The new issue of Flurb is out today!
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Qlone was great - cool idea but the characters brought it alive. Madeleine’s story was excellent and well thought out. Haven’t looked at the rest yet, but congratulations on another Flurb!
Authors often ask me about submission guidelines. Here we go:
The month of February, 2009, is when I’ll be thinking about the next issue, Flurb #7.
If you want to send me a piece, send it as an RTF file attached to an email with FLURB SUBMISSION as email subject line, and send it in February or early March, 2009. If you’ve already sent me a story, please resend it at that time, if it’s still available. You can find my email address from the “Email Rudy” link on my blog page near the top right.
I prefer short pieces (3,000 to 5,000) words, with an artistic, modern, literary, engaged quality, and with a reasonably strong SFictional element. I tend to avoid parody or hypertext. I only rarely publish poetry. I do not publish previously published work.
Terms: FLURB does not pay contributors. You keep copyright, and FLURB leaves your story online indefinitely, unless you want it removed.
The link to the de Vries story is broken (it points to the Byrne story).
I saw Bruce deliver his keynote at the Austin Game Developers Conference this morning. When he mentions running virtual reality apps on his futuristic computer, he draped the enormous napkin over his head. It was hilarious. When he lit a cigarette in the smoke-free zone, the audience stifled gasps of disbelief. It was almost a Lenny Bruce moment.
Fixed the De Vries link!
Thanks for the great story, Rudy!
hey this stuff is great i can’t wait for more
Great issue, the best yet, I think. I liked all the stories, and am still laughing from Bruce Sterling’s piece. Typo in his bio–or is it?–says he presented thie piece in 20008….
Watt & Krikksen rock! Zounds…if you take Bruce’s cautionary aspects as a layer over the other tales…maybe that’s too meta. Just couldn’t help mashing the two together a bit. Future napkin content providers…
Might a universe of qlones be asked to repeat things endlessly for historical reckoning purposes?
Flurb might also have adjective qualities to it…that uncomfortable feeling that the future is just a little weirder than you were expecting it to be, as if the air you normally walked through took on the consistency of a wall of Jell-o…
Oh goody, another Flurb!
I’ve got to save it for later but I have to say this issue looks great! It will light up the dark nights to come.
Many thanks to you and all the other sterling writers
Just wanted to say I enjoyed Madeleine’s tremendously.
Yes, Madeline’s is choice. Very fine twist end.
Thanks, guys! I had really hoped that this was the right place for my story, and I’m so happy to have been correct! Thank you, Rudy!
where can I get one of those napkins??
Just awesome, you guys. Just awesome. Not a dud in the lot.
Jetse’s work is always a pleasant surprise (with all the other good work he does, I always forget that he _writes_, too.
Thanks for brightening up my afternoon with the cream of the SFnal crop.
Edward Morris
Portland, OR
Wanted to toss a few words to the other authors, as well. I’ll be poring over this #6 for a good long while, I expect. My fav SF is that which haunts afterwards, and this issue has it in spades.
Michael Blumlein’s story is a marvelous study of character, while Brian Garrison’s poems resonate a certain distress with our increasing comprehension that we’re all riding a wave of computation.
Charles Platt’s highly engaging thought experiment made me chuckle and shiver all at once and Brendan Byrne continues chronicling the fascination of Haiti for another generation.
Bay kou bliye, pote mak sonje, for realz.
Adeline n Ashby ?
why does your story, AND the remake of Solaris, use Higgs bosons to create/decohere qlones?
Sterling is rather vague here in this observation of “griefing”…. in considering Allen Funt’s and Woody Allen’s infamous 60’s prank television series “Candid Camera,” I can see the obvious “cultural” aspect of griefing…. however “griefing” in the broad sense is kind of like “writing,” as there are many different intentions behind writing, not just “cultural writing.”
here is an extreme example: what if griefing becomes so severe that it becomes regular “prank fatwa-threats” on a roleplay gaming site in a sucessful attempt to get a gamer to resign?? ….this is not exactly a “cultural” intention…. therefore, polar opposites obviously exist in the vast spectrum of internet griefing!!
assessment: Sterling’s presentation here is considerably TOO flippant and ill-considered for it’s own good….
Awesome !!!
Im not in to computers much, but love good fun and reading. And this was masterpiece from my point of view :o)
Linus, doesn’t the world need its gadflies, though? To keep it from taking itself too seriously?
“Gadfly” is a term for people who upset the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or attempt to stimulate innovation by proving an irritant.” —- wikipedia
hey there Kelson…. valid point…. also the “gadfly” is rather appropo for any Texas game developers conference…. and certainly necessary for the often too formal industries of digital technologies…. perhaps the presentation needed a little extra zing of profanity as a more focused catalyst…. assuming that this is allowed??
Ian, note that Sterling’s piece uses Higgs bosons as well. Why? SF always uses as a magic wand the current sparkly tech words for things not yet understood. In the 30s they’d use “radio,” in the 50s “radioactivity,” in the 60s “black holes,” in the 70s “quarks,” and so on. “Quantum computation” had a good run recently. And right now it’s all Higgs all the time!
Arr, ye scurvy knaves, quit pickin’ on me Bosun. No wonder he’s takin’ so long with me grog. Darby, bring aft the rum!
In person, Sterling’s presentation came off as a sfnal comic routine. I guess you had to have been there for the laughs. Everyone in the audience seemed to get it. On paper, it’s perhaps not quite so obvious that he was setting up elaborate gags. There were plenty of other drier, less flip, and perhaps better considered presentations going on in parallel…with powerpoint slides.
I’m throwin’ in the humble positron to the mix: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positronic_brain
On TV and movies in those fabulous Sixties, it was computers. “My super computer will turn all my enemies into radishes. Ah, ha ha ha ha!” (pets white cat) “All I have to do is enter their names here and press this little button.” Then some lights flash and tapes roll back and forth while ominous music plays.
the poem “computer ate my soul” is great
thanks for sharing
(my computer reproduced a piece of your soul for me, i guess)
greetings from Leipzig in Germany
Congratulations for this wonderful issue. All stories were interesting and original and this is very impressive. Unfortunately, many currently published SF short stories lack originality, so your magazine is a pleasant surprise for any SF fan.
Qlone, for instance, is extremely inventive at a scientific point of view and the plot is excellent. Bruce Sterling’ s presentation was as clever and awesome as everything else he writes, but I am afraid that I am not very objective there as I am a fanatic admirer of Mr Sterling.
The story by Charles Platt is very funny and the one by Jetse De Vries is AMAZING!!! I am just sorry that I did not have the opportunity to read this story when I was a medical student, tortured for more than one year by Watson and Krick’s nightmarish helicoidal hallucination.
Thanks for the good time I had with your stories, congratulations for FLURB and keep up with the excellent job. I cannot wait to read the next issue! (I apologise for my English, it is not my mother language).
Hehe……Nice work man. I’ve known you for this long and this is the first I’ve heard your stuff. Very nice work you chivelrous Oxford scholor you. I like the picture too. It reminds me of the bad guys from Last Starfighter…….
Great images. Powerfully conceived to converse with the words of those poems. I like the way the platform rises to meet my eyes or retreats as I scroll up and down! That, too, is part of the poem, and part of the way I read the electronic text/image.
Congratulations.
Hey Brian
Can you hook me up Obodoimma? Only kidding, I enjoyed your poems. Colin
Yeah, fabulous stuff! Must check out The Hollow Earth book…
cheers, Kek
What a fantastic story! Would have liked to have seen it delivered live, but it works well on paper (note: am reading this in 2027, on a train, 30,000ft above the Earth ^_^)
Wow, it’s lovely to see people still commenting on this issue! I just wanted to add that the link to my comment above will no longer work, as the account is now defunct. I’m already figuring out what to submit for the next issue, too. Thanks again!
what a snarl of metaphors …
and allusions!
What Psychic color.
What? The next Ginsberg?. Nah,
But the next best thing
Since Adam blamed Eve…!