It’s wonderful, no question about it. But it’s hard to take from time to time, whether because of the calisthenics necessary for all that imagination stretching or because Cory Doctorow’s portrayal of evil is so truly frightening; I did not want to watch some things happen.
Peter Morrison, an audioblogger who attended last week’s World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, recorded my reading of my new novel-in-progress (working title “Themepunks”). The audio is live now — I’m really happy with how it came out. I love hearing writers read their own work, and I love reading my stuff aloud: it’s so much cooler than just reading off the printed page.
He reached down below a work-table and hosted up a huge triptych made out of three hinged car-doors stood on end. Carefully, he unfolded it and stood it like a screen on the cracked concrete floor.
The inside of the car-doors had been stripped clean and polished to a high metal gleam that glowed like sterling silver. Spot-welded to it were all manner of soda tins, pounded flat and cut into gears, chutes, springs and other mechanical apparatus.
“It’s a mechanical calculator,” he said, proudly. “About half as powerful as Univac. I milled all the parts using a laser-cutter. What you do is, fill this hopper with GI Joe heads, and this hopper with Barbie heads. Crank this wheel and it will drop a number of M&Ms equal to the product of the two values into this hopper, here.” He put three scuffed GI Joe heads in one hopper and four scrofulous Barbies in another and began to crank, slowly. A music-box beside the crank played a slow, irregular rendition of “Pop Goes the Weasel” while the hundreds of little coin-sized gears turned, flipping switches and adding and removing tension to springs. After the weasel popped a few times, twelve brown M&Ms fell into an outstretched rubber hand. He picked them out carefully and offered them to her. “It’s OK. They’re not from the trash,” he said. “I buy them in bulk.” He turned his broad back to her and heaved over a huge galvanized tin washtub full of brown M&Ms. “See, it’s a bit-bucket!” he said.
Mark Forman, a podcaster, is reading my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on his podcast with regular, chapter-by-chapter readings. He’s got the prologue and chapter one live now. Here’s the Podcast feed.
Magical realism and
literary iconoclasm abound in a novel that should appeal to fans of
experimental fiction in a near-future setting.
Mark Forman, a podcaster, is reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom on his podcast with regular, chapter-by-chapter readings. He’s got the prologue and chapter one live now. Here’s the Podcast feed.
It’s official: Cory Doctorow has become the new Neal Stephenson. Or, rather, he’s become the new early-period Neal Stephenson, since Stephenson himself has moved away from quirky, computer tech-y, zippy future-kitsch. Doctorow began filling the resulting gap with his first novels, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe. But his latest, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, is his most Stephenson-like novel to date, all bizarre characters, cutting-edge culture, and technological lectures, swirled into a refreshing, compellingly grounded semi-fable.
Make Magazine’s Phil Torrone has loaded Someone Comes to Town onto his fancy PalmOS watch. I’ve known intellectually all along that this was theoretically possible, but actually seeing the book on a ferchrissakes watch is pretty wild.
I’m off to the WorldCon as soon as they call my flight, then I’m headed off on holidays: long story short, I won’t be reading much email between now and the 15th of August and will be facing too gigantic a pile of mail to carefully filter then, so anything you send between now and oh, say, August 17th won’t get much attention from me and stands a good chance of getting accidentally deleted when I come to sort through received mail on my return.
If it’s not urgent, don’t send it until after the 15th. If it’s urgent and related to EFF, email Ren Bucholz, and if it’s urgent and related to writing, email my agent’s assistant, Ann Behar. If you’ve got a Boing Boing suggestion, please don’t ever email it to me, ever! Use the suggest a site form.
Becky Heydermann, an attendee at Glasgow’s World Science Fiction Convention later this week, has organized an informal session on the future of the book:
Discuss the nature of books, the idea of a book and what can be done with books, both as concept and as object.
This is a subject near and dear to my heart. It will be nice to cover this subject in a discussion rather than the traditional convention panel, where five people speak for ten minutes each, field one or two questions, and beat it. Naturally, I’ll be attending, and I hope you’ll come, too:
Date/Time: Sunday, 5PM
Location: Fan Lounge, at the Moat House. (apparently, real ale is on tap here)
