Last year, IDW published a collection of six comics adapted from my short stories called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now, all of these stories also licensed under Creative Commons. Now, Robot Comics, a firm that provides comics for Android mobile phones, has begun to make the comics available free under the same CC license for mobile phones, beginning with my story Anda’s Game (which was also included in my short story collection Overclocked, and podcasted as a reading by Alice Taylor of Wonderland. The adaptation is by the excellent Dara Naraghi, illustrated by Esteve Polls.

The story is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two — netting them about $0.02 an hour — but this is a very different proposition indeed.

Cory Doctorow’s Anda’s Game

Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was
too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of
uselessness for me not to like him — respect him, anyway. But then he found the
cowboy trunk. It was two months’ rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly
alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.

So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a
buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience,
wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind
but scorched earth.

Craphound spotted the sign — his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton,
gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway
in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on
to the CBC’s summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old
radio dramas: “The Shadow,” “Quiet Please,” “Tom Mix,” “The Crypt-Keeper” with
Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a
radio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truck
rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound’s breather. My arm
was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said “Turn
around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!”

Craphound on Internet Archive, MP3 download

See also: Super Man and the Bugout reading: what if Superman had been a nice Jewish boy from Toronto

Krimen nga pang-imprenta (Hiligaynon), Crima Printării (Romanian)

Filipino fan-translation

European Portuguese fan-translation

See also: Printcrime in Portuguese

Os tiras destruiram a impressora do meu pai quando eu tinha oito anos. Eu me lembro do cheiro quente de rolopack no microondas, do olhar de concentração furiosa do papi enquanto ele a enchia de geleca fresca e da sensação de recém tirado do forno dos objetos que saíam dela.

Os tiras entraram brandindo os cacetetes, um deles lendo o mandato através de um megafone. Um dos clientes do papi tinha vendido ele. A polícia pagou em drogas de alto nível – anabolizantes, suplementos de memória, aceleradores metabólicos. O tipo de coisa que custa uma fortuna na farmácia; o tipo de coisa que você pode imprimir em casa, se não se importar com o risco da sua cozinha se encher de corpos grandes e musculosos com cacetetes balançando no ar acertando tudo e todos em seu caminho.

Printcrime – Copie esta história

The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals — performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.

Printcrime in 3D

(Thanks, Greg!)

Link

(Thanks, William!)

See also: Locus Award winners announced — After the Siege is best novella 2008!

Many thanks to all who voted for this story, to Eileen Gunn for publishing the story and accepting the award on my behalf, and especially to my grandmother, Valentina Rachman, for sharing her stories of life as a child-soldier in the civil defense corps during the Siege of Leningrad.

SF NOVEL
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

FANTASY NOVEL
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK
Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

FIRST NOVEL
Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz)

NOVELLA
“After the Siege”, Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007)

NOVELETTE
“The Witch’s Headstone”, Neil Gaiman (Wizards)

SHORT STORY
“A Small Room in Koboldtown”, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Apr/May 2007)

COLLECTION
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Connie Willis (Subterranean)

ANTHOLOGY
The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos)

NON-FICTION
Breakfast in the Ruins, Barry N. Malzberg (Baen)

ART BOOK
The Arrival, Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic)

EDITOR
Ellen Datlow

MAGAZINE
F&SF

PUBLISHER
Tor

ARTIST
Charles Vess

Link

Woohoo! I’m on the Locus Award ballot — twice! Once for Best Novella for my story After the Siege and again for Best Collection for my book Overclocked. Thanks to everyone who voted for me!

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