News

Podcast with Patrick Nielsen Hayden on the future of SF, copyright and tech

Last night at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, Japan, I sat down for an interview with Patrick Nielsen Hayden, the editor who runs the largest science fiction line in the world for Tor Books. Patrick is my editor and a friend, and we had a rollicking, quick discussion about copyright, technology and the future of science fiction. It's live now on the Tor podcast, for your listening pleasure.

MP3 link, Link to Tor podcast homepage, Link to podcast feed

Spanish fan-trans of Printcrime

Ariel Maidana has produced a Spanish fan-translation of Printcrime, the short-short story that opens my latest collection, Overclocked. Like all the stories in that book, Printcrime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that encourages readers to play with, remix and adapt the text.

Los policías machacaron la impresora de mi padre cuando yo tenía ocho años. Recuerdo su olor como de papel film recién salido del microondas, y la mirada de feroz concentración de Pa cuando la llenaba con pasta fresca, y el aire cálido, como recién horneado, de los objetos que salían de ella.

Los policías entraron por la puerta agitando sus porras, uno de ellos recitando los términos de la orden de allanamiento con un megáfono. Uno de los clientes de papá lo había vendido. La ipolicía pagaba en fármacos de alta calidad -- mejoradores de rendimiento, suplementos para la memoria, estimulantes metabólicos. La clase de cosa que cuesta una fortuna sin receta; la clase de cosa que podrías imprimir en casa, si no te importara el riesgo de tener tu cocina llena con una súbita aglomeración de cuerpos grandes y robustos, grandes porras agitándose en el aire, machacando a cualquier persona o cosa que se pusiera en su camino.

Link

The Hacker Crackdown, Part 010

Here's part ten of my reading of Bruce Sterling's brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.

MP3 Link

Song based on Eastern Standard Tribe

Joe Falconer of the band Midnight.Haulkerton has done another song based on one of my works -- this time, a track based on my novel Eastern Standard Tribe. The song is CC-licensed (as is the book) and ready for you to share and play with.

What is the theme of this story?
What is the theme of life?
Do you want to be smart? Do you want to be remembered?
Do you want to be happy? Do you want to be content?
If you want to be smart gotta be unhappy
If you want to be happy gotta live in ignorant bliss
If you want to be remembered gotta go down in flames
If you want to be content you ain’t gonna be missed

Link

Get-together tomorrow in Melbourne

I'm in Melbourne, Australia for the Melbourne Writers' Festival and a number of people have written to see if I can get together for coffee or a meal. Unfortunately, my schedule's too tight for much socializing. Lucky for me, Lachlan Musicman, Guy, and Michael Hillis have put forward a venue for a public get-together for snacks and a drink or two before my first gig.

We're meeting at a Japanese place called Chocolate Buddha -- an informal place that's vegetarian-friendly. We're getting together there from 8-9PM on Friday, 24 August. There's no reservation -- we're just going to turn up and commandeer some tables. The next night, I'll be at Merlyn Theatre for "Free and easy," an interview with my by The Chaser's Charles Firth, along with anyone who wants to attend.

Hope to see you there!

Where: Chocolate Buddha, Federation Square, Melbourne
When: Friday, August 24, 8-9PM

Link

See also: Cory's schedule at Melbourne Writers' Festival, Aug 25-26

Me and Brian Wood interviewed on iFanboy

At this year's Comic-Con, I sat down for a joint iFanBoy interview with Brian Wood, creator of DMZ, one of the best new comics of the decade. Brian and I talked about creators' rights, copyright, my forthcoming comics, the next volume of DMZ (which I wrote the intro for) and other assorted bits.

Link

(Thanks, Ron!)

See also:
DMZ: graphic novel, a worthy successor to Transmetropolitan
Demo: Brian Woods's comic about teens with "powers"

My WorldCon Yokohama schedule

I'm a program participant at the World Science Fiction in Yokohama, Japan this year. Hope to see many of you there! Here's my schedule:

Thursday, August 30, 4PM: How to Make SF More Inviting to Teens, with David M. Silver, Farah Mendelsohn, Lisa C. Freitag, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

Friday, August 31, 11AM: Reading

Friday, August 31, Noon: Digital Maoism: Drowning the Individual Voice, with Eileen Gunn, Chris O'Shea

Friday, August 31, 4PM: The Tech Savvy Criminal, with Geoffrey A. Landis, Patricia MacEwen

Saturday, September 1, noon: Mundane or Transcendent? with Charles Stross, Robert Silverberg

Saturday, September 1, 2PM: The Universal Library, with Charles Stross, Linda Robinett, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Tom Galloway

Sunday, September 2, 10AM: Kaffeeklatsche

Sunday, September 2, Noon, Defending Public Domain from Corporate Copyright Maximalism, with Inge Heyer, Naomi Novik, Patrick Nielsen Hayden

I'll also be presenting the Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

Link

The Hacker Crackdown, Part 009

Here's part nine of my reading of Bruce Sterling's brilliant, seminal book The Hacker Crackdown, a 1992 book that recounts the events that led to the founding of The Electronic Frontier Foundation, my former employer.

MP3 Link

Don’t fall for the Potemkin scam

The Guardian

My column on DRM’s Potemkin Village for The Guardian

My latest Guardian column has just gone up -- it talks about the "Potemkin Village" effect with DRM, whereby DRM vendors walk their potential customers through a faked-up demo showing how great DRM is, how much people want it, and how easy it is to use. The latest victim of this scam is the BBC, who've just decreed that their TV shows will only be delivered online through the iPlayer, a DRM service that lets you do less than you can with your old TV and VCR. Because that's what the public is crying out for: an Internet TV that does less than a regular TV.

These demos almost never involve real hardware. It's so much easier to do interoperability when all it takes to make two devices communicate is to draw a dotted line between them on a slide. And when the demos do involve real hardware, it's usually all from one vendor, and only within a constrained universe of uses.

In reality, it's bloody hard to get any two technologies to talk to each other successfully. Remember how hard it was to get your new wireless card, printer or DVD recorder to work? Now, imagine that these technologies had been deliberately designed not to work with each other - except under the exactly correct circumstances.

Microsoft's PlaysForSure platform is typical of this. All such devices, "certified" to work with each other, barely ran on their own. And God help you if you tried to connect them to a competitor's device (even Microsoft's Zune won't handle PlaysForSure music).

Link

See also: Cory's column on "Digital Lysenkoism" for the Guardian

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