The Nebula Ballot for best sf/f book of 2008 is up — and I’m on it!
Little Brother – Doctorow, Cory (Tor, Apr08)
Powers – Le Guin, Ursula K. (Harcourt, Sep07)
Cauldron – McDevitt, Jack (Ace, Nov07)
Brasyl – McDonald, Ian (Pyr, May07)
Making Money – Pratchett, Terry (Harper, Sep07)
Superpowers – Schwartz, David J. (Three Rivers Press, Jun08)
The Nebula Ballot for best sf/f book of 2008 is up — and I’m on it!
Little Brother – Doctorow, Cory (Tor, Apr08)
Powers – Le Guin, Ursula K. (Harcourt, Sep07)
Cauldron – McDevitt, Jack (Ace, Nov07)
Brasyl – McDonald, Ian (Pyr, May07)
Making Money – Pratchett, Terry (Harper, Sep07)
Superpowers – Schwartz, David J. (Three Rivers Press, Jun08)
Tomorrow marks the first ever British Convention on Modern Liberty, co-sponsored by The Guardian, OpenDemocracy, and Liberty. It’s a daylong, nationwide forum on the erosion of liberty, privacy and civil rights in Britain. Boing Boing is a proud sponsor of the event, and I’ll be speaking at the closing plenary with Billy Bragg tomorrow afternoon in London.
We are entering a dangerous period in our country. Economic turmoil threatens profound hardship and disharmony. Disenchantment with politics is growing and even legitimate protest is threatened by an unprecedented programme of challenges to our rights, freedoms and democracy. Sixty years ago Britain was a proud co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. Now it is increasingly centralized, abandoning its historic principles some of which date back to the Magna Carta.The Government’s continued stated determination to extend detention without charge in terrorism cases to 42 days is one symbol of the damage done to our hard-won rights and freedoms. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA), which gives hundreds of agencies access to people’s records without their knowing, is another. The collection of all available records on a huge central database for the use of the authorities is a third.
We believe that such threats can be overcome but only if the public is woken to the dangers. While we may be impatient for action, the issues must be addressed in an open-minded way with as thorough and accessible public debate as possible.
My latest Guardian column’s just gone up, about the message that entertainment companies send when they put crappy EULAs on their digital downloads:
Here’s the world’s shortest, fairest, and simplest licence agreement: “Don’t violate copyright law.” If I had my way, every digital download from the music in the iTunes and Amazon MP3 store, to the ebooks for the Kindle and Sony Reader, to the games for your Xbox, would bear this – and only this – as its licence agreement.
“Don’t violate copyright law” has a lot going for it, but the best thing about it is what it signals to the purchaser, namely: “You are not about to get screwed.”
You shouldn’t have to sell your soul
just to download some music
My latest Make column is up, “Love the Machine, Hate the Factory,” written for the steampunk theme issue:
For me, the biggest appeal to steampunk is that it exalts the machine and disparages the factory (this is the motto of the excellent and free *Steampunk* magazine: “Love the Machine, Hate the Factory”). It celebrates the elaborate inventions of the scientifically managed enterprise, but imagines those machines coming from individuals who are their own masters. Steampunk doesn’t rail against efficiency — but it never puts efficiency ahead of self-determination. If you’re going to raise your workbench to spare your back, that’s *your* decision, not something imposed on you from the top down.
Last night I stayed up waaay late to record an episode of the excellent tech panel show, This Week in Tech.
Here’s part eight of my reading of my 2005 novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
