The Hugo Award nominations are now open; attendees at last year's World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne or next year's in Reno are eligible to nominate. I usually wait until the annual Locus List of notable publications to help me make my choices and jog my memory, but in case you're wondering, yes, indeed, I do have some items eligible for this year's ballot:
* Novel: For the Win (Tor, 2010)
* Novella: Chicken Little (Gateways, edited by Jim Frenkel, Tor, 2010)
* Novella: Epoch (published in With a Little Help, Sweet Home Grindstone press, 2010)
* Novella: There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow Now is the Best Time of Your Life (published in Godlike Machines, edited by Jonathan Strahan, Science Fiction Book Club, 2010)
* Short story: The Jammie Dodgers and the Adventure of the Leicester Square Screening, (Shareable.net, 2010)
* Short story: Ghosts in My Head (Subterranean Press, 2010)
Canadians: Now that summer's over, it's your last chance to select your favorite young adult reads in Indigo's summerlong Teen Read Awards. They're soliciting Canadians' daily votes for great books for teens to read, as part of a longer and larger promotion of teen reading and literacy. I'm honored to note that my latest young adult novel For the Win is in the final heat!
A quick reminder: Canadian teens have one month left to vote for their favourite YA novels in Chapters/Indigo's Best Canadian Reads series. You can vote every day, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that my latest novel, For the Win, is eligible for your vote!
I'm incredibly gratified to see Canada's largest bookseller putting such a sustained, high-profile effort into promoting YA reading and YA literature. Please participate and show your support!
Reminder for Londoners! I'm doing a live event tonight at 7PM with China Mieville in Exmouth Market (EC1R 4QE), through the excellent Clerkenwell Tales bookstore. We've outgrown the store, so Pete, our host, has booked the Church of the Redeemer next door; but we're nearly full there, too! If you'd like to come, RSVP (quickly!) to info@clerkenwell-tales.co.uk or tweet @booksellerpete. We'll be emceed by the wonderful Rob Sharp of English PEN.
Here's some video of interviews I did with Nick Gillespie from Reason Magazine and Reason TV after my talk at Public Knowledge in DC last
month. We talk about For the Win and how technology and kids and society interrelate.
John Clute's smashing review of For the Win in the latest Strange Horizons compares the book (and me) to Heinlein in his heyday. Color me delighted!
There are a lot of MMORPG battles in the first half of the book, and a lot of lessons—much more interesting —about gameworld economies, and gold farming, and derivatives, in the second. The climax of the tale is double: an at times kinetically arousing narrative of the joining of the oppressed of the world and gameworlds in worldwide strike actions; and a neat narrative—infodumps hanging into the page whenever necessary — explaining how the greedy corporations of the world have been lured into a ponzi scheme engineered by members of our extremely clever crew, and how these corporations are forced into a humiliating climb-down at the very end: in the line of SF created by Heinlein, proper mousetraps trap proper mice: period.
Doctorow doesn't write a bad sentence; he doesn't even ever write a sentence you have to read twice. You can feel story pounding through the arteries of For the Win
Canada's Indigo/Chapters books have launched a summerlong teen literacy promotion that invites readers to pick their favorite books and vote for them in a nationwide poll (you can vote every day, so no need to pick just one!). I'm delighted to learn that my latest YA novel, For the Win, is one of the titles featured. If you liked FTW (or any other recent teen novel), I hope you'll stop in at Teen Read Awards and cast your vote!
Hey DC! Tor Books is bringing me to your area for the American Library Association conference this coming weekend, and while I'm in town, I've signed on to do a couple of public events I hope to see you at!
Here's the full audio from the Cover to Cover, Open Book interview I did with Berkeley's KPFA. The edited, 29-minute version that aired doesn't stay online thanks to "bullying" with the SoundExchange rights-society, but Eric Klein, who conducted the interview, was kind enough to upload the whole thing.
Here's part 2 of the interview I conducted in Second Life with the Copper Robot show. In this part, I talk about the research that went into For the Win.
“For anyone who’s my age and uses computers, you would have to undertake an extraordinary effort not to be a gamer,” he said. He started computer games at age 8, when a neighbor got Pong, and they became obsessed with the game.
“We think you’ve got to be somebody who spends 70 hours a week playing World of Warcraft in order to call yourself a gamer,” Cory said. However, that’s not true, he said. Likewise, most people think of gamers as either being children or overgrown children, but 50% of FarmVille players are 50-year-old women with high school diplomas, Doctorow said.
Doctorow isn’t afraid of taking on big ideas and difficult themes. Here he mixes online gaming, trades union politics and economics in a realistic near-contemporary setting. In lesser hands, this might make for a dull read, but Doctorow is a fine stylist. In For the Win he has produced an exhilarating, unputdownable novel that’s likely to be nominated for the genre’s top awards.
