Dr. Graham J. Murphy, a prof in the Cultural Studies and Department of English at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, has written a swell academic paper about my novel Eastern Standard Tribe. The essay, “Somatic Networks and Molecular Hacking in Eastern Standard Tribe,” was originally published in Extrapolation Vol.48, Issue 1 (2007), from The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College. Graham and his publisher have given me permission to put a PDF of the article up, too!

Art’s Tribal activities as an agent-provocateur are obviously Doctorow’s
satirical critique of a wired marketplace that regularly has the end-user tied to the whims of a hostile corporate culture. Admittedly, Art is initially part of the end-user problem because his loyalty to the ESTribe requires his work at V/DT to be founded on maximizing end-user hostility. It is not until he is in the sanatorium that he has an epiphany that his life has been wasted. After roof-Art has been hurt while trying to escape off the roof, he is introduced to Dr. Szandor, a medical doctor who stands diametrically opposed to the sanatorium’s psychiatrists. Unlike the mental-health practitioners who have repeatedly ignored Art’s claims of wrongful incarceration and have opted to put him on medications that leave him in a drugged stupor, Dr. Szandor actually talks to Art and learns a great deal about the man. A key topic of discussion is the problems with mental-health facilities. During those discussions Art begins to sketch out potential alternatives to the sanatorium system that has him caged, a theoretical facility he dubs HumanCare. Dr. Szandor is noticeably impressed with Art’s acute vision of HumanCare while Art feels “a familiar swelling of pride. I like it when people understand how good I am at my job. Working at V/DT was hard on my ego: after all, my job there was to do a perfectly rotten job, to design the worst user experiences that plausibility would allow. God, did I really do that for two whole goddamned years?” (179). Art comes to recognize that the last two years of his life at V/DT have been a waste because his agent-provocateur mission, founded on end-user hostility and corporate stagnation, has stifled what amounts to his innate skills as a molecular hacker.

PDF Link

Evo Terra and the Podiobooks folks have posted the podiobook of my reading of Eastern Standard Tribe, my second novel.

Podiobooks are free audiobooks that are delivered to your podcast player in installments. Instead of getting a full ten hours of audio in one go, the story is sent to you in manageable chunks, on the schedule you set.

The raw audio for this podiobook came from my podcast, but the Podiobooks people have taken my readings and cleaned them up, cut out the intros, and equalized the levels across all the installments. It sounds dynamite.

The timing on this couldn’t be better — this is just in time for International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day, when Internet creators post free material for sharing and enjoying.

What’s more, this book also has the distinction of having been banned by the Mayor of Boston from Boston’s free WiFi network (Boing Boing is also banned!) I’m especially proud of this, since part of the book is set in Boston. I’m lucky to have been censored by the best.

Link

(Thanks, Evo and David!)

Inspired by the /shitlist chat command in my novel Eastern Standard Tribe, Ian modified his IRC client to add similar functionality:

I finished up a set of specially-crafted aliases for irssi that use the trigger.pl plugin to implement shitlist like so:11:59 -!- annoyingbastard [n=ianmeyer@dargo.trilug.org] has joined #frijole-test
12:00 < annoyingbastard> im so annoying
12:00 < annoyingbastard> blah blah blah
12:00 < annoyingbastard> !list
12:00 < annoyingbastard> wtf no warez?
12:00 [notice(#frijole-test)] annoyingbastard added to frijole’s shitlist
12:00 < annoyingbastard> [shitlisted]
12:00 < annoyingbastard> [shitlisted]
12:00 -!- annoyingbastard [n=ianmeyer@dargo.trilug.org] has left #frijole-test [“fucker…”]

Link

Here’s the first installment of the podcast of my second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, a novel of political intrigue among high-tech, sleep-deprived management consultants. This is my most ambitious podcasting project to date — I figure it’ll take 4-6 months to complete.

I’ve found a half-brick that was being used to hold down the tar paper around an exhaust-chimney. I should’ve used that to hold the door open, but it’s way the hell the other side of the roof, and I’d been really pleased with my little pebbly doorstop. Besides, I’m starting to suspect that the doorjamb didn’t fail, that it was sabotaged by some malevolently playful goon from the sanatorium. An object lesson or something.

I heft the brick. I release the brick. It falls, and falls, and falls, and hits the little blue fartmobile square on the trunk, punching a hole through the cheap aluminum lid.

And the fartmobile explodes. First there is a geyser of blue flame as the tank’s puncture wound jets a stream of ignited assoline skyward, and then it blows back into the tank and boom, the fartmobile is in one billion shards, rising like a parachute in an updraft. I can feel the heat on my bare, sun-tender skin, even from this distance.

Explosions. Partial nudity. Somehow, though, I know that this isn’t the climax.

MP3

Today’s Doonesbury strip has a nice, EST-like riff on timezone tribalism.

(Thanks, Mike!)

Many people have written to me with the news of Roadcasting, a technology that is very similar to the gimmick in Eastern Standard Tribe wherein cars stuck in traffic form ad-hoc peer-to-peer networks, sharing music among themselves (in truth, this idea came from my pal and former business partner, John Henson). It’s pretty cool to see stuff like this approaching reality, I tell you what.

It is a system, currently in prototype state, that allows anyone to have their own radio station, broadcasted among wirelessly capable devices, some in cars, in an ad-hoc wireless network. The system can become aware of individual preferences and is able to choose songs and podcasts that people want to hear, on their own devices and car stereos and in devices and car stereos around them.

Roadcasting provides a set of methods to transform radio into a community-driven interactive medium. Using collaborative filtering technologies, it enables rich passive and interactive experiences for ‘DJs’ and listeners in a way that has not previously been possible. Roadcasting matches you to radio stations that play the content that you want to hear.

Hee-YAW! My second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, is a finalist for this year’s Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. Last year, my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel.

Locus Magazine is the leading trade mag for science fiction, and the Locus Poll — from which the Locus Award nominees and winners are drawn — is the field’s popular award with the widest participation (wider even than the Hugos).

The Locus Award winners will be announced this July 4th weekend, at Calgary’s Westercon. Here’s the whole list of this year’s nominees (shockingly good company to be in, by the way):

Best Science Fiction Novel

The Algebraist, Iain M. Banks (Orbit)
Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow (Tor)
Forty Signs of Rain, Kim Stanley Robinson (HarperCollins UK; Bantam)
The Baroque Cycle: The Confusion; The System of the World, Neal Stephenson (Morrow)
Iron Sunrise, Charles Stross (Ace)

One of the coolest remixes that anyone’s done of my books has been the speed reader that Trevor Smith put together, which flashes the books one word at a time, at high speed, inside a Java applet. Though the words fly past so fast that they practically flicker, they are still readable — there’s some heretofore unsuspected talent buried in our brains for parsing sentences when rendered as rapid-fire flashcards.

Now Crutcher Dunnavant has adapted the speed-reader to run on Java-capable mobile phones, which makes sense: the screen on a handy is just the right size to show one word at a time.

(Thanks, Crutcher!)

Eastern Standard Tribe has made Locus Magazine’s recommended reading list for 2004, in such good company as Ian McDonald’s River of Gods and Bruce Sterling’s Zenith Angle. w00t!