dame?" the bare-headed brute demanded. "We played games long enough, Poochie! You must've seen something!"

Like the man said, it was none of my business. I was on a weekend getaway with my lovely secretary, trying to ease the pressure of big city life. Just before ten p.m. we'd arrived in Sidon, eighty miles out on Long Island, a little recreational hamlet in Suffolk County. We left my heap in the hotel lot and were having a nice cool evening stroll along the boardwalk, checking out the two-block business section of a little burg that had already gone to bed.

"You wanna die tonight, Poochie?" the big guy was saying. He had three inches on my six feet, and forty pounds on my one-ninety, and there was fat on him, but muscle, too.

And the hell of it was, I knew the son of a bitch.

"You can die right here, Poochie! We'll drop your sorry butt in a hole in the woods somewhere, no one the wiser."

I let the moonlight frame me in the mouth of the alley as I said, "You haven't changed much, Dekkert. Little fatter."

His bully boy associates froze; one in mid-kick almost lost his balance. That was worth a grin.

"Who is that?" Dekkert asked, turning toward me with that stubbly bullet head like a badly superimposed photo over his bulky body. He'd been handsome once, a real lady killer, before his nose became a nebulous thing that had been broken past resemblance to any standard breathing apparatus.

Once by me.

"I heard you were back in the cop business," I said. "I just didn't know Sidon was the lucky winner. You won the sweepstakes yourself when Pat Chambers didn't get your fat ass tossed in the pokey, for all the graft you took."

"...Hammer?"

I was within a few feet of them now -- him and his two cronies, a skinny one whose kicks couldn't have hurt much and a broad-shouldered one with the stupid features of a high school star athlete too dumb too land a college scholarship.

Dekkert moved away from his victim, who was curled up crying. He faced me, close enough that I could smell the onions. "What are you doing in Sidon, Hammer?"

"Just a little getaway."

"Come back in a couple of weeks, after the season starts. Show you a good time."

"Like you're showing that poor little bastard?"

He thumped my chest with a thick finger.

"This is police business, Hammer. Official interrogation in a missing persons case. Why don't you roll on down the road? Wilcox is a more year-round kind of place than Sidon."

He gave me a gentle shove.

"So long, Hammer."

I laughed. "Police business, huh? Usually interrogations take place at police headquarters. Or is this alley the new Sidon HQ?"

This shove wasn't so gentle.

"So long, Hammer."

The right I sent into his pan would have broken that nose if there had been enough cartilage left to matter. But the blow still managed to send ribbons of scarlet streaming from his nostrils and down his surprised expression. My left doubled him over, and then my right and left clasped in prayer to smash him on the back of his fat neck, sending him onto the alley floor in a sprawling belly flop.

I was on his back, rubbing his face in the gravel, when his two clowns tried to haul me up and off. An elbow in the athlete's balls took the fight right out of him, and a sideways kick into the skinny one sent him careening to hit the alley wall like I tossed a load of kindling there. Skinny boy slid down and sat and thought about his lot in life.

I chuckled to myself, wiping my hands off on the back of Dekkert's suitcoat. The little beaten-up figure down the alley was silent, like a child in its crib sleeping sound. The alley dead-ended in a wooden fence, so he wasn't going anywhere.

Still on his belly, Dekkert was the one doing the whimpering and moaning now, and so were his boys. I took the guns off all three of them, since my rod was in my suitcase, and rained slugs onto the gravel out of three Police Special revolvers before I tossed each of them with one-two-three clunks on the gravel, their cylinders hanging out, near their fallen owners.

The skinny one found his voice. "We're... we're cops..."

"Nah. You jokers aren't cops. You're hick rake-off artists."

The guy I'd kicked in the nuts was sitting up, hunkered, hands in his lap like he was taking inventory. He spoke with the quaver of a spanked kid.

"You...you better leave town right now, Mister."

"Go to hell. I know my legal rights. Three shifty-looking characters were beating up some helpless joe, and I put a stop to it."

Dekkert had rolled over, but otherwise was not making a move. Bits of gravel were imbedded in his face and his forehead was scratched like a cat got at it. His nose had stopped bleeding but the lower half of his puss was a smear of red mingled with the yellow of puke on his lips.

Just like the last time he screwed with me.

"If you want me," I said, tossing them a friendly wave, "I'll be at the Sidon Arms."

I went over to the small, battered prone figure they had called Poochie. I helped him to his feet, gently, and he whimpered some more, but his round-ish face -- a child's not quite formed face -- looked up at me, eyes bright with both tears and relief, and made a smile out of puffy, blood-caked lips.

"Thanks, mister. Who... who are you?"

"Why, I'm the Lone Ranger, kid. And wait till you get a load of Tonto."

Tell me the difference between these two pieces of text.

The first snippet is from my novel vN, and the second is from a class project I did on the future of kids' entertainment for the interactive division of Corus Entertainment. The first conjectures vehicles that assert control when the driver falls asleep. The second suggests that adolescents in China will soon enjoy Canadian content so much that they'll hack content distribution networks to get it. Which of these is a science fiction premise? Neither. Both of these things happen already, more or less. So, what's the difference between strategic foresight and science fiction?

I could be cynical here, and tell you that the difference is the paycheck. Strategic foresight pays more, because the clients often have budgets for research, innovation, and/or strategy. Publishers also have budgets, but they're smaller and the competition for a piece of them is ferocious.

The real difference from the writer's perspective is the degree of freedom afforded by each context. When I first learned my manuscript had been purchased, my dad was concerned that my editor would "interfere" with my work, and turn it from a Godfather-with-robots story (about self-replicating humanoids developed with funds from a Rapture-minded mega-church) into something with vampires in it. I told him not to worry. Editors read interesting stories, and help them become even more interesting. It's a collaborative process. I would have the freedom to drive the text my way, but I would also have a friend to take away my keys if I were clearly incapacitated -- provided he weren't too busy collecting awards like a boss.

Strategic foresight is also a collaborative process. It involves facilitating workshops, sitting down for long conversations, and standing up at white boards with sticky notes. Unlike the writing of a novel, there are other people in the room with you -- and their ideas matter more than yours. You, the researcher, are there to help the client open up about the problems and the potential endemic to her industry. For this reason, the research phase of a foresight project can sometimes feel like corporate therapy. People have to feel comfortable before they can express genuine hopes or anxieties about the future. But once they realize this is an opportunity to think creatively, they run with it. li{margin-top:1em;}

Here's how I've worked in the past. The methods outlined here are by no means complete, but they do relate to the work I've done in foresight and how I think as a science fiction writer. For a nice big list of methodologies, check out Rafael Popper's foresight diamond.

1. Find signals. Or, as I think of it, pay attention and take note. Get a team together. Learn everything you all can about the industry, market, demographic, problem, etc. Find recent news stories about it. Save and organize them. Listen to the sources no one else is listening to, because weak signals have more to say about the future than strong ones. (A good example is the anti-vaccination movement. Once upon a time, it seemed like a small cluster of people influenced by faulty research would have no impact. Now, California has record numbers of measles patients.) This is also how I research my fiction. I learn unusual things and write about them. This is why my last story had Quiverfull families working with fansubbers to uncover the truth about zombies.
2. Organize those signals into trends. Inevitably, some of the signals you find will fall into the same areas. Group them together as trends, like "the democratization of media" or "spending cuts for education." When you have those, further organize them into a STEEPV (.pdf) framework of social, technological, economic, environmental, political, or values-based trends. Some will overlap. That's okay. You're describing a culture, and cultures are messy. (Worldbuilders, take note: STEEPV also works as a method of organizing the current events in your fictional realm. It's like a character sheet for a whole culture.)
3. Determine what drives those trends. Think of signals, trends, and drivers as the ocean: signals are waves, trends are the tide, and drivers are the moon. Waves may be big or small, the sea may be choppy or flat, but without the moon the water wouldn't move in the same way it does now. Drivers are elemental forces impelling the trends we participate in. They can be things like the expanding capacity of a chip, the price of lithium in Afghanistan, or the human urge to communicate. But they're always the thing undergirding reality that you most take for granted.
4. Create a critical uncertainties matrix. Critical uncertainties are independent factors that have little influence on each other within the problem space, but could change the space as a whole if they tipped too sharply in one direction or another. They're determined from the drivers, and the client's workshop group decides which uncertainties are the most nagging. It's easiest to establish uncertainties which are polar, like "public funding for scientific research," which can go high or low. Then it's set against another uncertainty in a 2x2 matrix. That matrix creates the four scenario worlds.
5. Write a scenario. When I'm writing a short story or a novel, I can decide which aspect of the future I'd most like to explore. When I'm developing a foresight scenario, I need to explore the aspects that are most important to the client. Scenarios can be heavy or light on the narrative, or somewhere in the middle. Sometimes they're more like a field-guide description. But the more lived-in that future feels, the faster the client can decide whether or not she'd like to live there, too. What both have in common is the need to write entrancingly about a place and a time that doesn't yet exist.

For me, that's Strategic Foresight vs. Science Fiction. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/01/02/sf-vs-sf.html/feed 30 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/24/fictional-disease.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/24/fictional-disease.html#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2011 19:07:40 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=131528 the major fictional diseases. (via Maria Popova) ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/24/fictional-disease.html/feed 8 http://boingboing.net/2011/11/24/surfaces-a-short-story-for-a.html http://boingboing.net/2011/11/24/surfaces-a-short-story-for-a.html#comments Thu, 24 Nov 2011 18:05:50 +0000 Madeline Ashby http://boingboing.net/?p=131240

The dilemma of how to reconcile the needs of security with the desire for humanity is the defining question of the twenty-first century.

This sentence opens my thesis, "Loss Prevention: Customer Service as Border Security," written for the strategic foresight and innovation program that I just graduated. I decided to write about the future of border security after my friend and fellow writers' workshop member Peter Watts was beaten, maced, and arrested at the Port Huron border crossing. I remember the decision very clearly. Peter was facing a prison sentence, and I was on the phone with David Nickle. I was in tears. But as we spoke, something overwhelmed my despair. Something hard and sharp enough to cut a path down the centre of my life. An idea.

I'm a science fiction writer. My debut novel, vN, will be available next summer. For the past five years, I've belonged to the same writers' workshop that Cory once belonged to. Like Peter (and David), my SFI classmate Karl Schroeder is also a member of the workshop. He's the one who suggested I apply for the program and take up foresight consulting. Since then, I've been paid to write about the future of Canadian media and the future of gaming, among other things. I also joined the Bordertown design group, and attended the Detroit Design Festival with my first art installation. In January I will be visiting Intel's Interaction and Experience Research Lab to do a "futurecasting" session with Brian David Johnson of The Tomorrow Project, on the subject of my thesis. It includes a science fiction story about the future of humane border security.

I believe in the power of stories to help us understand who we are, what we want, and how to get it. Stories are among humanity's oldest tools for sharing information. Myths, parables, fairy tales, and fables all have a huge place in global cultures. Sometimes, our stories about the future take on the same cultural role as our myths about the past. We can use this same technique in a limited context to imagine a very specific future. This is called a foresight scenario.

As I wrote in my thesis, "[foresight scenarios] offer a vision of what might be, so that we can decide whether one course of action is better than another. For anyone who watches A Christmas Carol or It’s A Wonderful Life each December, this is not such an unusual idea. Sometimes when confronting the implications of a new idea or policy, we feel like Ebenezer Scrooge crouched over his own grave asking whether these visions are the shades of what will be or what can be, and wondering how to avoid them. Foresight scenarios are a method of examining those implications, like Scrooge and his ghosts, from the inside."

Below is the scenario I wrote for my thesis. It's not perfect, and it doesn't present a perfect future. My secondary adviser Ken Hudson, who designed a virtual training environment for the Canada Border Services Agency, consistently reminded me that I could only choose where to place my surveillance, not if it was right to do so. My father has worked with surveillance technology for the past twenty years, so I was familiar with the market. I could choose between an ubiquitous but invisible style of security (the Facebook model), or an invasive and ostentatious style (the TSA model). This choice led me to thinking about the border as a service design problem. What design interventions could I imagine that would improve the experience of crossing international borders for both travelers and border security personnel? And would those interventions actually prevent things like what happened to Peter from happening again?

I think it's possible. I want to believe. But what I know for certain is that we'll never get there without imagining it, first.

Surfaces

By Madeleine Ashby

Brandy Schumacher occasionally suspected that she had some kind of split personality disorder. At home, she was quiet and kept to herself. Her best days were spent cuddling her fluffy silverpoint Siamese, Aloysius, in her lap while wearing pyjamas and reading vampire books. What litter she generated usually came in the form of food delivery containers. Her neighbours somehow managed to sneak in their greetings and gossip during the rare moments she visited the balcony to water her rosemary tree. (They were old people who loved both the sun and her quiet habits. Somehow, they always managed to keep her talking far longer than she intended to.)

But after donning her uniform, Brandy transformed into another person. She made eye contact. She asked almost uncomfortably personal questions, and then followed them up with even more. And she did it all with a smile – a smile that was so big and so bright that even the boy she dated for a whole month senior year of high school didn’t recognize her when she processed his passport last Christmas. The room made it easier, of course: Pearson had switched out those horrid fluorescent tubes lighting the customs room for more flattering “natural” LEDs as part of a civic re-branding campaign directed at international travellers. (This really just meant that they glowed beige, not white, but Brandy wasn’t complaining. The people waiting in line looked less like the walking dead, and so did she.)

This all came with being a BSO.

The communications training had gone a long way to preparing her for the transformation. Part of the qualifying exam asked multiple-choice questions about customer service. For the most part, a teenager working a retail job could answer them, but Brandy remembered a tough one about dealing with someone who had a nosebleed. The right answer was C: Offer the traveller a tissue before asking about the nosebleed. (Answer A was the reverse – questions, then tissue – and apparently almost everyone in her class got it wrong.)

But after the exam came the training, and the training was hard. Brandy’s French wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the best, either. She watched a lot of French films to keep thinking in the language. She also made sure to practise with the virtual role-play a number of times the day before taking her benchmark quizzes. But the hardest part of the training was learning to put her emotional uniform on with her real one. Like most of the students, she did all right at first – the uniform went a long way to putting you “in character” – but she tended to fall apart once any real problems came up. She panicked too soon in conflict situations, and was quick to pass even basic problems like surly travellers on to superiors. It wasn’t the sort of thing an officer of any authority should or would do.

A consultant from Disney explained it as a confidence problem. She was the senior VP in charge of strategic communications, “cast member” division, which meant she designed the personality each non-costumed employee in the parks was meant to bring to life. (The people in costume, the Cinderellas and Mickeys and so on, apparently went through even more rigorous training in what the consultant affectionately dubbed the “Dao of Disney.” It involved going away to some kind of camp for two weeks.) The personalities were different for each park based on cultural expectations, with subtle gradations based on the age and gender of the park visitor the cast member was speaking to. Part of the cast member training involved taking them on a field trip to the animatronic labs down in the basement below the parks, where they saw how each artificial intelligence was calibrated. Cast members were encouraged to emulate this calibration – to think of their hand gestures and tones of voice and word choices as something they could adjust the way they might adjust volume or brightness on their phones.

Granted, the situation in the Disney parks was very different from that at the customs hub at the airport. But, the consultant stressed, there was still the potential for a lot of criminal behaviour in the parks that cast members had to watch out for while still maintaining a high standard of service – people kept trying to have sex in the Haunted Mansion, when they weren’t busy leaving human cremains there; the Pocahontas canoe ride was a regular site of aboriginal activist art; the parks themselves were common hunting grounds for pedophiles and crazed ex-spouses. Hearing these things about a theme park, Brandy wondered how she was ever going to manage possible drug traffickers or illegals or whatever other trouble the airport decided to test her with.

Her test came in the form of Jorge Rivera, exotic animal smuggler.

Rivera was a short-ish, balding man with outdated glasses and a preference for counterfeit Lacoste shirts. He never ventured into the rainforest himself to steal rare butterflies or jaguar kittens or spider monkeys. He also didn’t buy the animals himself, although he knew the gangsters and other lowlifes who did. The money he made smuggling animals was less than he would have smuggling drugs, but the risk was lower and the penalties smaller.

What made Rivera great at his job was his heart condition. It required beta-blockers, the side effects of which were so well documented that they were prescribed off-label for soldiers with PTSD. The man could be carrying a dummy external hard drive full of larval tarantulas, and he’d walk up to customs snapping his gum and smiling. What’s more, his medical ID bracelet usually gave him a free pass from security guards and police officers – it broadcast his condition to law enforcement layARs, and nobody wanted to bother the guy with the jumpy heart, much less use a stun gun on him.

Of course, Brandy had no idea about most of this.

What twigged Brandy to Rivera’s dishonesty wasn’t the series of answers on his customs form, or the big custom walking stick he carried, or even the fact that a man with a serious heart condition claimed to be visiting Canada for a hiking trip in Algonquin Park. (In retrospect, she realized this should have clued her in.) It was how her cultivated personality brushed up against his and caused no change to his affect.

Affect detection was another aspect to the training. In addition to the consultant from Disney, her cohort of recruits participated in seminars with an improvisational comedy troupe from Toronto, and a former relationship counsellor from Seattle who specialized in affect detection and had helped design an algorithm-based smartphone app that helped autistic children understand what the people around them were feeling. Affect, the counsellor explained, was more than the “micro-expressions” the Americans trained their airport personnel to look for. It included posture, gait, tone of voice, speed of response, and other things that Brandy had once taken for granted. Affect was a natural part of human communication that most all humans noticed on a subconscious level, the counsellor said. You were born with it. To prove this point, he had shown them video of a baby who started to cry when its attempts to elicit a change in facial expression from an adult failed. The cries only became more shrill and demanding when the adult continued not responding.

“That’s why you have to show some emotion,” he explained. “If you’re too stone-faced, the people in front of you will start to panic because they aren’t receiving any indication that they’re doing the right thing. So on the one hand, you can’t interrupt your travellers with too many questions – otherwise, you’ll never find out anything. But on the other hand, you have to offer cues that you’re still listening. Pretend you’re at a family or dinner, or something – all the same nodding and smiling, only this time you’re actually listening.”

Everyone in the room laughed, but Brandy worried: she’d never really been good at that kind of social interaction. She had decided to enter the CBSA because she wanted a relatively secure government job, and because she grew up in a family of firearms owners and therefore easily merited the payscale that came with carrying a weapon on the job. She hadn’t really considered the social intelligence requirements. She’d always thought that the agency would soon splash out on the same intent-detection devices they had at Reagan and Heathrow.

Brandy caught herself wishing for one of those fancy intent detectors while interviewing Jorge Rivera. As it was, her layARs only displayed his heart condition as a pulsing red glow on his left side, and a vaguely yellow aura surrounding his head in a cautionary halo. The rest of the herd glowed green. Brandy hadn’t seen a Red come through in months, and even he was part of a secret agency audit. He and a very silent, stoic child tried to enter the country through the family line, but the custody agreement he showed the BSO had a malfunctioning QR code. He got all huffy with the BSO, but upon separating father and child for interviews, the BSO recognized a kidnapping in progress. The agency usually did a kidnap simulation before the summer started. With so many kids off from school, it was easier to sneak them into other countries. A few weeks later, Brandy saw the kid in a commercial for a local butter chicken chain.

“Can you tell me why you’re visiting Canada today?” she asked, after ascertaining that he didn’t need a Portuguese translator. She blinked three times to obtain additional information on why Rivera was yellow. A tiny countdown appeared in the upper right corner of her glasses.

Rivera seemed not to notice the lights dancing across the surface of her glasses. His smile, the one he had greeted her with, remained in place. “I’m going hiking in Algonquin Park.”

She had to play for time. “Oh? For how long?”

“The whole week.” He lifted what looked like some sort of wizard’s staff. It was a gnarled old piece of wood about six feet long with a bunch of feathers tied to its head with a beaded leather thong. “Got my special walking stick and everything.”

Brandy examined Rivera. He wore a salmon pink polo shirt and pleated khaki trousers, with thick socks under the suede straps of his cork-bottomed sandals. The clothes didn’t make much sense, for a Yellow. Most of them came up to the kiosk with a lot of attitude, and that showed in their clothes, too: big logos, big jewellery, big sunglasses, even indoors. Rivera looked so…tame. Like the Brazilian version of her dad.

“Where are your hiking boots?” she asked.

He smiled affably and nodded in the direction of baggage claim. “I checked them. They’re too heavy to wear for so long, on the plane.”

“What about your camping equipment?”

Dimples deepened in his face. “My friends are bringing it.”

“Did you bring enough layers?”

He seemed absurdly delighted not to know what she meant. “Excuse me?”

“Layers. Your clothes. In Canada, we wear a lot of layers, to deal with the climate.”

He grinned. “Even in the summer?”

“Even in the summer. There are black flies.”

If possible, his grin grew even wider. “I’m not afraid of bugs. We’ve got some big ones, where I’m from.”

Rivera’s record came up, finally. He had no priors, but occasionally got surly about the weight of his luggage and once, ten years ago, had tried bribing someone at check-in not to notice the weight. (It was for this reason that he’d been Yellowed – the system took attempted bribery very seriously.) Almost every trip, he packed too heavy, but refused to check his baggage. He made a fuss, and eventually got his way. His home airport and preferred airline had gotten used to this, but his destinations in America, Canada, England, and Italy made no complaints. He checked the same number and types of bags on his return trips, but they always weighed in at the proper number and he never had to pay for the extra kilograms.

Why is his luggage so light on the way back? Brandy wondered. That almost never happens.

Brandy quickly assessed her options. His passport would tell her nothing. They were unreliable, these days. Worse yet, some would actually crash your system. Ditto the customs form – he had filled it out using the touchscreen on the seat-back in front of him, and it had popped up the moment she waved the passport across her desk. At best, she could use it to see if he was lying. She took another glance at his smile. He was too good – something was wrong, but she didn’t know what and she had nothing to hold him on. If she flagged him for no reason, it would go on her record and she’d have to explain herself. BSOs only got one mulligan a month, and she’d used hers on a woman who “couldn’t remember” how much she’d spent in the duty-free shop. She considered going for help.

For some reason, a vision Aloysius’ unique brand of feline disappointment arose in her mind. Oh, come on, Schumacher. It’s in the national anthem, for goodness’ sake. “We stand on guard for thee.” Try living up to it, for a change.

“Is there something wrong?” Rivera asked.

“No,” Brandy said automatically, but she was already matching Rivera’s fingerprints with the smart walls installed at regular intervals along the line. Ostensibly, they acted as advertisements for attractions in the Toronto area (that disgusting casino on the lakeshore featured prominently). They gave travellers something else to look at besides how long the line was and how slowly it was moving.

They also took fingerprints and added them to passenger profiles.

“Which hotel are you staying at?”

“The SoHo Met. Downtown.”

Then why are your fingers all over a map of Markham? Why are you so interested in the suburbs of Chinatown North?

Maybe that’s where his friends lived. Maybe he was meeting them later, and wanted to know how long the trip would be. Or maybe he was just lying. Brandy took another look at his grin. He was completely at ease, seemingly happy just to be there, unconcerned that she’d delayed him this long. No restlessness, no shifting from foot to foot, no huffing his breath or checking his phone. He was, in short, exactly what the VP of strategic communications, cast member division, wanted in a theme park employee. Completely unnatural.

Vampire, Brandy thought. Flag him.

“Let me just hand this to you, and you can go right on ahead.” Brandy gave him a coded receipt to show the secondary inspector after picking up his baggage. While watching him leave, she deliberately avoided signalling her readiness to process another traveller. Instead, she tapped her earpiece.

“Did you get all that?” she asked her CO, Charles.

“Yeah,” he said. “Why’d you hold him up like that?”

“I’ve got a funny feeling. He was slimy. And his plans didn’t match up with his form. I checked his map searches.”

“He was slimy? That’s it? Maybe he just thought you were cute.”

Brandy rolled her eyes. If Charles weren’t gay, she’d have been seriously angry. In this case, his teasing was just an annoyance, and not something to really worry over. “Careful, boss. That’s harassment, and five minutes from now it’ll be archived on the server.”

“Noted. You flag him?”

“Yup.”

“All right then. I’ll go see what he’s got in his luggage.”

What Rivera had in his luggage required the use of two blastproof boxes: one for the spiders, and one for the snakes. The clouded leopard kitten they wrapped in a thick blanket, and placed in a cargo trailer with a mesh enclosure on top. It (they were nervous about checking its sex and waking it up) was still wearing a tiny gas mask. Both Charles and Brandy guessed it had come all the way from Thailand. It might have been asleep for as long as three days. An emergency vet was on her way from Willowdale with some food and an IV drip. They had called the Toronto Wildlife Centre for help, and apparently they knew someone at Pinewood Studios who knew a venomous creature wrangler, because five minutes after opening Rivera’s luggage and figuring out what he was hiding in his “walking stick,” Charles got a text reading “DONT SHAKE THE BAGS!!1!” followed by “U HAVE A FREEZER?”

Now they had Rivera on ice, waiting for RCMP to take him so he could tell them who the buyers for his goods were. They were likely gangsters, or people pretending to be gangsters, or traditional medicine practitioners with links to other suppliers in the endangered species market.

Brandy ended up telling her neighbours this as she watered her rosemary tree and harvested more catnip for Aloysius. (She had already told him the story, with special emphasis on the rare jungle cat and how he was still more adorable.) As she left the balcony, she felt a little sad to end the conversation. In the elevator, she realized that this was probably the first time she’d ever felt that way about talking to her neighbours.

The system works, she realized.

***

Madeline Ashby wrote her first thesis on Japanese animation and cyborg theory. You can also find her on Twitter.]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/11/24/surfaces-a-short-story-for-a.html/feed 17 http://boingboing.net/2011/09/01/marines-vs-ancient-romans.html http://boingboing.net/2011/09/01/marines-vs-ancient-romans.html#comments Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:27:24 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=115751 wondered whether a single Marine regiment could take on the Roman Empire, redditor Prufrock451 took up the challenge the best way possible: with flash fiction. [Reddit via Metafilter]]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/09/01/marines-vs-ancient-romans.html/feed 88 http://boingboing.net/2011/08/29/pdf-download-of-suw-charmans-argleton.html http://boingboing.net/2011/08/29/pdf-download-of-suw-charmans-argleton.html#comments Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:08:49 +0000 Cory Doctorow http://boingboing.net/?p=115832 AKMA sez, "Founder of Ada Lovelace Day, Web and social media pioneer Suw Charman-Anderson crowdsourced her handmade novel-puzzle-adventure-treat, produced handmade editions for her sponsors, and now is sharing the adventure with readers everywhere. She's opening up free access to the PDF of Argleton, with more ebook formats to come. It's a shame we all didn't avail ourselves of the chance to order the hand-bound edition -- but now we all can read and imagine what we missed." ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/29/pdf-download-of-suw-charmans-argleton.html/feed 2 http://boingboing.net/2011/07/26/winner-of-the-2011-bulwer-lytton-contest.html http://boingboing.net/2011/07/26/winner-of-the-2011-bulwer-lytton-contest.html#comments Tue, 26 Jul 2011 15:18:23 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=110409 won this year's bad fiction award.

Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.