My novel deals with a group of people setting about to “unwire” Toronto by deploying free WiFi networks across the city. Wireless Toronto is just such a group in real life, and they’ve just launched their website. Truth is stranger than fiction!
Wireless Toronto is a not-for-profit group dedicated to bringing no-fee wireless Internet access to Toronto. Our aim is to encourage the growth of wireless networking and to build community in interesting and innovative ways.
Popular Science, June 2005
I have an editorial on Popular Science’s website about Grokster, the Supreme Court case on peer-to-peer file-sharing whose decision came down today:
This decision won’t kill P2P sharing. Engineering students write P2P software in 11 lines of code as class assignments. The majority of Internet users use file-sharing software, and that’s not going to stop, no matter how many lawsuits against customers and companies the labels win. P2P will outlast today’s generation of technophobic record execs who are steering their companies to slow, spectacular suicide.
But what today’s decision will kill is American innovation. Chinese and European firms can get funding and ship products based on plans that aren’t fully thoughtcrime-compliant, while their American counterparts will need to convince everyone from their bankers to the courts that they’ve taken all imaginable measures to avoid inducing infringement. This is good news if you’re an American corporate attorney worried about job security, but not if you’re about to invent a new way to enjoy content. Both sides went to the court hoping for clarity on what is and isn’t legal in P2P, and instead, the Court tipped a fresh load of claymores into the decade’s most perilous legal minefield.
Michael Parenti has put together an amazing short video based on Someone Comes to Town. He says, “Lets just say that i can’t agree with him more in his framing of the freedom of access debate in a zeitgeist fairy tale of good vs evil remniscent of the science fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis.”
Fine modern fantasy from up-and-coming SF writer (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003) and happening Web editor (boingboing.net) Doctorow, with the potential to please both SF and mainstream readers.
This chimera of a novel takes a plot with the geek appeal of a Neal Stephenson story and combines it with a touching family tale built out of absurdist elements that could have come from Italo Calvino or Kurt Vonnegut. We first meet Alan in Toronto, after he’s made some money running a series of vaguely bohemian enterprises—bookstores, used-clothing stores, etc. He has painstakingly renovated a house in the student district as the perfect setting for writing, but he’s distracted by his neighbors, primarily the sadistic punk Krishna, who is immediately hostile, and Krishna’s girlfriend, Mimi, an attractive young woman who’s revealed to have a set of wings, which Krishna regularly hacks off so that Mimi might pass among us. Both recognize Alan as something other than normal, and in the story’s other thread, they’re proven right. His mother was a washing machine, his father the mountain in which he grew up. Among his brothers are an island and three nesting-doll-like creatures, all of whom help Alan murder their resentful and dangerous brother David. Alan is further distracted when he meets Kurt, a techno-punk slowly installing wireless access points throughout the city to provide universal free Internet, a scheme that immediately engages Alan, who becomes the co-mastermind. Crisis blossoms when, with Krishna as his Renfrew, decomposing brother David returns to seek revenge, first by murdering the brothers, then targeting Mimi, now with Alan, and Kurt.
The Book Standard has a great article on the use of Creative Commons licenses for electronic distribution of commercial print books, and the growing schism between the kinds of publishers and authors who complain about Google and Amazon’s services for searching the whole text of books and the kinds of publishers and writers who celebrate it.
“I don’t want to condone piracy,” says Hayden of Tor Books. “But in general I find it not so much appalling as encouraging. We’re the genre that the readers care enough about to be this obsessive about. I want to do something with this, not fight against it.”
Doctorow agrees. “Think about the care that goes into pirating a book!” he says. “That person has not done that because he hates the author and wishes to do the author harm, but because he loves the work and loves the author. Calling that person a thief is about the most suicidal thing you can do.” And, as Stross points out, “the availability of a free e-book actually undercuts the profitability of pirate paper or electronic editions.”
Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, the leading publisher of computer books in America, says his company certainly does encounter piracy, the more so since their work attracts the most technically savvy people in the world. The books of theirs that sell the best are the books that are most often pirated (and the most shoplifted, incidentally), but this doesn’t stop those books from selling well. “I’m sure there are people who pass around the links and use the pirate links,” says O’Reilly. “But in our experience they’re not the people who are likely to buy the books anyway.”
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a perfect example of why we shouldn’t be trying to stuff books into genres (although I will say this book is definitely InfernoKrusher). This wonderful, loopy, deep, moving story has a mystery, or maybe lots of mysteries (including the mystery of the human condition), there are a couple of romances, (not to mention the love of life and technology) and there are wonderful, intoxicating, flights of fantasy.
I’m delivering a midnight keynote at this year’s ADHOC conference (ADHOC is the new name for the old MacHack conferences) in Detroit, July 27-31. Hope to see you there!
The Advanced Developers Hands On Conference (ADHOC) is an annual event that provides a unique environment for computer programmers, engineers, students, and technology enthusiasts. At ADHOC they learn the cutting-edge technologies of the day not only from experts in classroom and conference sessions but also from each other in intense coding marathons. The conference is well rooted in the Macintosh platform – it is also called MacHack – but over the last few years the conference has grown to encompass other technologies, such as UNIX, open source, mobile devices, and more…
The showcase is an intensive, multi-day contest where you try to make something to impress everyone else at the conference. Ideally, you start it when you arrive, and you finish sometime before you go on stage to show it. Many of the coolest bits of software that came out for the Mac started in the Showcase. And, because everyone wants to see something cool, if you need the help from a programming expert who just happens to be at the show, you can ask them, and you’ll learn what you need. You can learn more about the Mac OS in a very short amount of time just by trying to write a showcase entry.
Tim Bennett has done a fantastic text remix of my novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. He says, “The text was generated by separating the novel’s sentences onto separate lines. Then I sorted them alphabetically from the last letter, to the first, so that sentences would cluster in roughly rhyming groups. From that process I refined the rhymes and constructed a short narrative.”
The sun was warm on my skin, and the flowers were in bloom
I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin
I lurched out of the bed, naked, and thumped to the bathroom
I nearly started crying right thenI foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink
Lil shot me a look – she looked ready to wring my neck
She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk
I was an emotional wreckI was hyperventilating, light-headed
“Lil,” I said, then stopped
I hated how pathetic I sounded
Lil folded her arms and glaredI threw my glass at the wall
She went nuts
Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall
I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn’t have the guts
Tim Bennett has done a fantastic text remix of Down and Out. He says, “The text was generated by separating the novel’s sentences onto separate lines. Then I sorted them alphabetically from the last letter, to the first, so that sentences would cluster in roughly rhyming groups. From that process I refined the rhymes and constructed a short narrative.”
The sun was warm on my skin, and the flowers were in bloom
I woke disoriented and crabby, without my customary morning jolt of endorphin
I lurched out of the bed, naked, and thumped to the bathroom
I nearly started crying right thenI foraged a slice of bread with cheese and noticed a crumby plate in the sink
Lil shot me a look – she looked ready to wring my neck
She set her mug down with a harder-than-necessary clunk
I was an emotional wreckI was hyperventilating, light-headed
“Lil,” I said, then stopped
I hated how pathetic I sounded
Lil folded her arms and glaredI threw my glass at the wall
She went nuts
Now I wanted to hit something besides the wall
I looked inside myself, and I saw that I didn’t have the guts
