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Claude LaLumiere

In these quirky, brashly engaged “stories of the future present” Cory Doctorow shows us life from the point-of-view of the plugged-in generation and makes it feel like a totally alien world.
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Sci Fi Weekly

Cory Doctorow gives away his vital writing secret right here in these pages, a guaranteed method for producing cutting-edge, engaged, supercharged SF. In his preface to “Anda’s Game,” he says, “The easiest way to write futuristic (or futurismic) science fiction is to predict, with rigor and absolute accuracy, the present day.” Ah, but like the words of all oracles, his pronouncement has a cryptic, paradoxical air to it. What exactly can this mean?

Well, he’s simply giving us the classical, core methodology of SF from its Golden Age, restated for post-modern times. Doctorow is just doing, after all, what Robert Heinlein did at his best: steeping himself in the culture of the present and them amping up what he registers as significant to a day-after-tomorrow condition. Sounds trivial, put that way, doesn’t it? But the relative paucity of Heinleins and Doctorows on the market indicates it’s not as easy as it looks. One has to canvass thoroughly the whole of scientific, artistic and sociological progress, distill the essences, and then find a plot and characters that can best embody the lessons to be conveyed. Knowing a lot about history and the human heart is essential as well. In other words, even before one begins the conventional task of storytelling, one already faces a full-time job of analysis and prognostication.

But Doctorow, like Heinlein, is up to the task. As these stories illustrate, he has a knack for identifying those seminal trends of our current landscape that will in all likelihood determine the shape of our future(s). Add in a recursive affection for past landmarks of SF (besides the Asimovian references, there’s a lot of Clifford Simak in the “Row-Boat” piece), and a gentle empathy for the underdogs in such scenarios, and you get a winning narrative and ideational combination.
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Song based on Overclocked

Midnight.Haulkerton, a “Grok Rock” band from Australia, has very kindly recorded a song inspired by my new short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present — just the first of more to come. This is about the coolest, most flattering thing ever.

Future shock, present shock, we’re already in past shock
Too much to go to and nowhere to go, we’ve got way too much to know
Something in the future’s already in the past, the present’s an illusion
Cos the world is spinning way too fast

Overclocked, clock shock
This watch never stops
Overclocked, time’s fast
You’ve been blasted in the past

Link

LA book-launch: TONIGHT!

Reminder for Angelenos: Tonight is my Los Angeles book-launch for Overclocked, my new short story collection. It’s at 7PM at Secret Headquarters, the best comic-store in town. Hope to see you there!

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Other upcoming events: Duke University, Feb 22; University of North Carolina, Feb 22; Ad Astra Toronto, Mar 2-4; Simon Fraser U, Vancouver, Mar 8/9

Rick Kleffel

‘Overclocked’ is a reminder that we can’t hope to keep up and shouldn’t bother. But we do need to keep alert, to keep ourselves caffeinated, to run as fast as we can – if we hope to stay in the same place. Getting ahead? That’s, alas, a thing of the past.
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Coming to Duke, UNC, Ad Astra Toronto

I’m coming to North Carolina on Feb 22 to give a talk on privacy at Duke University at 5PM and a talk on copyright at the University of North Carolina at 2PM. There’ll be books for sale at both — hope to see you there!

Other upcoming events: my Los Angeles book-launch this Thursday at 7PM at Secret Headquarters, and I’m going to be a Guest of Honor at Ad Astra, Toronto’s regional sf convention, from Mar 2-4.

Vancouver lectures, Overclocked launch, Mar 8/9

I’m speaking at Vancouver, BC’s Simon Fraser University on March 8/9, in a couple of events that will include launches for my new book, Overclocked — and I’m delighted to note that the book has sold out its entire print run in two weeks and is going back to the presses!

The talk is presented by the Faculty of Applied Sciences’ Leonardo Institute, a non-credit graduate program that examines the risks, uncertainties, ethics, and art of applied science.

Doctorow’s topic is The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards. “It’s about how technology changes the way we view social problems,” says Doctorow. “Older mechanical technologies make us see the world as deterministic, knowable and manipulable. New emergent technologies like the Internet teach us that control is an illusion, the universe is out of control and laughing at us, and that the more we watch and control, the more problems we have.”

The lecture will be presented twice:

Thursday March 8 at 6:00pm in the Fletcher Challenge theatre at SFU Vancouver (515 West Hastings St.) Free. Seating is limited. Reservations, 604-291-5100.

Friday March 9 at 3:30pm at SFU Burnaby in Academic Quadrangle, C9001. Free. Arrive early to ensure a seat

Link, Download poster

Audio from last night’s launch at Borderlands

Randall “Sorcerer Mickey” Cooper came to my book-launch at San Francisco’s Borderlands Books last night, and caught audio of me reading “Printcrime” and answering a wide-ranging series of questions. The audio and a report are on his LiveJournal.

Transcript of RU Sirius radio interview

Ten Zen Monkeys has the transcript of the interview I did last week with RU Sirius on his radio program:

Well, I went to a little family reunion in St. Petersburg, Russia. My grandmother was born there, and her family still lives there. When I was growing up, she always used to tell me about the war, and about being a kid living through the Siege of Leningrad. And she would tell me how I would never understand the terrible horrors she’d faced. I didn’t know much about the Siege of Leningrad, but my understanding was… it wasn’t anything like Auschwitz, right? Like, “Boy, how bad could it have been? You were a civil defense worker. You weren’t in a death camp.” And a couple of years ago, on one of those long St. Petersburg days, my grandmother walked us through the streets of St. Petersburg and told us about what she saw and did during that period. It really changed my perception of it. I went out and read some books, most notably The 900 Days about the Siege of Leningrad. The privation and terrors of the Siege of Leningrad can’t be overstated. It was a nine hundred day siege. And Stalin bungled it so badly that people in Petersberg were also in bad shape. There was starvation and cannibalism and lots of people freezing to death. And my grandmother — this 12-year-old girl — was digging civil defense trenches in the frozen ground; and hauling bodies and throwing them out of fifteen story windows because they were too weak to haul them down the stairs. She was going to apartments where people had died and throwing them down, and then scraping them up off the ground. And she was seeing people who’d been rendered by cannibal black marketeers – who had parts of their body sliced off to sell on the black market.

They were the most amazing, incredible stories. And it got me thinking about writing about this as an allegory. At the same time, I’ve been doing all this work on copyright and related rights with developing nations, and with what they call emerging economies like the former Soviet territories. And these countries are getting really shafted in international copyright negotiations. They’re being forced to sign on to these regimes that are totally out of step with what they need.

America became an industrial power by being a pirate nation. After the American revolution, America didn’t honor the copyrights or patents of anyone except Americans. If you were a European or British inventor, your stuff could be widely pirated in America. That’s how they got rich. Only after America became a net exporter of copyrighted goods did it start to enter into treaties with other countries whereby American inventors and authors would be protected abroad in exchange for those foreign authors being protected in America. But now you have these countries in Africa, in Asia, and in Eastern Europe, who are signing on to trade agreements with the U.S. where they basically promise to just take huge chunks of their GDP and export it to the U.S. It’s a kind of information feudalism, you know? Info-serfs.

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Sysadmins and I, Row-Boat on this year’s Locus poll

Locus Magazine has just posted its 2006 sf reader poll, looking once again to take the temperature of the audience for science fiction around the world. In addition to the standard demographic questions, Locus always asks for votes on its recommended reading list, and going over that list, I’m amazed by how many great books and stories came out in 2006 — it was a real vintage year.

I’m also proud to note that two of my stories, I, Row-Boat and When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth made the recommended list and are eligible for your votes!

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