FlashNews

Review of Flash Fiction Online

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Sat, 01 May 2010 14:15:00 +0000

Sam Tamaino at SFRevu has reviewed Flash Fiction Online's April 2010 issue available here. Other than taking offense at a New Jersey slam in one of the stories (no, he took it with good wit), he liked FFO's April foolery. By the way, Sam, the editor-in-chief of Flash Fiction Online is a NJ resident.

The April issue had stories by Daniel José Older, Caroline M. Yoachim, and Andrew Gudgel, plus a classic story and Bruce Holland Rogers' Short-Short Sighted column.

Sam also reviewed recent editions of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Apex Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, the first issue of Bull Spec, Greatest Uncommon Denominator (GUD), Jim Baen's Universe, Kaleidotrope, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Thanks, Sam.

20th Anniversary of Hubble

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:28:00 +0000

The Hubble Telescope had a rocky start, with its budget concerns in Congress and later need for contact lenses, but few regret the project now in view of the outstanding science that was a direct outcome of the space telescope. NASA is now celebrating 20 years of Hubble Telescope science. There, you'll find a small collection of the most outstanding images and videos in the Hubble gallery, along with a Hubble model, "greatest (science) hits," timeline, and a way to send messages to the Hubble team. At the Hubble site, you'll find a much larger collection of Hubble images as well as links to news and their expansive gallery.

If you're interested in the future of NASA science, here is the infrared Webb Telescope site.

Flash Fiction Online SF/Fantasy writers: surely one of the images linked to above will inspire a flash story for us. Get busy!

Ranking Literary Magazines

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:55:00 +0000

Lincoln Michel, book editor at The Faster Times, has compiled a nice, ranked list of literary magazines. I thought this would be of interest to Flash Fiction Online readers and authors. Our readers occasionally read something of more than 1000 words in length and our writers have been known to accidentally write a 1001-word or longer story and would like to find a home for it.

Mr. Michel warned that his list was not based on his personal taste in literary magazines, but on reputation. He said:

It is based on the reputation of journals as I’ve gleaned them and related factors like distribution, contributors, pay rates and awards (especially Perpetual Folly’s very helpful Pushcart Prize Ranking). What publications would most impress an agent or editor? What magazines routinely crop up in the acknowledgements of new collections?

Enjoy.

Amazon v. Print Publishers

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 19:28:00 +0000

We've covered the story of Amazon's battle with print publishers over e-Book pricing. The Christian Science Monitor has a concise summary of the strange number game behind this battle. In short, it's all about defining the market, for now, rather than profits. Here is a summary of the players'...shall I call it voodoo economics? Nah, that dredges up too many dead topics. Um, here is a summary of what the players want:

Amazon: dear Sirs and Madams: we'd like to buy your e-Books for $13 and sell them for $9.99. Thank you.

Dear Mr. Bezos: thank you for your concern. However, for your benefit, we prefer that you make a nice 30% fee for selling our e-Books. $18.50 sounds like a much nicer retail price.

Motives: Amazon is willing to lose money for now to set the buyers' expectations for low prices for e-Books and own the market. The publishers cringe at the effect that such a low price for e-Books will have on print book sells. Who's in charge here?

In another related article, I saw another motive: Amazon allegedly wants to take the "middle man" (publishers) out of the equation and deal directly with authors.

Flash Fiction For Sale

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 18:08:00 +0000

Out of curiosity, I did a search for "flash fiction" at a certain Humongous Online Bookstore and was surprised to find 116 titles, many with "Flash Fiction," "Very Short Fiction" or some such in the title. Some were alternate editions--older or e-Book editions--but a substantial number were unique. These included fiction collections and non-fiction (how to write flash fiction) books.

Only towards the very end of the list did I suspect that Humongous Online Bookstore was messing with me and would never declare the search at an end until I bought something. (No, War and Peace is not an extremely long flash story.)

Below are some of the titles. This isn't an endorsement. These appeared in the first page of the search. The first on the list is one of Flash Fiction Online editor Jake Freivald's favorites. (Okay, that sounded a little bit like an endorsement.)

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction: Tips from Editors, Teachers, and Writers in the Field by Tara L Masih
Flash Fiction Forward: 80 Very Short Stories by Robert Shapard and James Thomas
Fifty-One Flash Fiction Stories by Louise Michelle
Thieves and Scoundrels: Absolute XPress Flash Fiction Challenge #3 by Pete 'Patch' Alberti, Krista D. Ball, James Beamon, and Jodi Cleghorn
Nano-Flash Fiction for (Humongous Online Bookstore's famous e-Book reader) by James Dillingham
A Brief History of Fables: From Aesop to Flash Fiction (Brief Histories) by Lee Rourke
Oh Baby: Flash Fictions and Prose Poetry by Kim Chinquee
Six Sentences by Robert McEvily
The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories: Flash Fiction from Contemporary China by Shouhua Qi
....

Locus Awards Finalists for 2010

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 16:43:00 +0000

The 2010 Locus Awards finalists have been named, not surprisingly, at Locus Magazine. Here are the finalists in a partial list of the categories:

Short Story

"The Pelican Bar", Karen Joy Fowler (Eclipse Three)
"An Invocation of Incuriosity", Neil Gaiman (Songs of the Dying Earth)
"Spar", Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld 10/09)
"Going Deep", James Patrick Kelly (Asimov's 6/09)
"Useless Things", Maureen F. McHugh (Eclipse Three)

Science Fiction Novel

The Empress of Mars, Kage Baker (Subterranean; Tor)
Steal Across the Sky, Nancy Kress (Tor)
Boneshaker, Cherie Priest (Tor)
Galileo's Dream, Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperVoyager; Ballantine Spectra)
Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

Fantasy Novel

The City & The City, China Miéville (Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
Unseen Academicals, Terry Pratchett (Harper; Doubleday UK)
Drood, Dan Simmons (Little, Brown)
Palimpsest, Catherynne M. Valente (Bantam Spectra)
Finch, Jeff VanderMeer (Underland)

Other categories, including first novel, young-adult novel, novella, novelette, magazine, publisher, anthology, collection, editor, artist, non-fiction/art book, can be found here.

Neil Gaiman continues his string of awards, here with a short story. I've noticed that Nancy Kress is making many awards lists lately, too, here with a SF novel.

Can Video Games Be Art?

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:41:00 +0000

No. Sorry.

Well, that's what noted movie reviewer Roger Ebert says. Video games are scripted to have a story with alternate story lines and outcomes, so they have potential to be art, if any literature does. Video games also have visual components, so they have potential to be art, if any visual media does. And they have audio components....bad ones, usually, but they have them.

With all this pent-up potential brewing, why does Roger Ebert think they can never be art.

Here is Mr. Ebert's article, videos games can never be art in his column at his home stomping grounds, the Chicago Sun-Times.

It is not surprising that consideration about this is crippled a bit by the difficulty of defining art...you know it when you see it, but people see differently.

Mr. Ebert invited a thoughtful video designer, Ms. Kellee Santiago, to be the foil for this discussion...in fact, so that it can be a discussion rather than an edict. He provided a link to her 15-minuted video on video games, which was made prior to Ebert's stand on the matter. She provides three examples that she considers artful and compares the maturation of video games to the progression of cave drawings to art.

That's said, Ebert remains firm on the matter: a video game is a game and will never be art, but concedes that never is a long time:

"One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them."

How Writers and Artists Work

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:47:00 +0000

Here is short but amusing collection of tidbits: a graphical image from Lapham's Quarterly, showing where and how some well-known writers and artists work. There are only a few noted, so I'll mention one:

Edith Wharton wrote in bed until noon, tossing her pages on the floor for a secretary to pick up and transcribe.

For the rest go here to learn how writers and artists work.

British Science Fiction Association Awards 2009

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 23:33:00 +0000

Sidenote: the April 2010 edition of Flash Fiction Online is now online with an unusual collection of stories by Jonathan vos Post, Tom Crosshill and John Wiswell.

The British Science Fiction Association (BSWA) has announced winners of the BSWA Awards for 2009. The honorees include the following for the best:

Novel: The City and the City by China Miéville
Short Fiction: "The Beloved Time of Their Lives" by Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia
Best Non-Fiction: Mutant Popcorn, by Nick Lowe
Best Artwork: cover of "Desolation Road" by Stephen Martiniere

Bonus: the venerable industry publication, Publishers Weekly, has been sold. Its former owner, Reed Business Info, has been shedding its publishing properties.

Review of Flash Fiction Online

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 13:20:00 +0000

Sam Tomaino at SFRevu has generously reviewed the March issue of Flash Fiction Online in his Zines, Magazines, and Short Fiction Review column. The March issue of FFO has stories by Daniel José Older, Caroline M. Yoachim, and Andrew Gudgel, plus a classic story and Bruce Holland Rogers' Short-Short Sighted column.

You can find the March issue of Flash Fiction Online here: before/after the April issue is published. Daniel José Older's "Midnight Mambo" seemed to be Sam's front runner,

Sam has also reviewed other magazines, including Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Apex Magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction, Interzone, Night Chills, Nth Zine, and Space and Time.

Weird Book Titles, The 2009 Diagram Prize

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 21:23:00 +0000

Here's another weird book title contest from The Bookseller, the 2009 Diagram Prize. No doubt there are some tech and academic titles that would rival these winners, but these are decently odd.

The winner is Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes, by Daina Taimina. To me, this isn't all that odd. I have a knitwit friend who's interested in similar knitting activities. If you do a Google/Yahoo!/Bing search for "mathematical knitting," you'll find quite a few mathematicians and craftspeople interested in designing mathematical patterns for knitting projects. I offer the following 'proof': if you follow the provided link to the winner, you'll see that she's an adjunct at Cornell, a lofty institution.

Some of the contenders include:

What Kind of Bean is this Chihuahua?
Collectible Spoons of the Third Reich
Afterthoughts of a Worm Hunter
Governing Lethal Behavior in Autonomous Robots [SF editorial: not weird at all]

To see more, including the authors of the contender, go to the article.

Bram Stoker Awards for 2009

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:45:00 +0000

The Horror Writer's Association has announced the winners for the 2oo9 Bram Stoker Awards. For 'superior achievement' in :

a novel: Audrey's Door, by Sarah Langan (Harper)
a first novel: Damnable , by Hank Schwaeble (Jove)
long fiction: The Lucid Dreaming, by Lisa Morton (Bad Moon Books)
short fiction: “In the Porches of My Ears,” by Norman Prentiss (Postscripts #18)
an anthology: He is Legend,  edited by Christopher Conlon (Gauntlet Press)
a collection: A Taste of Tenderloin, by Gene O’Neill (Apex Book Company)
nonfiction: Writers Workshop of Horror, by Michael Knost (Woodland Press)
poetry: Chimeric Machines, by Lucy A. Snyder (Creative Guy Publishing)

Tiptree Award Winners--2009

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 18:51:00 +0000

The Tiptree Award winners have been announced. If you're not familiar with the story behind this prestigious award, here is a synopsis: the award is for science fiction and fantasy works that are "thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating." It was inspired by the discussions about gender writing that arose by the revelation that James Tiptree, Jr. was a pen name for a female writer, Alice B. Sheldon. (See the Tiptree Award winners and What is the Tiptree Award? at the award site.)

The 2009 winners are:

Greer Gilman, Cloud and Ashes: Three Winter's Tales, Small Beer Press: "a dense, poetic, impressionistic book"
Fumi Yoshinaga, Ooku: The Inner Chambers, volumes 1 & 2, VIZ Media: the jury worried about its lack of experience with manga, but chose the story as a winner. Its premise is that 3/4s of Japanese men were killed by a plague, so the shogun and daimo are women. "Through-out the two books, Yoshinaga explores the way the deep gendering of this society is both maintained and challenged by the alteration in ratios."

Found: Black Angel

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:59:00 +0000

If you're at least 38 years old, you may remember a short film that was shown jointly with the theatrical release of The Empire Strikes Back in 1980. (I'm way past old enough, but have no recollection of that year at all.) The short film was Black Angel, produced with gift money of £25,000 from George Lucas for his appreciation of the art direction provided by Roger Christian in Star Wars.

Mr. Christian used the money to produce a moody, mystical fantasy art film set in the middle ages. The film was lost for many years following an illness suffered by Mr. Christian, but nevertheless was quite influential to filmmakers. Fortunately, a half-inch print of the film has been found. ShadowLocked has an excellent and exclusive interview with Black Shadow director Roger Christian. In the article containing the interview, you'll find stills from the film and conversation about its making and history.

An interesting quote from the interview:

"Cinema has changed so much, and I bless Peter Jackson [director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy], because he gave the world what it didn't know it wanted, and brought this kind of fantasy world into huge mainstream cinema, finally. And did it so beautifully."

Oscar Awards and Speculative Fiction

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:54:00 +0000

The Oscar winners have been announced. Here is the official list of the nominees and winners of the 82nd Academy Awards.

Speculative fiction films made a showing. Avatar scored well, winning art direction, cinematography and visual effects. But James Cameron and company, with so many other nominations, was vexed nearly every step of the way by The Hurt Locker: directing, film editing, best picture, sound editing and sound mixing. Maybe the billions in ticket sales will take the sting out of this for Cameron. Avatar eclipsed the previous ticket sales leader, Titanic, but that's his film, too. (I won't even mention Aliens and The Terminator.)

The other major speculative film win was Up with animated feature film.

Physicist: Watch Your Quantum Step, Writers

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:06:00 +0000

By way of The End of the Universe: a physicist, Sidney Perkowitz, a professor of physics at Emory University, prayerfully suggests that writers, especially screenwriters, violate physics no more than once per script. Dude, are we supposed to FTL ourselves to a distant galaxy and then use picks, shovels and Winchesters to kick out the space aliens there? Oh...we are. Okay, noted.

Especially egregious and offensive was Angels and Demons, according to this related Guardian (UK) article:

"The amount of antimatter they had [to blow the Vatican to Kingdom Come] was more than we will make in a million years of running a high-energy particle collider," said Perkowitz. "You can't contain it using an iPod battery."

That offends even me. They could've used flashlight batteries or a car battery. Sheesh. (And I like Tom Hanks, but isn't there someone else to play professorial adventurers (who is not Sean Connery)?)

Seriously, folks, I like mundane SF (another term badly needed), which doesn't violate any present laws of physics. Those stories are closer to home and have more realistic protags and bad guys, rather than the Gothic figures we're grown accustomed to. But I liked Angels and Demons and Avatar, too, even though my BS meter pegged the red zone several times in each.

A humble suggestion to Professor Perkowitz: watch a few adventure movies. It is not uncommon to see someone leap from a roof down a couple of stories and manage to grab onto a ledge, or leap from speeding car roof to speeding car roof...etc. Don't get me started on video games....

Trekkie-Zombie Mashup

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 17:43:00 +0000

We interrupt this post for an important announcement: The March 2010 issue of Flash Fiction Online is, well, online. It has three new, excellent stories by Daniel José Older, Caroline M. Yoachim and Andrew Gudgel, plus a classic story, and Bruce Holland Rogers' Short-Short Sighted monthly column.

Now back to our regular posting:

Yikes. Kevin David Anderson has contracted to write a Trekkie/Zombie apocalypse mashup, called Night of the Living Trekkies. Will Mr. Anderson be able to safely attend a Trekkie convention after this? He has published widely in magazines, anthologies and podcasts. My apologies for my earlier misreporting of the actual author of this work. Good luck with this project.

Die hard and prosper, dead Trekkies!

Author Barry Hannah RIP

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:25:00 +0000

I had the good fortune of meeting Barry Hannah a few times when he was teaching at Clemson University. I then managed to get a signed copy of his first novel Geronimo Rex, which he had just published. He was a Faulkner-styled Southern Gothic writer with quite a gift for short fiction. Geronimo Rex was a National Book Award nominee and William Faulkner Prize winner; his short fiction collections netted him the PEN/Malamud Award.

Here is an oft-quoted bit from the 1972 New York Times review of Geronimo Rex, the review written by writer Jim Harrison of Legends of the Fall fame. Harrison said that Hannah was a writer

“brilliantly drunk with words [who] could at gunpoint write a life story of a telephone pole.”

This quote was in each of several articles I read about Barry Hannah's death, including the excellent one in Vanity Fair. Hannah struggled with cancer and drinking, the former one finally winning.

Review of Flash Fiction Online

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Sam Tomaino at SFRevu has a review of the Feb. 2010 edition of Flash Fiction Online. This month, he seemed to favor "Six Reasons Why My Sister Hates Me":

The narrator of Aimee C. Amodio's story details "Six Reasons Why My Sister Hates Me" and helps draw a picture of their relationship and the world they live in. It was quite good.

You can see this edition of FFO here.

Sam also reviews Abyss & Apex, Apex Magazine, Black Static, Jim Baen's Universe (penultimate issue), Outer Reaches, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Flash Fiction in the Market

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 16:46:00 +0000

Duotrope.com is a great place to research fiction publications of interest to you. You may find many publications of which you were unaware. Duotrope's fiction home/search page has a database of about 2825 publications at present. You can search with various filters, such as genre, theme, length, media, pay scale and others.

I decided to search the database for various genres, with the length set to flash. The result is shown in the table below. Adding up the various genres may not be useful since many publications publish multiple genres. This doesn't guarantee that all publications found have ever or ever will publish flash fiction, but at least they are not officially opposed to it.

Flash Fiction Publications by Genre

All genres	1158
Mainstream	382
Experimental	267
Fantasy	176
Science Fiction	169
Horror	162
Magical Realism/Surrealism	123
Cross Genre/Slipstream	119
Mystery	57
Crime/Suspense	40
Action/Adventure	30
Erotica	23
Romance	16
Western	9

Nebula, Stoker and Saturn Ballots/Awards

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 16:38:00 +0000

The writing awards season has begun with three prestigious ballots or awards:

The Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) has named their short list for the 2009 Nebula Awards. Their categories include short story, novel, novelette, novella, the Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation, and the Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy. John Scalzi has two nominations, for the novella and young adult science fiction and fantasy categories.

The Horror Writers Association (HWA) has announced their ballot for the 2009 Stoker Award nominees. They include categories for superior achievement in a novel, first novel, long fiction, short fiction, anthology, collection, nonfiction and poetry.

The Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Films (Academy) has announced their finalists for the 35th annual Saturn Awards. Here are the Saturn Award nominations and the Saturn Award winners (link will eventually change). The Dark Knight won five awards. Iron Man won the best science fiction film. This award has numerous categories, including films, directors, writers, actors, music and others.

Jay Lake's Novel-Publishing Time Line

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 18:58:00 +0000

By way of PW's Genreville blog is writing machine Jay Lake's novel publishing time line, from his perspective and the publisher's perspective.

I have a problem with this Jay:

Months 1-2 — I draft a book.
Months 3-4 — I redraft the book.

We're talking a full-length novel, right? Not a flash novel? Here's my time line:

Months 1-2: It were a dork and starmy night.
Months 3-4: It was a dark and stormy night.
Months 5-6: Try to come up with an idea....

I also have a problem with this:

Month 11 — Agent issues acceptance check to me, less commission.

What agent? Sigh.

Jay illustrates well why it takes so long for a novel to go from the first peck on the Royal to a bookseller putting the book on the wrong shelf. He also explains why he doesn't self-publish, even though some argue that he could make more money going that path. It's a good read.

Go here to see Jay Lake's Flash Fiction Online story.

Bonus via Kathy: British UFOs! (CNN covered it but The Guardian didn't. Hmmm.)

Another Death Knell To FTL Space Travel?

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:53:00 +0000

According to this The Register article, faster-than-light travel has another obstacle besides relativity: the lowly hydrogen atom. Since that article is quite brief, this post will be all the more brief. As a craft approaches light speed, it compresses what would ordinarily be the sparse hydrogen in space, resulting in incredibly high voltages...more than 1000 times the lethal dose of ionizing radiation. (That's bad.) As the author points out, they'll think of something. SF authors will, for sure.

Cultural Shift? Plagiarism vs. Remixing

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:26:00 +0000

Here is an interesting story about a 17-year-old uber-author in Germany who is successful while withstanding a charge of plagiarism...but she calls it mixing.

Some background: (re)mixing has many contexts. In music, it is the mixing of sound tracts into an alternative form of the work. In literature, the most obvious meaning is that used in the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license, in which others may "remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms." A publisher of one of Yours Truly's stories used the non-commercial form of this license for their anthology.

According to this NYT story, 17-year-old German author Helene Hegemann has a staged play and a script for a theatrically distributed movie to her credit, and now a well-selling novel (5th in Spiegel's best-seller list). However, someone pointed out that pieces of her novel, sometimes page-length) were lifted with little change from other works. Naturally a controversy arose. But even an important literary prize staff has overlooked this problem with her work and are still considering it. They apparently felt that the story was new and important enough, even with the copied passages, to justify continued consideration. The author says she did not plagiarize. She mixed. This is what people do now in the world of the always-connected Internet.

Is she right? Has the standard of plagiarism irrevocably changed or shifted?

For more on this story, see the NYT article, entitled, "Author, 17, Says It's 'Mixing,' Not Plagiarism."

Take a Black Hole Tour

noreply@blogger.com (William Highsmith) — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 18:33:00 +0000

Science fiction writers for various media like black holes. They solve many story issues (while creating some thorny theoretical ones). If you enjoy reading or writing such inventions, you might appreciate this post.

By way of SlashDot, New Scientist is reporting a simulation published in the American Journal of Physics of what the sky would look like if you entered a black hole. (Warning: do not try this at home; serious bodily injury may result from approaching or falling into a black hole.) The simulation uses actual star data (100,000+ stars). The authors of the American Journal of Physics article (and apparently of the simulation) are Thomas Müller and Daniel Weiskopf at the University of Stuttgart (Universität Stuttgart).

The short New Scientist article includes a video of a simulation run (and then gives options for other related videos). If you are more adventurous or interested, you can download the simulation and simulation data files and run/tweak it yourself. They have a Windows executable and Linux source files.

Here is the New Scientist article and video about a black hole simulator that uses star data. Here is the University of Stuttgart black hole simulator for Windows and Linux.

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