Each installment in Tor.com's serialization of my latest novel Makers was accompanied by a Creative Commons licensed illustration from Idiots' Books, in the form of a tile that can be interlocked with previous tiles on all four sides. We're planning to release these as a limited-edition deck of cards in the future, and we've also been releasing little flashtoys that let you play with the tiles onscreen as they were released.
Now Tor has an embeddable version, courtesy of Malloc, which you can stick in your blog or wherever you choose! Here's the code:
JC Hutchins -- he of the boundless energy! -- has assembled a free "holiday sampler" of excerpts from great new books, handily bundled together in a handsome PDF, well suited to loading onto your device or printing out for your Xmas holiday. In it are excerpts from recent books by some of my favorite authors, including Cherie Priest, Seth Godin, and Scott Sigler (as well as an excerpt from my latest novel, Makers.
In Makers, 3D printers are used to run off everything from homes for squatters to the fairground rides that cause the plot-twisting showdown with Disney. But, typically for a Doctorow novel, it's not as far-fetched as it might sound: the 3D world is already here. He jumps up to show me a 3D museum object, part of a bear's jaw, that was scanned and printed in six hours, and explains that he's waiting for the post to bring one of the first 3D-printed objects he's ordered online ("a beautiful big steel cross that looks like a nun's cross except that the tips are screwdriver tips and it's actually a multi-driver and it hangs around your neck from a leather thong!") "We'll have 3D printers which will make the world weird and they will beget something even weirder. 3D printers are just for starters!" he says, gleefully.
Despite his success in fiction – last year's young adult novel Little Brother was a New York Times bestseller and he has previously won the Locus award and been nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards – Doctorow is better known in some quarters for his political activism around digital freedom and open rights. He's the former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy and standards; he co-founded the UK Open Rights Group; and he's currently campaigning on the government's draconian digital rights bill. Both sides of his work come together in his novels, not just in terms of subject matter but in the way they are distributed. Although published by mainstream presses, Doctorow also releases all his books for free download from his website under a creative commons licence, and talks enthusiastically about the uses people have made of these free online versions of his books, from foreign translations and student films to a teacher in a Detroit school for the blind who was able to run the download of Little Brother through the school's Braille embosser for her students without having to painstakingly retype the whole book first.
I did a really fun interview on Makers and the writing process for the Bazooka Joe podcast, which has many other interesting writers in this latest instalment (Annalee Newitz, JC Hutchins and Steve Eley).
The audiobook of my latest novel, Makers has been published by Random House Audio, strictly in DRM-free formats over the net (this means that Apple won't carry it in the iTunes store, even though Audible was willing to carry it without DRM).
The reading is by Bernadette Dunne, a very talented actor. I just listened to this for the first time yesterday and I was blown away by Dunne's reading. I'm a huge audiobook nut, and I'm incredibly glad to have professional audiobook adaptations of my books from Random House -- and doubly grateful to them for supporting my commitment to DRM-free distribution. When you buy this book, you own it. The "terms of service" are "Don't violate copyright law," not "By buying this audiobook, you agree that we get to come over and kick you in the ass."
This weekend, I'll be wrapping up my US/Canada tour for Makers, my new novel, with a weekend at Philcon, near Philadelphia. I'll be signing books, doing a reading, giving a speech, and appearing on several panels. Hope to see you there!
Important note: I had previously announced a couple of readings tomorrow at the Philadelphia Free Library. It turns out that these are not open to the public (they're for school groups, which no one told me until last night). Sorry about this, folks.
Philcon: Nov 20-22
The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cherry Hill, NJ
Nice piece in today's National Post about Makers and my approach to publishing:
Presently, Doctorow is in the midst of a short North American book tour promoting Makers, which, like all his work, is free to download from his website, craphound.com,under a Creative Commons licence, which allows readers to share and remix the work as long as it's not for commercial purposes. Interestingly, Doctorow doesn't accept payment from readers who've downloaded his book. Instead, he posts the addresses of libraries and schools who have requested the book and asks donors to buy them a copy instead. It's his commitment and encouragement of sharing that makes Doctorow a thorn in the side of some in the publishing industry (though it should be noted his own publisher, Tor, is part of Macmillan, which in turn is a subsidiary of the massive German conglomerate Holtzbrinck). He wants his books to be read, he wants his books to be passed around and he wants his books to be copied.
"I copy, you copy, everybody copies. Pretending we don't copy is just hypocrisy," says Doctorow, whose own early attempts at sci-fiwere pastiches of Conan the Barbarian stories and Star Wars fan fiction. "It's the 21st century: Art will be copied. If you're making art not to be copied, you're not making contemporary art. It's lovely that someone wants to be the blacksmith at Pioneer Village, but that's not my job. I'ma science-fiction writer."
Hey, New Yorkers! I'm reading from and signing my new novel Makers tonight at the Borders in Columbus Circle at 59th Street, starting at 7PM. Hope to catch you there! Philadelphians, you're next -- Philadelphia Free Library on Friday, then Philcon (in Cherry Hill, NJ) over the weekend.
I recently conducted an interview with AMCTV's Sci-Fi Scanner about my new novel MAKERS, in which we got into some nice, juicy detail about what makes Disney Parks so fascinating for science fiction treatment.
Q: So how did the concept evolve into creating a hacker Disney World in a Wal-Mart? Did it come from your other novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?
A: What it evolved out of was the incredible fun I had researching a novel set in a theme park. I've got a real interest in gadgets and doodads, and I set out to reverse engineer a novel plot that revolved around my getting to do fun stuff to research it. Amusement park rides, buying interesting junk, visiting hacker spaces, looking at 3D printers... What novel fits in there?
Q: And then you made Disney the villain.
A: Disney is essentially a privately run city that has 50,000 employees on site and does some novel social stuff as well as lots of interesting technical stuff. And in a world in which the costs of organizing people is going through the floor, Disney ends up with a product that is more expensive. What if in ten years, doing 60 percent of what Disney World does costs a tenth of a percent of what Disney World costs? At that point, Disney World is in real trouble. Disney is a thing unto itself, and science-fictionally it's bottomless.
Doctorow is also a master of one-upping himself, which should come as no surprise given his interest in the Singularity. In ‘Makers’ he manages to keep the readers’ jaws dropped, as one mind-boggling scheme is supplanted by another, each new plan in equal parts wacky, intelligent, and plausible.
