News

Speaking at UC Irvine next Wednesday

I'm speaking at UC Irvine next Wednesday, giving a variant on my copyright and trade-policy talk, called "Happy Meal Toys versus Copyright: How America Chose Hollywood and Wal-Mart--and why it's doomed us, and how we might survive anyway." It's free and open to the public, though space is limited, so they want you to RSVP. See you there!

Wednesday, June 6, 2007
3:00-4:20 PM
100 Humanities Instructional Building

Link

My talk at Google about trade policy, copyright and Happy Meal toys

A couple weeks back, I went to Google and spoke there as part of their Authors@ Google series. I talked about how US trade policy had driven the US to abandon the tech sector and all the enterprises it supports in favor of a doomed plan to replace American industry with Police Academy sequels and Happy Meal toys. They've posted the video to YouTube.

Link

There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life, Part 04

Here's part four of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life."

MP3

Podcast feed for Overclocked

Jesse has created a podcast feed containing all the stories from my collection Overclocked -- these all appeared on my podcast, but not in a neatly packaged form like this. Here's the feed. Thanks, Jesse!

In Praise of Fanfic

Locus Magazine

In Praise of Fanfic

My latest Locus editorial is out: "In Praise of Fanfic."

Two things are sure about all fanfic, though: first, that people who write and read fanfic are already avid readers of writers whose work they're paying homage to; and second, that the people who write and read fanfic derive fantastic satisfaction from their labors. This is great news for writers.

Great because fans who are so bought into your fiction that they'll make it their own are fans forever, fans who'll evangelize your work to their friends, fans who'll seek out your work however you publish it.

Great because fans who use your work therapeutically, to work out their own creative urges, are fans who have a damned good reason to stick with the field, to keep on reading even as our numbers dwindle. Even when the fandom revolves around movies or TV shows, fanfic is itself a literary pursuit, something undertaken in the world of words. The fanfic habit is a literary habit.

Link

Audio from LA Times panel

On April 28, I did a panel at the LA Times Festival of Books with Kage Baker, John Scalzi and Harry Turtledove, called "Science Fiction: The Road From Here to There." The LA Times just provided us with the audio for this panel on CD and I've secured the permission of my co-panelists to rip the disc and put the audio up on the Internet Archive as an MP3, licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Enjoy!

MP3 Link

There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life, Part 03

Here's part three of my podcast of my novella-in-progress called "There's a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow/Now is the Best Time of Your Life."

MP3

Interview with Hal Stern, Sun VP of Software

A couple months back, I did an interview with Sun's VP of Engineering, Hal Stern. Hal's an amazing guy, a really smart advocate for open standards and open systems. We had a great conversation:

HS As we start to look at the issues of identity and security and privacy, we also come up with trust. What is the purpose of actually keeping a secret? It's so you can either control the flow of information where there is no trust or validate information where there's imperfect trust or less-than-ideal secrecy or less-than-ideal security. You start to build up a model of what particular threats you're worried about and how those threats represent themselves, and then you can ask, "Well, where is it that I need to go and enforce protection?" Is it keeping things on my laptop that are unencrypted, or is it that if I just keep everything in a network file storage mechanism somewhere, that's as safe as keeping my money at the bank and just using the ATM for cash and cache, in both homophonic interpretations of the word.

I worry about accidentally divorcing people from their content. In the short-term there are things like theft, or losing your laptop with your book on it. But over longer periods of time, we have to worry about the encoding of the data. Do we actually know how to interpret that five, 10, 50 years from now? I don't think we have that much experience with it. I think my mom probably asks me at least every six months when she can throw away the paper tape that's in my old bedroom. It's a very retro technology placeholder of 25 years ago, but that was the preferred storage and transfer mechanism, lacking anything else, and my Radio Shack TRS-80 with the cassette tape backup was a big improvement over that. It's hard data, but where are you going to find a KSR 33 Teletype with a paper-tape reader on it? In some museum somewhere...

Link

Update: Here's the MP3 as well!

Rudy Rucker, Terry Bisson and me in San Francico last night

Last night, Rudy Rucker and I gave a reading and a fun panel in San Francisco, as part of the SF in SF series hosted by Terry Bisson. Terry and Rudy are two of my favorite writers, and they were absolutely great. Rudy read a wild story about Alan Turing's efforts to avoid the MI5's post-war morality squad as he pursues a gay dalliance with a handsome Greek. I read a part of my forthcoming hackers-versus-the-DHS novel Little Brother. Afterwards we talked publishing. Al Billings brought his podcasting rig and recorded the whole thing and he's already got it online.

Link, MP3 Link

(Thanks, Al!)

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