Noah Brewer just successfully defended his MA English thesis Re-Makers: The Novel in Digital Collaborative Space at the University of Georgia. As the title implies, the piece is about my novel Makers. It’s a smart piece of work, and I’m both tickled and honored.

My latest Locus column, “A Prose By Any Other Name,” is a state-of-the-project report on my longrunning habit of writing science fiction stories with the same titles as famous books, and the interesting things I’ve discovered about creativity and my subconscious along the way.

The more I thought about writing stories with ‘‘borrowed’’ titles, the more interesting it all got. Every time I thought about a famous title – one I hated, one I loved, one I had mixed feelings about – I found my subconscious simmering and then bubbling over with ideas. Stories – more so than novels – are often the product of odd subconscious associations. I’ll see something, I’ll see something else, the two will rub together, and wham, there’s a story idea crystallizing in my mind, and off I go to find a keyboard.

But for every story fragment that finds a complementary fragment to bond with and form into an idea, there are dozens of lonely haploids, grains of potential that never find another grain to join and synthesize with. Seven years into the project, the single most significant and reliable trait of ‘‘title’’ stories is that the titles exert a powerful gravity on story fragments, aggregating them into full-blown inspiration.

A Prose By Any Other Name

My latest Guardian column, “Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers,” looks at the wider consequences of Tor Books’ dropping DRM on its ebooks, and what it would mean for writers and publishers if DRM was dropped across the industry:

oat.

Back when ebook sales began to kick off, most major publishers were still DRM believers — or at least, not overly skeptical of the claims of DRM vendors. They viewed the use of DRM as “better than nothing”.

When queried on the competitive implications of giving control over their business relationships to DRM vendors, they were sanguine (if not utterly dismissive). They perceived “converting ebooks” as a technical challenge beyond the average book buyer. For the absence of DRM to make any kind of difference in the marketplace, they believed that book buyers would have to download and install a special program to let them convert Kindle books to display on a Nook (or vice-versa), and they perceived this to be very unlikely.

But it’s only the widespread presence of DRM that makes “converting ebooks” into a technical challenge. Your browser “converts” all sorts of graphic formats — GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc — without ever calling your attention to it. You need to take some rather extraordinary steps to find out which format of the graphics on your screen right now are using. Unless you’re a web developer, you probably don’t even know what the different formats are, nor what their technical differences are. And you don’t need to.

Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers

I’m incredibly chuffed to learn that the Japanese edition of Little Brother is up for this year’s Seiun award, along with Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl, Mieville’s The City & the City, Wilson’s Chronoliths, Delany’s Dhalgren and Ballad’s Millennium People.