Salon has published part eight of my novel-in-progress, Themepunks
(previous installments). In today’s installment, the shanty-town finds itself under siege, and shots are fired:

He pulled out the megaphone and went to his window.

“ATTENTION POLICE,” he said. “THIS IS THE LEASEHOLDER FOR THIS PROPERTY. WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR GUNS DRAWN? WHAT IS GOING ON?”

The police at the cars looked toward the workshop, then back to the shantytown, then back to the workshop.

“SERIOUSLY. THIS IS NOT COOL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”

One of the cops grabbed the mic for his own loudhailer. “THIS IS THE MIAMI-DADE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. WE HAVE RECEIVED INTELLIGENCE THAT AN ARMED FUGITIVE IS ON THESE PREMISES. WE HAVE COME TO RETRIEVE HIM.”

“WELL, THAT’S WEIRD. NONE OF THE CHILDREN, CIVILIANS AND HARDWORKING PEOPLE HERE ARE FUGITIVES AS FAR AS I KNOW. CERTAINLY THERE’S NO ONE ARMED AROUND HERE. WHY DON’T YOU GET BACK IN YOUR CARS AND I’LL COME OUT AND WE’LL RESOLVE THIS LIKE CIVILIZED PEOPLE, OK?”

The cop shook his head and reached for his mic again, and then there were two gunshots, a scream, and a third.

My short story Anda’s Game, which is about obesity, childhood, labor laws, and massively multiplayer role playing games, has just been reprinted in Michael Chabon’s Best American Short Stories anthology, something that I’m very, very proud of!

I’m speaking at a conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina next week on Nov 1/2. The event is sponsored by iBiblio, the Long Now Foundation and Red Hat, and I’ll be speaking about copy restriction technologies and the risk that they present to the future of technology. There’s a podcast and a telecast in case you can’t make it to UNC:

The Information Revolution has brought into question the wisdom of intellectual property regimes and their relationship to society, culture, jurisprudence, commerce, and government. Intellectual property law is built upon historical notions of tangible property ownership—with the basic premise of restricting access by others. By contrast, the Information Revolution is grounded in concepts of enhanced access and a more universal sense of ownership. Cultural, social, intellectual, and economic growth must be driven by creativity and innovation, and successful growth increasingly depends upon the dissemination of information and application of knowledge. The University Of North Carolina Symposium on Intellectual Property, Creativity, and the Innovation Process will invite 100 participants to question whether creativity and innovation can fully flourish under the current intellectual property regimes. By making the inquiry intellectual property regimes, rather than just intellectual property law, the Symposium can examine business, political, and cultural practices as well as jurisprudence.

Through support from Red Hat, and in cooperation with the Long Now Foundation and Ibiblio, the Symposium will be held November 1 & 2, 2005 in Chapel Hill and will draw participants from diverse disciplines — from lawyers to chefs — to take a hard look at all of the languages of creativity and innovation; in order to determine how current intellectual property regimes affect creative incentives. The Symposium will address key areas of concern, including Copyright, Patents, Open Source Code, Digital Rights Management, Downloading & Peer to Peer Revolution, Public Domain, Government Involvement and Regulation, and University/Industry Collaboration. The approach will be participatory and collaborative, and the focus of the Symposium will be to understand the creative incentives necessary for cultural, social, intellectual, and economic innovation and growth. An open public session will also provide the opportunity to take the dialog to a broader audience.

Since the end of September, I’ve been podcasting a story-in-progress called “After the Siege,” reading it in installments as I wrote it. Last week, I finished writing the story and today I’ve uploaded the final piece. You can get the whole thing through my podcast page.

Part seven of Themepunks is live today. That’s the novel-in-progress whose first third Salon has been serializing every Monday — three more installments to go! Today we learn about how Perry and Lester’s crazy school of invention can be applied to urban squatting:

The new shantytown went up fast — faster than she’d dreamed possible. The boys helped. Lester downloaded all the information he could find on temporary shelters — building out of mud, out of sandbags, out of corrugated cardboard and sheets of plastic — and they tried them all. Some of the houses had two or more rickety-seeming stories, but they all felt solid enough as she toured them, snapping photos of proud homesteaders standing next to their handiwork.

Little things went missing from the workshops — tools, easily pawned books and keepsakes, Perry’s wallet — and they started locking their desk-drawers. There were junkies in amongst the squatters, and desperate people, and immoral people, them too. One day she found that her cute little gold earrings weren’t beside her desk-lamp, where she’d left them the night before, and she practically burst into tears, feeling set-upon on all sides.

She found the earrings later that day, in the bottom of her purse, and that only made things worse. Even though she hadn’t voiced a single accusation, she’d accused every one of the squatters in her mind that day. She found herself unable to meet their eyes for the rest of the week.

“I have to write about this,” she said to Perry. “This is part of the story.” She’d stayed clear of it for a month, but she couldn’t go on writing about the successes of the Home Aware without writing about the workforce that was turning out the devices and add-ons by the thousands, all around her, in impromptu factories with impromptu workers.

“Why?” Perry said. He’d been a dervish, filling orders, training people, fighting fires. By nightfall, he was hollow-eyed and snappish. Lester didn’t join them on the roof anymore. He liked to hang out with Francis and some of the young bucks and pitch horseshoes down in the shantytown, or tinker with the composting toilets he’d been installing at strategic crossroads through the town. “Can’t you just concentrate on the business?”

Previous Installments

A reminder: I’m doing a a reading and signing tomorrow (Monday) night at London’s Stanhope Centre, near Marble Arch, at 6:30PM. Books will be on sale and light refreshments provided. Hope to see you there!

This is such a cool reminx of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — an RSS feed that gives you a couple pages every day. No matter when you subscribe to it, it sends you the book starting from the beginning. Subscribe via Winksite and it’ll come to your phone in daily bite-sized pieces.

(Thanks, Charles!)