News

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth in The Rake

My story, "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" has been published in the magazine The Rake, including the online edition. You may remember the earlier podcast of the story, which tells the tale of gangs of sysadmins stuck in the world's data-centers as a string of nuclear, biological and conventional attacks herald the end of the Earth. The story will also appear in my forthcoming short story collection Overclocked, which will be published later this month.

“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could log in to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1:00 a.m., nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—aka Felix’s Law.

Link

Podcast: Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5,
Part 6

Gone until Jan 2, 2007

I'm heading out for a couple weeks' holidays now -- back on January 2. Taking a cue from danah boyd, I'm discarding all the mail that comes in between now and then; that way I won't come back from hols with a million emails shouting for my attention and harshing my mellow. It's a good way of managing holiday away-time, keeping work from creeping into downtime -- I'm seeing it more and more.

Of course, the rest of the gang will still be here. If you want to submit a Boing Boing suggestion, use the form. I just delete Boing Boing suggestions I get by email, anyway, so this is always the right thing to do, no exceptions, ever, period.

If you want to talk to someone about doing business with Boing Boing, visit FM Publishing.

If you're looking to talk to someone about licensing some of my stories or novels, or commissioning a speech, article or whatnot, contact my agent, Russell Galen.

Have a great holiday, everyone! See you in 07!

Cory

Someone Comes to Town quoted on CBS’s Criminal Minds

Last night's episode of Criminal Minds on CBS opened with a quote from my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town -- keen!

1.6MB QuickTime Link

(Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this!)

Interview on deep geek podcast, the Command Line

Last week I did an interview with Tom from the Command Line podcast, and I was immediately struck by how knowledgeable and quick Tom was on the subjects that I care about -- technology, civil liberties, and social change. Curious, I downloaded some of the previous episodes of his podcast and found them to be even better than I'd hoped -- thoughtful, informative, and deep, a real plunge into the geeky end of the news-pool. There's great analysis and rumination, as well as detailed explanations of important security issues with common OSes and so on. Tom's just posted the episode with my interview, but don't stop there -- I've added this one to my subscription list.

Link, Podcast feed link, iTunes "enhanced" podcast feed link

My novels used as test-docs for speed-reading app

Lirevite is a new, free/open speed-reading program for mobile devices that displays a long text one word at a time, quickly. The three initial test books for the system were my novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

French interview

Alexandre Hervaud from Fragil, a French website, did a short interview with me last month in Nantes at the Utopiales convention and he's just posted it:

Le copyright est justement l’objet de sa venue aux Utopiales où il donne une conférence à ce sujet. Activiste, il est convaincu de l’absurdité d’un copyright excessif.

« Le copyright, c’est un monopole qui a tendance à entraîner des concentrations. Désormais, dans le domaine artistique, on a 3 ou 4 compagnies qui contrôlent la musique, et autant pour le cinéma et l’édition... D’une certaine manière, c’est comme un retour au mécénat, l’ancêtre du copyright, lorsqu’un artiste ne pouvait exercer son talent qu’avec l’appui des puissants, et pas autrement. Le pape ou le PDG d’Universal, c’est du pareil au même. »

Son baladeur mp3 à portée d’oreilles, il voit le Web comme une chance pour l’Art. « Avec des coûts de distribution très bas, Internet permet à un plus grand nombre de personnes de participer aux pratiques artistiques. L’offre s’en trouve considérablement augmentée, ce qui permet de satisfaire différents publics. »

Link

Giving it Away

Forbes Magazine
French translation (Irene Delse)

My future of books op-ed for Forbes

Forbes has a new special issue on the future of books, and I have a lead op-ed in the issue, called "Giving It Away."

The thing about an e-book is that it's a social object. It wants to be copied from friend to friend, beamed from a Palm device, pasted into a mailing list. It begs to be converted to witty signatures at the bottom of e-mails. It is so fluid and intangible that it can spread itself over your whole life. Nothing sells books like a personal recommendation--when I worked in a bookstore, the sweetest words we could hear were "My friend suggested I pick up...." The friend had made the sale for us, we just had to consummate it. In an age of online friendship, e-books trump dead trees for word of mouth.

There are two things that writers ask me about this arrangement: First, does it sell more books, and second, how did you talk your publisher into going for this mad scheme?

There's no empirical way to prove that giving away books sells more books--but I've done this with three novels and a short story collection (and I'll be doing it with two more novels and another collection in the next year), and my books have consistently outperformed my publisher's expectations. Comparing their sales to the numbers provided by colleagues suggests that they perform somewhat better than other books from similar writers at similar stages in their careers. But short of going back in time and re-releasing the same books under the same circumstances without the free e-book program, there's no way to be sure.

What is certain is that every writer who's tried giving away e-books to sell books has come away satisfied and ready to do it some more.

Link, Link to special books issue of Forbes

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