Arc 1.3

Sumit Paul-Choudhury

Arc

About this ebook

Futures and fiction from the makers of New Scientist.

Welcome to Arc"s afterparty: Neal Stephenson brings us to our feet; Broadway producer David Binder takes us to the new festival; Justin Pickard and Simon Ings find rough pleasure in the streets; Sumit Paul-Choudhury gets us onto the guest list for the singularity disco; and Christina Agapakis shows off her garden of biohacked delights.

And this issue's original fiction edges us even closer to the future. Open-source celebrities run amok in Lavie Tidhar"s Changing Faces; smash-and-grab shoppers run amock in Tim Maughan"s Limited Edition. David Gullen"s tale of second-place spacefarers, All Your Futures, wryly celebrates humanity"s Outward Urge, while Nan Craig"s Scrapmetal drops a cyborg killing machine into Port Talbot.

Each quarter, Arc explores the future through cutting-edge science fiction and forward-looking essays by some of the world’s most celebrated authors, alongside columns by thinkers and practitioners from the worlds of books, design, gaming, film and more.

Ratings and reviews

Wow, good job New Scientist. Send people here claiming that they can get an issue free and yet I got charged for the issue. Unfortunately for you I find that behavior disgusting. I had renewed my New Scientist subscription for 3 years and have just cancelled it. Putting in credit card details may be a requirement for Google and not New Scientist but getting charged is your fault because you put it for sale on here at a price.

If you want to see a truly 'free' book entry on Play, do a search for Treasure Island. The free book will not have a FREE icon to initiate the download, it has an OPEN icon. When you click on it you get a READ icon, which takes you to the reader app, and downloads the book. However, if you search on 'free book' you also get a lot of 1st edition periodicals like Arc.... Guess what, they too want a £0.00 credit card payment. This is easing you into paying in future, they're making it easier for you to mistakenly hit the subscribe button without hitting you with the payment authorisation. Just be careful next marketing email.

It's a very great shame that NS has lowered itself to being a tool for google to collect credit card details. And shame on google for requiring first time visitors (and potential repeat visitors) to surrender their details for even the free books. Surely giving away freebies is a way to get return visits. If returners come to buy THEN take card details, but being so insistant for those first free-books (that tempt visitors to start) is pointless, annoying, unnecessary, and mind-lessly counter productive for each freebie seeker who therefore won't be enticed to return. Sad for NS that this is the case, but shame on google, for being silly as well as irritatingly exposing how keen they are for money (over service)