Josh Swinehart made this cute procedural movie using my story Printcrime as a script. Cool!

Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Detective de Policía de Tercer Grado, Esfera NorteAmericana de Comercio, Tercer Distrito, Cuarta Prefectura, Segunda División (Parkdale) había tenido muchas aventuras en su distinguida carrera, atrapando a sinvergüenzas con una imbatible combinación de instinto y devoción al deber sin restricciones. Había sido condecorado en tres ocasiones distintas por su comandante y por el Gerente Regional de Armonía Social, y su madre mantenía un altar dedicado a sus recortes de prensa y menciones que ocupaba la mayoría de la atiborrada sala de estar de su apartamento en Steeles Avenue.

Aunque ninguna cantidad de técnica o devoción policial le era de utilidad en la tarea de de preparar a su hija de doce años para ir al colegio.

—Mueve el culo, jovencita, fuera de la cama, en pie, cagar-ducharse-afeitarse, o juro por dios que te sacudo hasta ponerte como un tomate y te saco por la puerta completamente desnuda, ¿capichi?

El montículo bajo las mantas gruñó y siseó.

—Eres un padre terrible—dijo—. Y nunca te he querido.

La voz sonaba indistinta, amortigüada por la almohada.

—Buah buah—dijo Arturo, examinando sus uñas—. Lamentarás haber dicho eso cuando haya muerto de cáncer.

El montículo, cuyo nombre era Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, echó a un lado las sábanas y se incorporó de un salto.

—¿Te estás muriendo de cáncer? ¿Es cáncer de testículos?—Ada aplaudía y daba grititos de alegría—¿Me puedo quedar con tus cosas?

Yo, robot

The first, from Donald Riggs at Drexel College in Philadelphia, contains links and supplementary material for students reading my second short story collection, Overclocked. Donald put the material together because Overclocked was Drexel’s book of the year, given to the entire freshman class (I visited campus in November and met with students, taught a writing program, and gave a lecture). He’s got a ton of good supplementary links and glossaries explaining the technical and genre terms for a lay audience.

The second, from Deborah Menkart at the Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People ’s History project is a recommendation for teachers whose students are working with Howard Zinn’s brilliant “Peoples’ History” books to include Little Brother in their works.

Coming from a family of teachers (both parents, brother) and serving on faculty at two universities at present (Open University, UK and University of Waterloo, Canada), I’m always intensely gratified when educators use my material with their students.

John did a wicked-cool set of data-visualizations of the text of my story Anda’s Game: “I picked terms for the trees that were relevant to the themes of the story – gold, for in-game items and Fahrenheit, which is a clan in the story.”

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