 NewsWhen Sysadmins Ruled the EarthThis story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007 Baen's Universe, August 2006 Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth">Full cast radio drama, QN Podcast French fan-translation, courtesy of Zen le Renard (Text, HTML) Spanish tranlsation (Axxon) Italian Translation (Fantascienze, Dec 2007) I started writing When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth on July 6th, 2005, while teaching Clarion. The next day, the London Underground and busses were bombed, including the bus I rode to work every morning (I was in Michigan, teaching Clarion, thankfully). These kinds of coincidences can be spooky when you're a writer. I ended up putting the story away for some months. When I returned to it, I was fired anew with the story of Felix and Van and their vainglorious struggle to keep the servers online as the world went offline. Once created, apocalyptic anxiety can't be destroyed -- the 1980s fear of nuclear annihilation I grew up with surfaces anew with each theoretical disaster: Y2K, climate change, und so weiter. There's something primal about a story of the Earth's impending doom. I was a sysadmin at an earlier stage in my career and I have infinite respect for the field: sysadmins are the secret masters of the universe, and they keep your life running. My Fulbright signing ceremony talk
Update: Isaac B2 has pics, too. I, Row-BoatThis story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007 Flurb Magazine, August 2006 Podcast: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4 This story came to me while I was 20 meters down the reef-wall in the Coral Sea, off the coast of northern Australia. I think a turtle was involved. The good ship "Spirit of Freedom" is the model for the "Free Spirit," the ship in this tale. As far as I know, neither it nor its ship's boats are sentient. If I return to this theme, it will be with a story about uplifted cheese sandwiches, called "I, Rarebit." "I, Row-Boat" is a riff on my Hugo-nominated story I, Robot, and it concerns the theological wars between an Asimov-cultist AI boat and an uplifted coral-reef. Talk at USC next WednesdayI'll be giving a free public talk to kick off my Fulbright Chair at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center on Public Diplomacy -- hope you can make it!
After the SiegeWinner, 2008 Locus Award for Best Novella This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007 Elsi (Russian translation), Summer 2006 Podcast, Subterranean Press, read by Mary Robinette Kowal, June 2008 Listeners to my podcast heard me read this story, After the Siege, as it was written, shortly after returning home from a family trip to St Petersburg. My grandmother was born there, back when it was Leningrad, and she lived through the Siege of Leningrad as a little girl. She'd never talked to us about those years, but then, walking through Petersburg, she opened up and the stories came pouring out, stories that scared and appalled me. After the Siege is a science fictional re-telling of those stories, with much artistic license.
I gave first publication rights to this story to Esli, the Russian sf magazine that had published some of my stories in translation before. In return, Elsi has given me the Russian text to release under a Creative Commons license. The first English publication will come shortly in the online magazine The Infinite Matrix, which published my story I, Robot and other pieces. Truncat, Part 03 – CONCLUSIONHere’s the conclusionof the podcast of Truncat. Websense censors my podcast – UPDATED
I spoke with Cas Purdy, the Websense PR manager, but he was unable to provide any information or comment at this time. (Thanks, Salim!) Update: Websense added all of archive.org/download to its "free software download" category after this post was published. Update 2: Websense has reclassified the Internet Archive and my podcast. This morning, archive.org/download was not classed as "Software Download," but archive.org/download/ (with trailing slash) was, hence the appearance that my podcasts had been singled out. Websense has since reclassified all of the Internet Archive, including my podcasts, as "Search Engines and Portals."
(Thanks, Salim!) Truncat, Part 02Here's part two of the podcast of Truncat -- the final part will come next week. Interview with me at Singularity SummitThe latest installment of Rick Kleffel's great tech/sf podcast contains an interview with me, recorded last spring at the Singularity Summit at Stanford. My WorldCon scheduleThis year's World Science Fiction Convention starts a week Thursday, on August 24th, in LA. I'm doing a bunch of programming this year, as well as dusting off my tuxedo for the Hugo Awards ceremony, where I'm a finalist for my story I, Robot. I'm doing several signings, as well, but if you can't make it to WorldCon, you can pre-order custom-inscribed signed copies (with free US shipping, too!) from Borderlands Books. Hope to see you at the WorldCon!
(Thumbnail of Hugo Award from a larger image on an AwardWeb page) 
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ISBN US:
9780765312792
ISBN: 1892391813
ISBN: 0765319853
ISBN: 1600101720
ISBN: 1560259817
ISBN: 0765312786
ISBN: 0765307596
ISBN: 1568582862
ISBN: 076530953X |
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