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Bill Massiola, who adapted my novel Little Brother for a critically acclaimed stage-play running in Chicago right now at the Griffin Theatre Company performing at the Athenaeum Theatre, sent me these three video clips from the production. I’m coming through Chicago on July 9 to see the play (it runs until July 19); based on these clips I’m incredibly excited to see more!
I’ve been waiting to announce this for months now, while the paperwork went back and forth and now I finally can! Don Murphy, producer of such films as Natural Born Killers and From Hell, has bought a film option on Little Brother. I’ve talked it over with Don and feel confident that if he makes the movie that he’ll do it justice — I’m guaranteed a spot as a consultant to ensure that it all comes out right, too!
For the uninitiated, a film option gives a producer the exclusive right to try to sell the film to a studio, signing up actors, a director and writer, and so on. For every film produced, many are optioned. But all that said, every film that gets made starts out as an option deal. Bottom line: a Little Brother movie isn’t a lock, but it’s a lot more likely than it was yesterday.
Love this short video review of Little Brother from Rebecca on Five Awesome YA Fans!
Chicago’s Griffin Theatre has mounted a live production of my young adult novel Little Brother, adapted by William Massolia. This is incredibly exciting; Time Out Chicago gave it four stars, saying, “Doctorow raises many worthy points about the relationship between our safeties and our freedoms, and in Milne’s bracing production, newcomer Mike Harvey as Marcus makes a confident tour guide.” Bill Shunn, writing in Sci-Fi Wire, said, “Little Brother is an exciting and thought-provoking production, imaginatively staged on a bare-bones set with some multimedia elements stirred in.”
I’ve managed to wrangle a trip to Chicago to see the play on July 9 — I hope to see you there! And if July 9 doesn’t work for you, I hope you can catch it on another night.
LITTLE BROTHER: Griffin Theatre, Chicago
Sci Fi Wire: Review: Cory Doctorow’s revolutionary novel Little Brother comes to the stage
Chicago Sun-Times: ‘Little Brother’ tackles big issues
Pavol Hvizdos just posted a Slovak fan-translation of my book Little Brother — Maly brat. Man, I love the cool stuff Creative Commons licenses lets people do with my books!
The final Hugo Award ballot is finally online (and, presumably, in the post). If you’re registered to attend this summer’s Worldcon in Montreal, Anticipation, you’re eligible to vote in one of the most prestigious science fiction awards in the world (and yes indeed, I am a double nominee, thanks for asking!).
Once again, John “Mensch” Scalzi (a triple nominee) has assembled a Hugo Voters’ Packet consisting of electronic versions of practically every nominated work. If you’re a registered Hugo voter, he’ll supply you with a copy of the whole damned thing.
Final Ballot for the 2009 Hugo Awards
and John W. Campbell Award
I did a live video-chat with some enterprising high-school freshmen at Arapahoe High School in Littleton, CO, a cabal of enterprising kids who are lobbying the school-system to add Little Brother to the statewide curriculum (!). We had a great chat — they’re really bright and lovely kids and clearly passionate and engaged!
Bruce M Campbell created a lovely alternative PDF of Little Brother:
I took the HTML version, ran some type-cleaning things on it, and restyled it using, of all things, Apple’s Pages 8. I thought about using Adobe InDesign, but as my intention was to produce this as a PDF, thought that ID would be over-kill.
I’ve styled it as I thought it appropriate to the subject matter and the fonts I have on my system.
I’ve used Rockwell for the the Chapter titles and heads as I think the sardonicness of the “All-American” feel covers the “on-message” hypocrisy of the overall government policy here, and Minion Pro for the body, because I think it’s a very readable font, and the innate typography, especially with the punctuation characters, makes it disappear for the reader. For novelty, I’ve used Orator for the IM texts, and ITC AMerican Typewriter for the literary extracts.
Today I found myself surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of enthusiastic, high-school age readers from the Ontario school system, and was honoured to receive a popular award for best Canadian young adult novel of 2008. The award was the White Pine, part of the Ontario Library Association’s “Forest of Reading” program — librarians nominate ten books in each of several age-divided categories and students from across the province are encouraged to read all ten on the roster and vote for their favourite.
All in all, 250,000 students participate in Forest of Reading, and over 8,000 were in attendance today for the awards ceremony at Harbourfront in Toronto. I was mobbed by group after group of vibrant, intelligent, engaged students, passionate readers who wanted to talk about my book and the other books they’d enjoyed (the other nine nominees were all very good, and the authors were fascinating people).
To top it all off, I was delighted to discover that Little Brother won the White Pine award, making it the popular choice for best YA book among Ontario’s high-school students. I could not be more delighted!
The Locus Award shortlist has been posted — this is the list of the best science fiction books and stories of the year, as chosen by the general public. I’m immensely gratified to say that I’m on the list three times, for my young adult novel Little Brother, my collaborative novella True Names (with Ben Rosenbaum), and my novelette The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away.
The whole list is a great jumping-off point for exploring the best written sf and fantasy of 2008!
