News
Woohoo! I’m on the Locus Award ballot — twice! Once for Best Novella for my story After the Siege and again for Best Collection for my book Overclocked. Thanks to everyone who voted for me!
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My next novel, Little Brother, is coming out in a couple weeks — it’s a young adult novel about hackers who use technology to challenge authority. The folks from Instructables saw an early copy of the book and were really inspired by all the ingenuity demonstrated by the book’s heroes, so they’ve made a series of HOWTOs in the voice of M1k3y, the techno-guerrilla who tells the story in Little Brother.
The first one has just gone live: Photo-Emulsion Screen Printing, a HOWTO for making t-shirts for your movement’s wardrobe needs.
The general idea: After stretching fine-mesh cloth over a wooden frame, you spread a thin layer of photosensitive emulsion on the screen and let it dry. You then take a black image on transparent or translucent surface, place it against the screen, and then expose the screen to light. The light causes the emulsion to harden and bind to the fabric. Where the light strikes the screen, the emulsion will bind, making a solid layer. Where the light is blocked (ie where your black image is placed) the emulsion remains water-soluble. After exposing the screen, you spray down the screen with water, washing off the emulsion only where your image was placed; this clear area is where ink will be pressed through the screen when you print. Finally, you lay the screen on your t-shirt, other fabric, or paper, spread ink on the inside of the screen, and press the ink through the screen. If you use textile ink, you can heat-set the ink after it dries, and it’ll be permanent and washable.
Link, Link to RSS feed for Little Brother Instructables
The Toronto Public Library system is just kicking off a gigantic, ambitious speculative reading series that starts next Monday with Michael Skeet hosting a panel discussion with Karl Schroeder, James Alan Gardner and Peter Watts on the pursuit of foresight in Canadian science fiction.
On May 1, Toronto Public Library be launching my next novel, Little Brother, at an event at the Merril Collection, the astounding public science fiction reference library. Books will be on sale through BakkaPhoenix books, and they’re taking pre-orders for signed/inscribed copies of the book to be mailed out to you (CDN$19.95 for the book, plus $9 and GST for shipping in Canada, $15 to the US, $20 to Europe, and $25 to the rest of the world). BakkaPhoenix: 416 963 9993, inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com
(Patient US readers who don’t mind waiting until the end of May for their signed, inscribed copies can request them from San Francisco’s Borderlands Books, who are not charging for domestic shipping. Borderlands: 888.893.4008, webmail@borderlands-books.com.)
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The Starry Rift, a new anthology of kids-oriented science fiction, comes out today. It’s edited by Jonathan Strahan, and includes fiction by Neil Gaiman, Steven Baxter, Greg Egan, Jeffrey Ford, Gwyneth Jones, Kathleen Goonan, Ian McDonald, Kelly Link, Scott Westerfeld, Garth Nix, Walter Jon Williams and others — including me (with my story Anda’s Game).
The editor, Jonathan Strahan, did a fantastic job in pulling this together, and it couldn’t come at a better time. Kids’ literature is peaking right now, and a high-quality anthology that introduces young people to authors they can plunge into for books and books and books is a timely and great idea.
Jonathan’s giving away five copies of The Starry Rift to the first five young readers who write to him and name the last sf novel they loved and why.
Link, Buy it on Amazon
The German magazine Spex just published an interview with me, conducted while I was there in February touring with the German edition of Eastern Standard Tribe.
Jede technologische Entwicklung in der Geschichte der Menschheit hat Gewinner und Verlierer produziert. Als es noch keine Radios und Grammophone gab, war für einen Künstler Charisma, die Bühnenpräsenz, das Wichtigste – die Eigenschaft, die ihn erfolgreich werden ließ. Radio und Schallplatte relativierten die Wichtigkeit der charismatischen Bühnenpersönlichkeit, wichtiger wurde die Virtuosität im Studio – die Fähigkeit, seine Stimme oder sein Instrument im Moment der Aufnahme perfekt zu beherrschen! Es gefiel einer Menge Künstler nicht, dass sie ein Produkt einspielten, eine Konserve, die anschließend jemand anders dem Publikum lieferte – diese Künstler mussten sich bald neue Jobs suchen… Wer sich als Autor zu fein ist, Lesungen zu geben, Vorträge zu halten und für Magazine zu schreiben, hat in der heutigen Zeit verloren. Technologie tut Gutes und Böses, und die Frage ist nicht, ob die Helden und Gewinner von Gestern die Helden und Gewinner von Morgen sein werden. Die wichtige Frage ist vielmehr: Wird einer größeren Anzahl von Menschen die Möglichkeit gegeben, an Bildung und Kultur teilzuhaben?
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The finalists for Canada’s Aurora Awards for the best science fiction of the year have been announced, and I’m delighted to note that Tesseracts Eleven, the anthology I co-edited with Holly Phillips, is a finalist for Best Work in English (Other)!
Best Long-Form Work in English:
As Fate Decrees by Denysé Bridger (published by EDGE Publishing)
New Moon’s Arms by Nalo Hopkinson (Grand Central Publishing)
The Moon Under Her Feet by Derwin Mak (Windstorm Creative)
Rollback by Robert J. Sawyer (Tor/Analog)
Cry Wolf by Edo van Belkom (McClelland & Stewart)
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See also: Tesseracts 11 Canadian sf anthology launch in Toronto this Sat
I’m featured in the April 1 ish of Locus Magazine:
In a widely anticipated move, blogger and sf writer Cory Doctorow today announced that he is making himself available for download under a Creative Commons license. The download, which will be available from midnight on Tuesday, will be for a wide range of non-DRM platforms.
In a webchat announcing the plans, Doctorow downplayed suggestions that the download would reduce demand for people wanting to meet him in person: “My bet is that the Ubiquitous Cory will be the best promotional tool I’ve ever had.”
The downloaded Doctorow also includes a laptop, MP3 player, and a range of eight Copyfight/EFF T-shirts.
Link
My latest Thinkernet column is live: “The Pleasures of Uninterrupted Communication,” about the difference between technologies that let us do a lot of things at once and those that interrupt us over and over again:
The mature information worker is someone who can manage his queues effectively, prioritizing and re-prioritizing as new items crop up, doing the fast-context-switching necessary to respond to an email while waiting for a file to download or a backup to complete. It’s a little like spinning plates, and when you get the rhythm of it, it can be glorious. There’s a zone you slip into, a zone where everything gets done, one thing after another clicking into place.
But once you add an interruptive medium like IM, unscheduled calls, or pop-up notifiers of mail, flow turns into chop. The buzz, blip, and snap of a thousand alerts turn plate-spinning into hell, as random firecrackers detonate over and over again, on every side of you, always there in your peripheral vision, blowing your capacity to manage your own queue as they rudely insert themselves into your attention.
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I’m one of the guests of honor at this summer’s Pi Con, the annual science fiction convention held Aug 22-24 in West Springfield, MA, appearing alongside of Randall Munroe, the creator of the brilliant geek webcomic XKCD. I’m really looking forward to this — I’ve never met Randall and I’m an ardent admirer of his work. Discount registration is open until May 31.
This year Pi-Con, the convention located in the belly button of the universe (or more specifically, The Pioneer Valley) is lucky enough to have both Cory Doctorow and Randall Munroe as guests of honor.
Pi-Con has a lot to offer. We have a gaming (both table top and electronic), panels of all types (including virtual and pool panels) and flavors (from hard science to gaming, web comics to polyamory, and quite possibly everything in between), and vendors to fit all your geeky needs.
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DailyLit, the excellent free ebook-by-email service, has been putting a ton of my Creative Commons-licensed works online. DailyLit lets you subscribe to receive books in small, quickly-readable chunks every day. They started with my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and now they’ve got all my novels and short story collections and a couple of my uncollected stories, too!
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