Dragonpage radio have recorded a podcast with me about the Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town and it went live today. I love doing interviews with these guys — they’re really knowledgeable and fun. Here’s the MP3 link

Joel “on Software” Splosky put together a Best of Software Writing anthology filled with articles he’s cadged from blogs and other web-writing (he kindly included my Boing Boing post on Notice and Takedown regimes in Canada). The contributor list is fantastic:

Ken Arnold,
Leon Bambrick.
Michael Bean,
Rory Blyth,
Adam Bosworth,
danah boyd,
Raymond Chen,
Kevin Cheng and Tom Chi,
Cory Doctorow,
ea_spouse,
Bruce Eckel,
Paul Ford,
Paul Graham,
John Gruber,
Gregor Hohpe,
Ron Jeffries,
Eric Johnson,
Eric Lippert,
Michael Lopp,
Larry Osterman,
Mary Poppendieck,
Rick Schaut,
Aaron Swartz,
Clay Shirky,
Eric Sink,
why the lucky stiff

The book is out now — I’m looking forward to getting my copy!

The software development world desperately needs better writing. If I have to read another 2000 page book about some class library written by 16 separate people in broken ESL, I’m going to flip out. If I see another hardback book about object oriented models written with dense faux-academic pretentiousness, I’m not going to shelve it any more in the Fog Creek library: it’s going right in the recycle bin. If I have to read another spirited attack on Microsoft’s buggy code by an enthusiastic nine year old Trekkie on Slashdot, I might just poke my eyes out with a sharpened pencil. Stop it, stop it, stop it!

On July 24, I’ll be appearing in the online world Second Life to do a book signing/launch for my new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. The Second Lifers have been conducting a contest to see who can come up with the coolest in-game programmed book-object to decant the novel into, and they’ve picked a winner:

Falk Bergman was the first to bring me by to have a look at his prototype in development, a giant book positioned next to a seat. Sitting on it automatically fixes your camera position in place, to give you the best possible view of the book.

“The viewer in-world itself is very simple,” Falk tells me modestly. “It is basically a shopping agent with two displays that hooks into Page Up and Down [on the keyboards] for changing the pages.”

Next Wednesday, June 29, I’m speaking on Europe’s coming Broadcast Flag in Cambridge, England, at the Communications Research Network/Communications Futures Program Bi-Annual Conference. Attendance is free — hope to see you there!

At the Plenary Day on Wednesday 28 June, delegates will hear the latest results from the CRN and CFP working groups on Broadband, QoS, Viral, DoS-Resistant, Core-Edge, Spectrum, Security and Photonics. The Plenary day will be of particular interest to CEOs, CTOs and board level decision makers, looking to get up to speed on the communication industry’s cutting-edge in the shortest possible time.

Cory’s novel is out today!

Today, my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town ships to bookstores. It’s another fine Tor hardcover, with jaw-droppingly beautiful cover art by genius Dave McKean to boot. This is a physical artifact worth owning. Hell, buy two.

As with my first and second novels, I’ve posted the entire text of this book online under a Creative Commons license that allows the unlimited, noncommercial redistribution of the text. You can send it around, paste it into a chat, beam it to a friend’s PDA, or print out a chapter to hand out in the university common room. Like Woody Guthrie said, “Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

The whole point of giving away electronic books is to experiment with electronic text and spot where the new opportunities for earning a writer’s living lie — working with my audience, not against them. So with every release, I’ve tried some experimentation. This book is no exception.

This book is the first novel to employ the new Creative Commons Developing Nations License. That’s a license that lets anyone living in a country that’s not on the World Bank’s list of high-income countries treat the book as if it were in the public domain. If you live in a developing nation, you can print your own editions of this book and sell them, you can make your own movies, radio plays, translations and whatever else you can think of, charge whatever the traffic will bear for them, and never give me a penny or ask my permission (though I hope you’ll drop me a line and let me know what you’re up to so I can keep up on the book’s spread!). The only limitation on this right is that you may only export your works to other developing nations: the rich nations where my paying customers live are strictly off-limits.

I’m doing three signings for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in the first two weeks of July. The first two are in the Detroit region (I’m spending July 4 week in East Lansing, Michigan teaching at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop), and the third is in Toronto, at BakkaPhoenix books, the oldest sf bookstore in the country, where I once worked. I hope to see you at these!

July 5, 7PM: Archives Bookshop, 517 West Grand River, East Lansing, MI, 48823, (517)332-8444

July 7, 7:30PM: Schuler Books and Music, 1982 West Grand River Avenue, Okemos, MI, 48864, (517)349-8840

July 11, 7PM: BakkaPhoenix Books, 697 Queen St West, Toronto, ON, M6J 1E6, (416)963-9993

Also, Second Life players can attend an in-game signing on Sunday, July 24 at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT/10pm London time.

Here’s the spanking-new website for the book. I hope you’ll spare a moment to take a look. This is the longest thing I’ve ever written, and the early reviews have been stunning. I’m as proud of this as I could be, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it:

SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.

– Gene Wolfe