Shimmer is one of the few magazines I actually subscribe to, like, paying ahead of time with honest-to-goodness money. So I was happy to see (at BoingBoing) that they're giving away the electronic edition of their most recent Pirate issue just for one day, September 19:

Pirate Booty!
Shimmer’s Pirate Issue, guest-edited by John Joseph Adams, was originally released in November, 2007. In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day, we’re making it freely available TODAY ONLY–September 19, 2008.

Download your copy today, ye scurvey sea-dogs, or forever be regrettin’ it.

Go get it!

John Joseph Adams has a new anthology out:

Gathering stories by nine of today’s most incisive minds, Seeds of Change confronts the pivotal issues facing our society today: racism, global warming, peak oil, technological advancement, and political revolution. Many serve as a call to action. How will you change with the future?

Three of the stories are available for free download: "Arties Aren't Stupid" by Jeremiah Tolbert, "The Future by Degrees" by Jay Lake, and "Resistance" by Tobias Buckell. Excerpts from others are there as well. The other authors in the collection are Ted Kosmatka, K. D. Wentworth, Blake Charlton, Ken MacLeod, Mark Budz, and Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu.

By the way, there's already a review up by John Ottinger of Grasping For The Wind, who has been kind enough to review us in the past.

From Larry Lessig by way of Cory Doctorow blogging at BoingBoing:

In non-technical terms, [the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE "IP" court in the US)] has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you're simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

I probably don't need to tell people how important copyright law is, and how important it is to get the details right when people want to share their work while still retaining their rights. (If you don't want to retain any rights, you can explicitly place your work into the public domain.) Even if you don't want to give your stories away, using a Creative Commons licence strikes me as a great way to make your stories available after they have already been published elsewhere; one example I learned about recently from John Scalzi's blog is Mary Robinette Kowal's free fiction page, for instance.

Obviously, this topic is near and dear to my heart since I use out-of-copyright works for my "Classic Flash" stories. Since copyright laws have changed over the years, you might get confused over what you can use and what you can't; if so, start with the librarycopyright.net Digital Slider, and follow the links to get further clarifying information.

This article comes from the August 8, 2693 edition of the Al-Sharq Al-Awsat and was translated into twentieth-century English by Robert Iverson.

Spilled Seed
"Rosetta Stone" Grain Cache Discovery May Cause Ecological Disaster, Minister Warns

Bab Al-Hamdu, Scandinavia -- August 08, 2693 -- Far from being a boon to paleobotonists and archeolinguists, the recent discovery of an ancient grain cache on this remote northern island may cause the destruction of plant species, decreases in native wildlife, and even widespread famine among humans, a top Scandinavian minister told reporters today.

"It is as if the rebels in the time of the Annexation left a bomb to detonate at our feet," said Muhammad Al-Waziri, Scandinavian Minister of the Environment. "These grains produce much more gluten and other compounds and thus are less digestible for modern people. They also grow exceedingly rapidly in cool, carbon-rich climates, and are not designed to self-restrict."

"This is biological warfare that the infidels deferred to our century," he added.

The seed cache was discovered in March by two Special Officers of the Ministry of Species Management, Ingmar Al-Muhaine and Bjorn Al-Ghamdi, while they catalogued the flora and fauna of the mountains of Bab Al-Hamdu in the Scandinavian archipelago of New Dhabi, the northermost territory of the Caliphate. The men found a large man-made cave filled with packets that contained a wide variety of different seed types.

The packets were labeled in many different languages, often showing the same message in different languages, including Middle Arabic, English, and Russian. Linguists hailed the find as a modern "Rosetta Stone" because it helped them decode languages that had been believed to be lost, including a dialect of Norwegian, which was thought to have been eradicated when the European Caliphate annexed the Scandinavian Provinces in 2239. Al-Ghamdi said in an after-action report that the seed package labels dated the creation of the cache to no earlier than 2005.

Minister Al-Waziri, however, sees a dark side in the activities that followed the discovery, and has raised the question of punishing the local inhabitants.

"This area is not fully Muslim," he said at a press conference on channel Lam-Meem. "The local population has lived for five hundred years through payment of the jizya, but has not converted. We believe that their hard living and lack of morals caused some of them to steal the seeds and release them into the wild."

The New Dhabi archipelago and its largest island, called "Cold Shores" and "Jagged Mountains" at the time of the cache's creation, has long been a penal colony for infidels. Although weather patterns make it less difficult of an environment than locations at similar latitudes (up to 81 degrees north), its average temperature is 12 degrees Centigrade in the summer and -7 degrees during the winter, and from October 26 through February 15 the sun never rises above the horizon. Its main industry is nuclear power generation, and only a small population (3,500 people), mostly ethnic Scandinavians and Russians, remains on the archipelago to work the plants. Since they are fully dependent on European sources for food, which has been withheld during rebellious periods in their history, Al-Waziri believes that the inhabitants may have stolen the grains to plant clandestine crops.

"They did not grasp the scope of what they were doing," he said. "These grains are starting to grow beyond Bab Al-Hamdu, throughout the archipelago, which leads us to believe that some grains might have been spread by birds. If that's the case, they may have already reached the mainland."

Analysis shows that most of the seeds growing in the wild are primitive stocks that have not been properly engineered. Their ability to thrive in cooler temperatures enables them to grow during the extensive Midnight Sun period. They not only grow well in high-CO2 environments, but even seem to consume carbon rather than sequester it.

Al-Waziri fears that their growth rate will overwhelm modern grains in short order. "If that does not happen, in'sh'allah, we will averted a disaster," he said. "But I am afraid because the grains do not appear to have been engineered with limited lifespans or generations. It is even possible that they were collected before such engineering was possible. I fear that they will eradicate our standard stocks of grains and other plants. Our people are not capable of digesting the grains that these plants produce."

"I call on the Scandinavian Prime Minister to investigate fully and impose the appropriate punishment for stealing on the guilty residents of Bab Al-Hamdu," he said. "And if they have caused an ecological catastrophe, they should be prosecuted for murder."

---

For the previous Future History post, click here.

Photo (from 2002, by the way) courtesy of Michael Haferkamp and licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. For details, visit the photo's documentation page.

Nice to see the big companies offering audiobooks online and in MP3 format.

ANN ARBOR, Mich., July 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Borders Audiobook Downloads -- a new audiobook download service -- debuts today on Borders.com, offering an initial 15,000 titles, including fiction and non-fiction bestsellers, classics, self-help and children's books, among other categories.... To introduce the service, beginning tomorrow July 15 and continuing through July 19, customers can download free of charge Jon Krakauer's "Into the Wild" in MP3 format. In addition, the 15 popular titles listed below are being offered at the discounted price of $9.95 through July 22.

-- "Lord of the Flies" by William Golding
-- "In Cold Blood" by Truman Capote
-- "Beloved" by Toni Morrison
-- "The Logic of Life" by Tim Harford
-- "Twilight" by Stephenie Meyer
-- "The Martian Chronicles" by Ray Bradbury
-- "The Snow Flower and the Secret Fan" by Lisa See
-- "The Eight" by Katherine Neville
-- "Fortress of Solitude" by Jonathan Lethem
-- "The Traveler" by John Twelve Hawks
-- "The Appeal" by John Grisham
-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams
-- "A Short History of Nearly Everything" by Bill Bryson
-- "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" by Barack Obama

Although this is targeted to youngish urban women, it's pretty funny for word-lovers of all sorts. The Daily Candy Lexicon -- words that don't exist, but should -- is now a book (order it here). You can get a flavor by reading a sample or the press release:

Are you a cereal monogamist? Annoyed your party was crashed by a nontourage? Proud to be a whor d'ouevre? Whether it's a group of surfers, bankers, or co-workers, every clique has its own dialect -- and now young urban women have one, too....

Dany Levy, founder and editor-in-chief of DailyCandy [says,] "Upon hearing the words, most will know exactly what the definitions are. After all, there's only one way to describe annoyingly loud cell phone conversations (yellular) or that older woman dressing way too flashy for her age (teenile)."

... Some examples include: drimming, a verb, meaning drunk instant-messaging; fabric-ation, a noun, is the involuntary impulse to lie when the salesgirl asks what size you are; lady business casual, an adverb, is when your hoo-ha is past due for a wax; post-modem, a noun, is the freak-out you experience when your Internet goes dead; gabbin pressure, a noun, is the sense of obligation to chat to the person next to you during a flight; snoopid, an adjective, means leaving an obvious trail when snooping through your mate's belongings; and SCUM, an acronym, is a Self-Centered Urban Male.

Remember Rich Hall's "Sniglets"? Different generation, same idea, still pretty funny.

I thought this was an interesting list: the recommendations don't come from literature professors, but from the all academic specializations: management, biomedical engineering, pediatric medicine, biomedical ethics, neurosurgery, communications, psychology, etc. I know some of the books, and they look like good recommendations.