Jamie from Vodo writes, “We’ve launched Otherworlds, our first indie sci-fi bundle! This pay-what-you-want, crossmedia collection includes the graphic novel collecting Cory’s own ‘Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now’, Jim Munroe’s micro-budget sci-fi satire ‘Ghosts With Shit Jobs’, Robert Venditti’s New York Times Bestselling graphic novel ‘The Surrogates’, and Amber Benson/Adam Busch’s alien office farce, ‘Drones’. Check out the whole bundle and choose your own price 5% of earnings go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation!”

I love Vodo — they produce gorgeous, high-quality science fiction shows that are CC licensed; each episode is released once donors have pitched in to pay for it. It’s a business-model that lets them make good art based on generosity, trust and working with the Internet, instead of stamping their feet and insisting that it change to suit their needs.

Otherworlds

Robo Pastierovic has created Advanced Comic Book Format (ACBF), a free/open format for online comic books. ACBF has a lot of cool features: support for creator metadata; per-panel/page definitions; multiple text-layers for multiple languages; text formatting and style data; auto-indexing and more. The format is CC-BY-SA, and can be found on Launchpad, along with GPL’ed viewers for GNU/Linux and Windows.

There’s screenshots, too. Robo was kind enough to convert the comic adaptation of my story Craphound, which appeared in my CC-licensed graphic novel Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of Here and Now — he also translated the comic into Slovak and included the translation in a separate layer.

The Robot Comics folks have been industriously converting my Creative Commons licensed IDW graphic novel, Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (which collects six of my short stories adapted to comics form by an array of talented writers and editors) to a multiplicity of mobile phone platforms.

This is all under the auspices of the CC license and all the resulting comics are free — there’s stuff for Android, the Nintendo DSi, and the iPhone/iPod Touch (Apple finally caved and decided that the panel depicting an orc in a video-game being decapitated didn’t disqualify the comic of Anda’s Game from being included as a freebie in the iPhone store).

Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now reaches 60,000 downloads

Previously:

The folks are Robot Comics have completed their conversion of the comics in my CC-licensed graphic novel Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now, which adapts six of my stories for comic form.

The Robot Comics editions are free and run on your Android phone and (sometimes) on the iPhone (Apple rejected the adaptation of the award-winning story Anda’s Game because the scene in which a video-game orc is beheaded was “objectionable”). Many have also been translated to Spanish — they’re planning on doing the whole lot. It’s all free, non-commercial, and CC licensed, natch!

Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now reaches 30,000 downloads

Previously:

Last year, IDW published a collection of six comics adapted from my short stories called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now, all of these stories also licensed under Creative Commons.

Now, Robot Comics, a firm that provides comics for Android mobile phones, has begun to make the comics available free under the same CC license for mobile phones, beginning with my story Anda’s Game (which was also included in my short story collection Overclocked, and podcasted as a reading by Alice Taylor of Wonderland. The adaptation is by the excellent Dara Naraghi, illustrated by Esteve Polls.

The story is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two — netting them about $0.02 an hour — but this is a very different proposition indeed.

Cory Doctorow’s Anda’s Game

Previously:

I just got word from IDW, the publishers of my graphic novel Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (which collects six of my short stories, adapted for comics by a team of talented writers and artists), that Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million have both taken very large orders of the hardcover, every copy of which is signed and numbered (yes, I signed thousands and thousands of tip-in sheets, by hand, until I thought my arm would fall off).

They’re available online, of course, but practically every BN and BAM store nationwide is bound to have them. The book has also seen great orders from independents across the nation — and, of course, it’s available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download.

Futuristic Tales on BN.com
Futuristic Tales at Books-a-Million,
Futuristic Tales at independent booksellers near you

Download Futuristic Tales for free!

IDW have just published the collected issues of “Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now,” a six-edition series of comics adapted from my short stories by an incredibly talented crew of writers, artists, inkers and letterers (and I do mean incredible: Dara Naraghi, Esteve Polls, Sam Keith, Robert Studio, J.C. Vaughn, Daniel Warner, Scott Morse, Paul McCaffrey, Paul Pope, Dan Taylor, Dustin Evans, Ben Templesmith, Erich Owens, Ashley Wood, James Anthony Kuhoric, Guiu Vilanova, German Torres, Danny Parsons, Robbie Robbins, Neil Uyetake, Chris Mowry, and Amauri Osorio).

As with all of my books, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license, meaning you can copy it, share it, remix it and play with it, provided it’s on a non-commercial basis. I’ve uploaded the full book in high resolution as a PDF and CBR file to the Internet Archive, for your downloading pleasure.

Collected in this volume are adaptations of my award-winning stories “Craphound,” “Anda’s Game,” “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” “After the Siege,” “I, Robot” and “Nimby and the D-Hoppers.”

Have at it!

Link to “Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now” on Amazon
Link to free downloads of “Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now”