News

Speaking tonight in Seattle

Reminder: I’m speaking tonight at the University Bookstore in Seattle as part of the Clarion West reading series — hope to see you there!

Where: University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE in Seattle.
When: Jul 8 2008, 7PM

Link, Link to Clarion West events calendar

Reading in Seattle this Tuesday

I’m giving a public reading and talk in Seattle this Tuesday as part of the excellent Clarion West reading series, through which all six instructors do free appearances (you can meet the Clarion West students at these, too!). There’s also a public party on Friday.

Where: University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE in Seattle
When: Tuesday, July 8, 7PM

Link

Futuristic Tales, nationwide!

I just got word from IDW, the publishers of my graphic novel Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (which collects six of my short stories, adapted for comics by a team of talented writers and artists), that Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million have both taken very large orders of the hardcover, every copy of which is signed and numbered (yes, I signed thousands and thousands of tip-in sheets, by hand, until I thought my arm would fall off). They’re available online, of course, but practically every BN and BAM store nationwide is bound to have them. The book has also seen great orders from independents across the nation — and, of course, it’s available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download.

Futuristic Tales on BN.com,

Futuristic Tales at Books-a-Million,

Futuristic Tales at independent booksellers near you,

Download Futuristic Tales for free!

Locus column: Nature’s Daredevils: Writing for Young Audiences

Locus Magazine’s just published my latest column, “Nature’s Daredevils: Writing for Young Audiences,” written in honor of their special young adult publishing issue — in it, I examine the lessons I’ve learned in writing my first YA book, Little Brother:

Genre YA fiction has an army of promoters outside of the field: teachers, librarians, and specialist booksellers are keenly aware of the difference the right book can make to the right kid at the right time, and they spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to convince kids to try out a book. Kids are naturals for this, since they really use books as markers of their social identity, so that good books sweep through their social circles like chickenpox epidemics, infecting their language and outlook on life. That’s one of the most wonderful things about writing for younger audiences — it matters. We all read for entertainment, no matter how old we are, but kids also read to find out how the world works. They pay keen attention, they argue back. There’s a consequentiality to writing for young people that makes it immensely satisfying. You see it when you run into them in person and find out that there are kids who read your book, googled every aspect of it, figured out how to replicate the best bits, and have turned your story into a hobby. We wring our hands a lot about the greying of SF, with good reason. Just have a look around at your regional con, the one you’ve been going to since you were a teenager, and count how many teenagers are there now. And yet, young people are reading in larger numbers than they have in recent memory. Part of that is surely down to Harry Potter, but on this tour, I’ve discovered that there’s a legion of unsung heroes of the kids-lit revolution.

Link

Guardian column: Warning to copyright enforcers: Three strikes and you’re out

My latest Guardian column is up: “Warning to copyright enforcers: Three strikes and you’re out” argues that if the entertainment industry wants the right to disconnect accused infringers after three accusations, then they should be prepared to have their corporate Internet access terminated if they make three false accusations. Thanks to Kevin Marks for the idea!

The internet is only that wire that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press in a single connection. It’s only
vital to the livelihood, social lives, health, civic engagement, education and leisure of hundreds of millions of people (and growing every day).

This trivial bit of kit is so unimportant that it’s only natural that we equip the companies that brought us Police Academy 11, Windows Vista, Milli Vanilli and Celebrity Dancing With the Stars with wire-cutters that allow them to disconnect anyone in the country on their own say-so, without proving a solitary act of wrongdoing.

But if that magic wire is indeed so trivial, they won’t mind if we hold them to the same standard, right?

Link

After the Siege wins the Locus Award!

Last night, Locus Magazine held its annual Locus Awards Ceremony in Seattle, the winners include several of my favorite books of the year — and my novella, “After the Siege” — which was collected in my short story collection Overclocked and adapted for comics in my new collection Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now“. (The story’s first publication was in the Russian magazine Esli, and the translation is also downloadable).

Many thanks to all who voted for this story, to Eileen Gunn for publishing the story and accepting the award on my behalf, and especially to my grandmother, Valentina Rachman, for sharing her stories of life as a child-soldier in the civil defense corps during the Siege of Leningrad.

SF NOVEL
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

FANTASY NOVEL
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK
Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

FIRST NOVEL
Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz)

NOVELLA
“After the Siege”, Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007)

NOVELETTE
“The Witch’s Headstone”, Neil Gaiman (Wizards)

SHORT STORY
“A Small Room in Koboldtown”, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Apr/May 2007)

COLLECTION
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Connie Willis (Subterranean)

ANTHOLOGY
The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos)

NON-FICTION
Breakfast in the Ruins, Barry N. Malzberg (Baen)

ART BOOK
The Arrival, Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic)

EDITOR
Ellen Datlow

MAGAZINE
F&SF

PUBLISHER
Tor

ARTIST
Charles Vess

Link

Interview with Chicago Red Eye

Last month while on my Little Brother book-tour, I sat down for an interview in Chicago with Elliott Serrano from the Chicago Red-Eye.

MP3 Link

Over-surveillance makes it harder to fight crime

My latest Guardian column “Surveillance: You can know too much,” explains how collecting too much information on innocent people makes it harder to catch guilty ones:

At a certain point, data gathered to predict the weather overwhelms your capacity to add it to your calculations efficiently, resulting in ever-longer runtimes that give less accurate predictions. It’s better to crunch the data needed to calculate tomorrow’s weather in 10 minutes (and refine your guess twice an hour) than to shovel so much data into the hopper that you don’t get tomorrow’s forecast until next week.

The sweet spot lies somewhere between gathering too much information and gathering too little – and the secret to hitting that spot is intelligent, discriminating data-acquisition.

Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you’ll get so much information that you’ll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.

Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.

Link

My new graphic novel as a free, remixable download and in stores!

IDW have just published the collected issues of “Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now,” a six-edition series of comics adapted from my short stories by an incredibly talented crew of writers, artists, inkers and letterers (and I do mean incredible: Dara Naraghi, Esteve Polls, Sam Keith, Robert Studio, J.C. Vaughn, Daniel Warner, Scott Morse, Paul McCaffrey, Paul Pope, Dan Taylor, Dustin Evans,
Ben Templesmith, Erich Owens, Ashley Wood, James Anthony Kuhoric, Guiu Vilanova, German Torres, Danny Parsons, Robbie Robbins, Neil Uyetake, Chris Mowry, and Amauri Osorio).

As with all of my books, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, meaning you can copy it, share it, remix it and play with it, provided it’s on a non-commercial basis. I’ve uploaded the full book in high resolution as a PDF and CBR file to the Internet Archive, for your downloading pleasure.

Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories “Craphound,” “Anda’s Game,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “After the Siege,” “I, Robot” and “Nimby and the D-Hoppers.”

Have at it!

Link to “Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now” on Amazon,
Link to free downloads of “Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now”

Guest of Honour at SweCon, Sweden, next weekend

Reminder: I’ll be the guest of honour at the Swedish national science fiction convention, SweCon, in Linköping, Sweden, next weekend! Hope to see you there:

Swecon 2008 - ConFuse 2008
The Swedish National
Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention 2008
Guest of Honour
Cory Doctorow

Date: 13-15 June 2008
Venue: Ryds Herrgård, Linköping, Sweden

Link

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