Last week I did a virtual book-signing of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town along with an interview in the massively multiplayer online world Second Life. All last week, Hamlet Linden, the game’s embedded reporter, has been running the transcript of the interview in the Second Life blog, New World Notes. Now the whole thing is online.

On a related note, Damon Wallace continues to add to his amazing collection of fan illustrations of scenes from my novel, including Alan’s tiny thumb, Marci in the family cave, a sketch of Davey and a wicked-creepy Davey attack on Alan. These illos are just gobsmackingly wonderful.

HL: [Audience member] Jarod Godel asks, “A lot of the backstory and universe in Someome Comes To Town was left open; was this done on purpose, trying to encourage fan fiction to fill in those gaps?

CD: Not to encourage fan fiction per se, but the human imagination has a lot higher polygon-count than prose could ever have. Leaving most of the world in shadow lets readers fill in very high rez pictures where you don’t have the throughput in the printed page. That said, if fan fiction emerged that filled that in, I’d be mightily chuffed.

Alex Steffen of Worldchanging has posted a great interview with me about WIPO, the copyfight, and international development.

WIPO — the World Intellectual Property Organization — is the UN’s most captive agency. WIPO was originally a stand-alone organization, essentially an industry consortium for rightsholders’ interests, and they got brought in under the umbrella of the UN thirty or so years ago, with the understanding that they would change their practices to make them consistent with other UN instruments like the Universal Declaration on Human Rights — humanitarian instruments — and that it would become a humanitarian agency for development.

Which makes sense. Information goods are a critical piece of the development picture. Every successfully developed country made use of free information goods. More accurately, they all went through a stage when they were a pirate nation. America spent a century as a pirate nation, ripping off the intellectual property of every country around it, and in particular, of Britain, because when you’re a net importer of intellectual property, signing on to multilateral copyright and patent agreements is signing on to exporting your wealth off-shore. When you’re a net exporter of intellectual property, it makes economic sense.

The choice is not simply one of piracy or monopoly. There is a whole rich middle ground of public domain and open information regimes which could give developing world countries the tools they need to serve humanitarian purposes, while protecting the legitimate interests of authors, performers and inventors. WIPO could have created a global knowledge goods regime which protected both the commercial and the humanitarian fairly.

Next week, Glasgow will host the Interaction, the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention. I’ll be attending and doing a number of program items, including some stufff on Creative Commons and a reading from my new novel-in-progress. Here’s an overview of my program items:

Friday August 5:
10:00am You’ve Plugged _What_ into It?
Hardware Hacking is an increasingly popular pastime. Also the advent of computer control has revolutionised many hobbies, e.g. amateur astrophotography. (with Martin Hoare amd Jordin Kare)

Noon: Clones, Children or Countless Lives
If everyone lives forever, or is endlessly reincarnated, where do we
put them? And can anyone reproduce in any other way? (with Simon Bradshaw, Anne K. Gay, Richard Morgan and Eric M. Van)

5:00pm: Is Genius Gendered?
One lone genius and an attractive assistant (fill in the genders)
save the world. Our panel gives media and literary SF examples, and
discuss how changing the gender might change other things.
(with Sean McMullen and Connie Willis)

Saturday, August 6:
2:30pm: Signing at the Borderlands Books table

6:00pm: Fannish Currency: Whuffie, Egoboo and Chocolate
(Fandom has for a long time had a potlatch economy, where you give
things away in the expectation of egoboo, or fannish kudos. How does
this translate to the Internet Age?)
(with Christina Lake, Mike Scott and Suzanne Tompkins)

Sunday, August 7:
10:00am AI: the Aliens We Make?
Aliens and AI are both Other, but where one comes from Out There,
the other lives Down Here. Are they really the same thing — and
either way, what difference does it make?
(with David Gerrold, Ian McDonald, Charles Stross and Tricia Sullivan)

Noon: Creative Commons 101. A Primer for the Interested

2:00pm Reading

Monday, August 8:
10:00am: Standing up for our (Copy)rights
Contrasting views on the benefits and hazards authors see in sharing
(or having their work shared) online.
(with Andrew Adams, David Cake and Christopher Priest)

Hope to see you there!

The current July/August 2005 issue of the amazing magazine Adbusters includes a reprint of my story “To Market, To Market, the Re-Branding of Billy Bailey,” which was originally published in the British sf magazine Interzone. It got a lot of favorable critical attention when it was first published — it’s a comedic story about junior-high students who create and market personal brands, accepting street-crew sponsorshipd from various companies. You can pick up the current Adbusters at most decent newsstands and bookstores.

Billy and Principal Andrew Alty went all the way back to kindergarten, when Billy had convinced Mitchell McCoy that the green fingerpaint was Shamrock Shake, and watched with glee as the little babyface had scarfed it all down. Billy knew that Andrew Alty knew his style: refined, controlled, and above all, _personal_. Billy never would’ve dropped a dozen M-80s down the girls’ toilet. His stuff was always one-on-one, and possessed of a degree of charm and subtlety.

But nevertheless, here was Billy, along with the sixth-grade bumper-crop of nasty-come-latelies, called on the carpet in front of Andrew Alty’s massive desk. Andrew Alty was an athletic forty, a babyface true-and-through, and a charismatic thought-leader in his demographic.

Hormones. They were the problem.

Billy Bailey was the finest heel the sixth grade had ever seen — a true artisan who kept his brand pure and unsullied, picking and managing his strategic alliances with the utmost care and acumen. He’d dumped BanginBumpin Fireworks (a division of The Shanghai Novelty Company, Ltd.) in the _fourth_ grade, fer chrissakes. Their ladyfingers were too small to bother with; their M-80s were so big that you’d have to be a lunatic to go near them.

But sixth grade was the Year of the Hormone at Pepsi Elementary. Boys who’d been babyfaces since kindergarten suddenly sprouted acne, pubic hair, and an uncontrollable urge to impress girls. Their weak brands were no match for the onslaught of -osterones and -ogens that flooded their brains, and in short order they found themselves switching over to heel.

As a result, the sixth grade was experiencing a heel glut. Last year’s Little Lord Fauntleroys were now busy snapping bras, dropping textbooks, cracking grading computers, and blowing up the girls’ toilets.

Hormones. They made Billy want to puke.

On Sunday, I did an in-game book-signing in Second Life, a massively multiplayer online world. Now, part one of the transcript from the interview is online. The signing was stupendously weird and fun — people turned up in avatars designed to look like characters from the book (or in other, weirder avatars, including an AT-ST from the Star Wars universe!). All this week, you can check back with New World Notes, Second Life’s in-game newspaper, for subsequent installments on the transcript:

For those few here (and I hope it’s just a few) who haven’t read Someone Comes to Town yet, why not give us your brief cocktail party pitch for the story?

Cory Doctorow: Hmm– it’s not an easy book to summarize. Alan is a serial entrepreneur who moved to Toronto to get away from his family. His father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. He has several brothers, including one who is an island, three who nest like Russian dolls, a precognitive, and a demonic savage. When he was a teenager, he murdered the latter brother, with his other brothers cooperating. And now that brother is back form the dead, stalking them all. Alan has fallen in with a gang of anarcho-info-hippies who are using dumpster-dived hardware to build meshing WiFi repeaters in a mad bid to unwire all of Toronto, or at least the bohemian Kensington Market streets. Meanwhile, his neighbors– a student household– contain a girl with wings and a mean-spirited guitar player/bartender, who, it appears, may be in league with the demonic brother.

So that’s it in a nutshell. A very large and n-dimensional nutshell.

HL: If someone asked me to classify Someone Comes to Town, I’d call it “high-tech magic realism”. (That may be a new genre!) But how’s that hit you?

CD: I think that’s a good classification. I’ve been calling it a techie contemporary fantasy — contemporary fantasy being the label commonly applied to magic realist fiction when written by North American popular authors instead of Marquez and his cohort.

Yesterday’s in-game book-signing in the massively multiplayer online world Second Life went swimmingly. A variety of accounts of it are appearing now, including this liveblog on the Terra Nova blog and this Flickr set of photos from in the game, that includes some of the attendees’ avatars who turned up “dressed” like Mimi, a character from the book. Man, that was cool.