News

Craphound in German

Christian Spließ just posted this fan-translation of my story Craphound, my very first professional publication! Like pretty much everything I’ve published, Craphound is under a CC license, as is this translation. Thanks, Christian!

Craphound hatte für einen verfluchten dreckigen Alien-Bastard ein abgefahrenes Garagenflohmarkt-Karma. Er war einfach zu gut darin aus einem rasenden Fluss der Nutzlosigkeit das einzige Körnchen Gold herauszuwaschen als dass ich ihn nicht hätte mögen können – oder jedenfalls respektieren. Aber dann fand er die Cowboy-Truhe. Für mich waren das zwei Monatsmieten und für Craphound nichts als ein verrückter Alien-Kitsch-Fetisch. Also tat ich das Undenkbare. Ich verletzte den Code. Ich geriet in einen Bietkrieg mit einem Kumpel. Lasst euch nicht erzählen Frauen würde Freundschaften vergiften; laut meiner Erfahrung heilen die Wunden von Auseinandersetzungen über Frauen recht schnell; Auseinandersetzungen über Schrott hinterlassen nichts als verbrannte Erde.

Link

0wnz0red in Nebula Showcase 2005 Anthology

My story 0wnz0red, which was originally published on Salon and later reprinted in my collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, was nominated for the 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

It has just been reprinted in Nebula Awards Showcase 2005, a fantastic assemblage of the best of recent Nebula-nominated and Nebula-winning stories, edited by Jack Dann.

Acceptance speech from the Sunburst Awards

Nalo Hopkinson sent me this photo of my pal and collaborator Karl Schroeder accepting the Sunburst Award (presented by Michelle Sagara) for my short story collection, A Place So Foriegn and Eight More on my behalf at last night’s ceremony at Toronto’s Merril Collection sf library. Here’s the speech he read for me:

It is a cliche to note that receiving an award conveys an honour upon its recipient, but this is a stupendous honour and I would be remiss if I failed to tell you all how mightily chuffed I am. I am deeply sorry that I am not able to be there tonight: I am with you in spirit.

The list of people who deserve to be thanked for this is long indeed: the friends and colleagues; the fans and readers; the editors and critics; the collaborators and the writers who inspired me — and the jury, them too! My most sincere thanks to all of you.

No writer is an island, no idea is original, no effort is a solo effort. We stand upon the shoulders of giants, we collaborate with our colleagues and with the immortal words of our dead literary ancestors. Literature — indeed, all human endeavor — is dignified and uplifted through collaboration and cooperation. We sit atop a great erected infrastructure of human invention and effort, all of it embodied in the bricks and boards that surround us, and, most importantly, in the traditional knowledge that allows each generation to improve upon the bricks and boards of the last one.

The writer is engaged in dialog with the world and with posterity. Our words go on to form a layer of the substrate of human creation. Those who tell us that our words, our art and our posterity are best served with strong locks and high fences are *not on our side*. No writer could pen a single word but for the rich humus of public domain effort with which we garden our notions and conceits.

So thank you all, and thanks most of all to our ancestors, the bringers of fire and the inventors of the wheel, the Judith Merrils and the Phyllis Gotleibs, the Gilgameshes and the golems, the Turings and the Teslas. Thanks to the brave pirates who continue to preserve our posterity in the face of outrageous insult to creation. Thanks to the readers and to you all.

Sunburst Award ceremony in Toronto, Sept 23

My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, won the Sunburst Award for the best Canadian sf book of the year. There’s a
ceremony commemorating the event on the 23d of September in Toronto, at the Merril Collection. I (really!) wish I could be there, but I’m committed to speaking at a UN meeting on Free/Open Source Software in Geneva on that day, so Karl Schroeder, the brilliant author of Permanence and Ventus, will accept on my behalf.

SUNBURST AWARD CEREMONY
September 23, 2004  7-9pm
Merrill Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy, Lilian H.
Smith Branch of the Toronto Public Library
239 College Street, 3rd Floor, Toronto
for more info: (416) 393-7748
The event is open to the public and free of charge. Refreshments will be
served.

(Thanks Peter!)

I won the Sunburst Award!

A Place So Foreign and Eight More, has won the 2004 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, winning out over such worthy competitors as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake. I am bursting with pride.

The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic is a
prized and juried award. Based on excellence of writing, it will
be presented annually to a Canadian writer who has had published
a speculative fiction novel or book-length collection of
speculative fiction any time during the previous calendar year.
Named after the first novel by Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first
published authors of contemporary Canadian science fiction, the
award consists of: a cash award of $1000 and a medallion which
incorporates a specially designed “Sunburst” logo. The winner
will receive his or her award in fall 2004.

Another chance to get a copy shipped to your door

Back when I lived in San Francisco, the nice people at Borderlands Books did this super-cool thing where they’d take orders for my books, along with details for personal inscriptions, then get me to sign them when I dropped round the store, and ship them for free within the US (and for a modest fee elsewhere).

Of course, that became a lot less practical last winter, when I moved to London. But you’ve got another chance to get a signed, inscribed book shipped right to your door: I’m swinging briefly through SF in June (and I do mean *briefly* — sorry, no time to socialize) and I’m gonna stop by Borderlands and sign any stock that they have. If you get your order in before June 15, I’ll sign your copy that week and you’ll have it before July 1 — pretty cool!

Borderlands’ contact info is

866 Valencia St.
San Francisco CA 94110 USA
415 824-8203
888 893-4008

Call or email them with your order and payment details and they’ll get you sorted out.

Place So Foreign up for the Sunburst Award

My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, has been shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, a juried prize that goes to the best Canadian science fiction book each year. I am pleased as PUNCH.

Down and Out relicensed today

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn’t.

So here we are, just a little over a year later, and I am currently, at this moment, standing on a stage at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, delivering a talk called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, in which I lay out the case for what I’ve done and explain the myraid ways in which the sky has not fallen on me, and just about now, I’m announcing what’ sin this blog post:

That I am re-licensing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, effective today, under the terms of one of the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which explicitly allows anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptation of my book s/he can think of: translations, radio plays, movies, sequels, fanfic, slashfic…you get the picture.

I can’t wait to see what you-all make of this. Surprise me, please!

My ETCON talk, in the Public Domain

I have just given a talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Confernece called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, which is something of an anomaly for me in three ways:

1. I wrote out this talk, word for word, in advance of the presentation
2. I am releasing that written text as a free, public domain file, right now, moments before I get off the stage

So here’s the text of that talk, dedicated to the Public Domain, for you to do with what you will.

This isn’t to say that copyright is bad, but that there’s such a thing as good copyright and bad copyright, and that sometimes, too much good copyright is a bad thing. It’s like chilis in soup: a little goes a long way, and too much spoils the broth.

From the Luther Bible to the first phonorecords, from radio to the pulps, from cable to MP3, the world has shown that its first preference for new media is its “democratic-ness” — the ease with which it can reproduced.

(And please, before we get any farther, forget all that business about how the Internet’s copying model is more disruptive than the technologies that proceeded it. For Christ’s sake, the Vaudeville performers who sued Marconi for inventing the radio had to go from a regime where they had *one hundred percent* control over who could get into the theater and hear them perform to a regime where they had *zero* percent control over who could build or acquire a radio and tune into a recording of them performing. For that matter, look at the difference between a monkish Bible and a Luther Bible — next to that phase-change, Napster is peanuts)

Eastern Standard Tribe ships

My second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe starts shipping today — it should be showing up in bookstores any day now.

As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first novel, I’ve made the whole text of the novel available as a free download in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license — and I’ve written a short essay explaining why I’ve done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I’d be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.

I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.

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