This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007
Salon
Best American Short Stories, Michael Chabon, ed, 2005
Podcast read by Alice Taylor of Wonderland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
This is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two — netting them about $0.02 an hour — but this is a very different proposition indeed.
There are a lot of firsts in this story:
- It’s the first story I’ve written since moving to the UK, and the story is told from the point of view of an English girl
- It’s the first in a series of stories I’m writing that riff on the titles of famous SF novels and stories (this one is a play on Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” — also coming are “I, Robot,” “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “Jeffty is Five,” and “True Names” — this last with Ben Rosenbaum). This started as a response to Ray Bradbury’s assertion that Michael Moore was a “thief” and a “horrible human being” for using the word “Fahrenheit” in the title of his last movie — but now I’m just finding it fun to deconstruct the stories of the writers who came before me.
- It’s the first story that Salon has ever published under a Creative Commons license — which means that you can put it on a P2P network or email it to a friend without running afoul of the law.
I’m really proud of this one: I read it to an audience at the WorldCon last September and the response was really warm and enthusiastic.
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