Rebecca Nguyen is a high-school senior who is a fan of my young adult novels. Recently, she read my book Makers and liked it so much that she wrote a great review of it, which she placed with the Poughkeepsie Journal. It’s an incisive review, and I’m very grateful to Rebecca for it. Thank you, Rebecca! I hope the Journal gives you more reviewing work in the future — you’re very good at it!
Monthly Archives::
January 2014
Here’s a reading of my latest Locus column, Cheap Writing Tricks, which discusses the mysterious business of why stories are satisfying, and how to make them so:
Plots are funny things. In the real world, stuff is always happening, but it’s not a plot. People live. People die. People are made glorious or miserable. Things eagerly awaited are realized, or hopes are cruelly dashed. Love is gained; love is lost. But all these things are not a plot – they lack the fundamental tidiness and orderliness that makes a story a story.
In fiction-land, stories have beginnings, middles and ends. They have dramatic tension, which rises to a climax towards the end of the story, and then roll on a while longer, into denouement. A plot is what you get when you draw a line around a set of circumstances and say, ‘‘These things are all part of one story, and they comprise its beginning, middle and end, and its arc from low tension to high. This moment here is the climax of this story.’’
That line is wholly arbitrary, of course – your personal life-story’s climax is merely a passing moment in someone else’s arc – but the really weird thing is that a story that lacks this arbitrariness feels arbitrary. A bunch of things that happen without any curation or pruning away of extraneous moments do not a story make, despite the fact that this is how the world actually works.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
Rebecca Nguyen is a high-school senior who is a fan of my young adult novels. Recently, she read my book Makers and liked it so much that she wrote a great review of it, which she placed with the Poughkeepsie Journal. It’s an incisive review, and I’m very grateful to Rebecca for it. Thank you, Rebecca! I hope the Journal gives you more reviewing work in the future — you’re very good at it!
Yesterday, FirstSecond formally announced the publication of In Real Life, a graphic novel about gaming and gold farming for young adults based on my award-winning story Anda’s Game, adapted by Jen Wang, creator of the amazing graphic novel Koko Be Good. Jen did an incredible job with the adaptation.
Kotaku conducted a Q&A with Jen and me about the book and its themes, and lavishly illustrated it with art and panels from the book:
The book touches on points that some people who play video games don’t want to think about, like the social attitudes or economic politics surrounding the delivery and maintenance of these experiences. The reluctance happens because it’s not easy to think about these things. “I am as guilty of this as anyone is. It doesn’t feel good to think about it. I think that life in the modern world embodies all kinds of contradictions that are difficult to face,” Doctorow said over e-mail. “We don’t decide to abandon our principles in a rush—rather, they slide away in a series of incremental steps, each of which seems like a reasonable compromise based on the LAST compromise.”
“We are most capable of detecting relative differences. Once you’ve made a little compromise, another little compromise seems like not much, and another, and another. No one wants to admit that the fun bit of plastic he unboxed from Amazon this morning is awash in invisible blood, especially because, as an individual, there’s nothing he can do about the blood, and not buying the thing doesn’t make it any less bloody. So you draw the curtains.”
Gold farming is the kind of thing that captured the public imagination for a while and is now accepted as par for the course in massively online games. When asked why he’d want to re-visit the practice now, Doctorow said that “science fiction isn’t about the future, it’s always about the present.” “When you contemplate the microscale phenomenon of a world-in-a-bottle like an MMO and the toy economy within it, it equips you with a graspable metaphor for understanding the macroscale world of monetary policy. In other words: thinking about gold farming is a gateway drug to thinking about money itself.”
In Real Life [Amazon]
The Kitschies are a British award for science fiction and fantasy; every year they choose some marvellous books to honour. This year, I’m proud and pleased announce that they’ve shortlisted the UK editions of my novels Pirate Cinema and Homeland for the “Inky Tentacle” award for best cover. Both covers were designed by the studio Amazing15 for my British publishers, Titan Books. I’m indebted to the judging panel and the Kitchie volunteers — thank you!
The Kitschies are a British award for science fiction and fantasy; every year they choose some marvellous books to honour. This year, I’m proud and pleased announce that they’ve shortlisted the UK editions of my novels Pirate Cinema and Homeland for the “Inky Tentacle” award for best cover. Both covers were designed by the studio Amazing15 for my British publishers, Titan Books. I’m indebted to the judging panel and the Kitchie volunteers — thank you!
I’ll be returning to SXSW Interactive this March for the first time in more than five years, to interview Pulitzer-winning journalist Barton Gellman, who is one of the journalists who’s been entrusted with some of the Snowden NSA leaks. We’re doing a presentation called “Snowden 2.0: A Field Report From the NSA Archives,” which follows an address by Glenn Greenwald. We’re speaking on March 10 — I hope to see you!
Here’s a reading of my latest Guardian column, Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful, about the social and political factors that make all the difference when choosing technologies.
Banshee fails gracefully because its authors don’t attempt any lock-in. When I find myself diverging from the design philosophy of Banshee to the extent that I want to use a rival system to manage my music, Banshee is designed to assist me in switching. Unlike Apple, Microsoft, and others, who treat you as a product to be bought and sold – and who have engineered laws like the DMCA to make it illegal to convert your files for use with rival products – Banshee is designed to work with me until we part ways, and then to gracefully bow out and let me move on to someone else’s version of this particular bit of plumbing.
A good example of this is Amazon’s MP3 store. Until recently, it worked beautifully. I’d pay a reasonable price for my music, and Amazon would let me download it to my computer with as little fuss as possible. Recently, that changed. Amazon wants to promote its cloud drive services, so now it requires that you lock yourself into an Amazon-proprietary downloader to get your MP3s. The Amazon MP3 store started life with a lot of rhetoric about liberation (they made t-shirts that trumpeted “DRM: Don’t Restrict Me!”) that contrasted their offering with the locked-in world of the iTunes Store. Now that Amazon has won enough marketshare in the MP3 world, it’s using that position to try and gain ground in the world of cloud computing – at the expense of its customers.
Lucky for me, MP3 is an open format, so MP3 investments fail well. The fact that I bought hundreds of pounds’ worth of music from Amazon doesn’t stop me from taking my business elsewhere now that they’ve decided to treat me as a strategic asset instead of a customer. By contrast, I was once unwise enough to spend thousands on audiobooks from Amazon’s Audible subsidiary (the major player in the audiobook world), kidding myself that the DRM wouldn’t matter. But the day I switched to Ubuntu, I realised that I was going to have to spend a month running three old Macs around the clock in order to re-record all those audiobooks and get them out of their DRM wrappers.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting livingproofbrewcast.com. In his free time he makes “Beer Jewelry” and “Odd Musical Furniture.” He often “meditates while reading cookbooks.”
My latest Guardian column, “Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful,” talks about evaluating technology based on more than its features — rather, on how you relate to it, and how it relates to you. In particular, I try to make the case for giving especial care to what happens when your technology fails:
Graceful failure is so much more important than fleeting success, but it’s not a feature or a design spec. Rather, it’s a relationship that I have with the technology I use and the systems that are used to produce it.This is not asceticism. Advocates of software freedom are sometimes accused of elevating ideology over utility. But I use the software I do out of a purely instrumental impulse. The things I do with my computer are the soul of my creative, professional, and personal life. My computer has videos and stills and audio of my daughter’s early life, rare moments of candid memoir from my grandmothers, the precious love letters that my wife and I sent to one another when we courted, the stories I’ve poured my heart and soul into, the confidential and highly sensitive whistleblower emails I’ve gotten from secret sources on investigative pieces; the privileged internal communications of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a law office to whom I have a duty of care as part of my fellowship (and everything else besides).
Knowing that I can work with this stuff in a way that works is simply not enough. I need to know that when my computer breaks, when the software is discontinued, when my computer is lost or stolen, when a service provider goes bust or changes ownership and goes toxic, when a customs officer duplicates my hard-drive at border, when my survivors attempt to probate my data – when all of that inevitable stuff happens, that my digital life will be saved. That data that should remain confidential will not leak. That data that should be preserved will be. That files that should be accessible can be accessed, without heroic measures to run obsolete software on painstakingly maintained superannuated hardware.
Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful
(Image: Smashed, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from sarahbaker’s photostream)
Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson converted my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (from the collection Overclocked) into .mobi and .epub for easy viewing on an e-reader or mobile device. I probably get more fan mail for Sysadmins than for any other story, and it won the Locus Award the year it came out (it was later adapted to comics by JC Vaughn for the IDW book Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now). Give it a read!
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