Stories from Nature magazine, July 2013 issues

4 stories, all flash fiction length, all online. Where I have a separate post on a story, link on story title goes there. Label "download" links the online copy of the story.

List below is in order of my preference, best first.

1. 4 July: Ken Hinckley's "The ostracons of Europa" (B); download: Human explorer meets a local on Europa!
2. 18 July: Gregory Benford's "Think big" (B); download: Humans aren't the only ones modifying local atmosphere...
3. 25 July: Deborah Walker's "Surrendered human" (B); download: Man discovers another God & realizes his past Sins...
4. 11 July: Shane D Rhinewald's "All that remains" (B); download: After an earth destroying war, a man from a colony world has brought his two children back here on a nostalgia trip...

Related: Stories from Nature magazine.

Gregory Benford's "Think big" (flash fiction, climate change, free)

An astronomer looking at alien planets will find, over the years, evidence on a lot of worlds where atmospheric composition seems to be driven by intelligent design - sometimes to cool the world, sometimes to warm it.

But she's not the only one watching alien atmospheres for intelligent interventions. Others from far have seen similar evidence in earth's atmosphere too...

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, 18 July 2013.
Download full text from publisher's site.
Rating: B.
Related: Stories of Gregory Benford.

"Lightspeed", February 2012 (ed John Joseph Adams) (magazine, free): Annotated table of contents & review

Whole issue.

Has 4 science fiction stories, including 2 reprints. I didn't find any really interesting, though Vaughn's is action packed.

List below is in order of my preference - best first.

1. [reprint] [ss] Gregory Benford's "Dark Sanctuary" (B); download; Omni, May 1979: A lone asteroid miner is "attacked" & chased by an alien craft. Story is mostly deductions by miner based on very little information.
2. [ss] Carrie Vaughn's "Harry & Marlowe & the Talisman of the Cult of Egil" (B); download; steampunk: Two Britishers, a princess & a soldier, steal an alien artifact from a temple in Iceland. Then they cross a blockade of British isles by Germans in an airship. Set in late 19th century.
   
   While the language is modern, the sentiments are from a century ago; not sure if it's intentional. First half could have been from an Argosy issue - "civilized" white man vs barbaric savage natives.
3. [reprint] [ss] Kristine Kathryn Rusch's "Craters" (B); download; Future Weapons of War/Baen, March 2007: Two stories, actually, & dark - terrorists using bombs implanted in babies, & using engineered viruses to prevent wars.
4. [ss] Keith Brook's "War 3.01" (B); download: Description of a world where geolocation-sensing augmented reality is common. We already have some of it in phones; this one adds a version of it using spectacles or contact lenses' based mobile displays.

Free fiction: 4 stories from JBU, #23 (February 2010)

At Webscription. Includes a story by Gregory Benford.

Related: Fiction from Jim Baen's Universe.

Free fiction: Some stories by well known authors from "Imperial Stars" anthology series edited by Jerry Pournelle

Free SF Reader links Imperial Stars 3: The Crash of Empire at Webscripton. 3 stories are free:

1. Gregory Benford's "Pebble Among The Stars"; download.
   
2. Christopher Anvil's "The Claw And The Clock"; download.
   
3. Cyril Kornbluth's "The Only Thing We Learn"; download: This has already been online as part of David Drake, Jim Baen, & Eric Flint (Ed)'s "The World Turned Upside Down" anthology: Frontiersmen always return as raiders of their ancient homes...

The series at Webscription has some more free fiction from "Imperial Stars 2: Republic & Empire":

1. Norman Spinrad's "Outward Bound"; download.
   
2. Wayne Wightman's "In The Realm Of The Heart, In The World Of The Knife"; download.
   
3. Hayford Pierce's "Doing Well While Doing Good"; download.
   

Gregory Benford's "Reason not to Publish" (flash fiction, science fiction): Who is God, & why did He create the universe?

This is not a story for sf novices. You must have already read a lot of genre fiction to not throw out this story as utter nonsense; I know I would have done it at that stage.

Story summary.

It's about a "mathematical physicist" who has observed jitters during a leisure walk in the woods: "jitter was not a fluttering bird, but an entire tree jumping in and out of focus... whole tree and all around it flickered, went grainy and sometimes vanished."

He has seen this behavior before - in computer simulations when the machine resources are low. Lot of investigations & observations at different places, & he realizes he & the world around him are parts of a computer simulation - computer at the edge of its capacity.

There is an implicit assumption in the story that Programmer God cares more about humans, than about rest of the Creation! Now with the human world population increasing, & computer resources already running low, God must delete some details.

How to survive so you don't get deleted? Make yourself interesting to Programmer God! How?

Collected in.

1. David Hartwell & Kathryn Cramer (Ed)'s "Year's Best SF 13" (2008).
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Nature, December 2007.
Rating: B
Download full text. Note this download is of HTML that doesn't render well at least in Firefox. But it's easy enough to clean in a text editor, or via a script.
Note: Download link no longer exist; see Ross' comment at bottom.

* Gregory Benford's "The Voice" (short story)

Dark story about a future society where people have forgotten reading, writing, & books, & access all information via the Voice, a wireless audio interface to an all-knowing AI. Cops go after any foolish enough to rediscover the art of reading; their brains are forcibly treated so they forget their reading habits! Looks like the controlling AI is hiding something or have a design of its own, but we don't know for sure till end - where the protagonist's brain gets the treatment.

Collected in.

1. David Hartwell (Ed)'s "Year's Best SF 3" (1998).
   

Fact sheet.

First published: Science Fiction Age, May 1997.
Rating: B

Note: Why is this post so short?