Last Sunday, my young adult novel Little Brother won the Emperor Norton Award (for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason” in San Francisco), presented at the 13th birthday party for Tachyon Books, at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco. I wasn’t able to accept the award (I’m in India, researching my next novel), so I asked Cindy Cohn, EFF’s legal director, to accept on my behalf and say a few words about EFF’s new lawsuit over NSA wiretapping, in which AG Alberto Gonzales, GW Bush, and Dick Cheney are all named as defendants. Tachyon’s put the text of the speech online — as ever, Cindy gave a hum-dinger:

And here’s where EFF comes in. Cory’s work and EFF’s mission have long been intertwined, not just because he was with us for so long and drank so much of our Kool-Aid, but even before that. And the same is true for Little Brother. While we thankfully haven’t yet had the next terrorist attack, the use of digital technology against ordinary people by an overreaching government is well underway. This week at EFF we filed a new lawsuit, called Jewel v. NSA, aimed at stopping one such invasion of our privacy, the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of all of us, especially those of us in San Francisco.

That’s because the strongest evidence in the case is about San Francisco, specifically the installation of a fiberoptic splitter in an AT&T facility on Folsom Street that is making copies of all of the internet traffic that goes through that facility and giving it to the NSA. Those of you who watch EFF know that we filed suit against AT&T with this same evidence in 2006, but in the last year AT&T and the Administration bullied Congress into passing something called “retroactive immunity” for the telecommunications companies, trying to let them off the hook. We’re fighting that immunity in court, but this week we opened a second front, suing the government and government officials directly. This includes Bush, Cheney, and the other architects of this dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans, you, me and Marcus Yallow alike.

Tachyon’s 13th Anniversary party wrap-up

Last Sunday, my young adult novel Little Brother won the Emperor Norton Award (for “extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason” in San Francisco), presented at the 13th birthday party for Tachyon Books, at Borderlands Bookstore in San Francisco. I wasn’t able to accept the award (I’m in India, researching my next novel), so I asked Cindy Cohn, EFF’s legal director, to accept on my behalf and say a few words about EFF’s new lawsuit over NSA wiretapping, in which AG Alberto Gonzales, GW Bush, and Dick Cheney are all named as defendants. Tachyon’s put the text of the speech online — as ever, Cindy gave a hum-dinger:

And here’s where EFF comes in. Cory’s work and EFF’s mission have long been intertwined, not just because he was with us for so long and drank so much of our Kool-Aid, but even before that. And the same is true for Little Brother. While we thankfully haven’t yet had the next terrorist attack, the use of digital technology against ordinary people by an overreaching government is well underway. This week at EFF we filed a new lawsuit, called Jewel v. NSA, aimed at stopping one such invasion of our privacy, the NSA’s dragnet surveillance of all of us, especially those of us in San Francisco.

That’s because the strongest evidence in the case is about San Francisco, specifically the installation of a fiberoptic splitter in an AT&T facility on Folsom Street that is making copies of all of the internet traffic that goes through that facility and giving it to the NSA. Those of you who watch EFF know that we filed suit against AT&T with this same evidence in 2006, but in the last year AT&T and the Administration bullied Congress into passing something called “retroactive immunity” for the telecommunications companies, trying to let them off the hook. We’re fighting that immunity in court, but this week we opened a second front, suing the government and government officials directly. This includes Bush, Cheney, and the other architects of this dragnet surveillance of millions of ordinary Americans, you, me and Marcus Yallow alike.

Tachyon’s 13th Anniversary party wrap-up

Austin “Soon I Will Be Invincible” Grossman’s written a fantastic review of my young adult novel Little Brother for this weekend’s New York Times book review section. Incidentally, the book went into a fifth hardcover printing last week, and is going back for a sixth printing next week because so many orders came in between the fifth printing being set up and it being delivered!

“Little Brother” is a terrific read, but it also claims a place in the tradition of polemical science-fiction novels like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Fahrenheit 451” (with a dash of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”). It owes a more immediate debt to Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli’s comic book series “DMZ,” about the adventures of a photojournalist in the midst of a new American civil war. …

MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy.”

BTW, if I’m not mistaken, there are still some signed first-edition hardcovers in stock at Bakka Books in Toronto and Borderlands in San Francisco, and both stores ship.

Nerd Activists

I did a fun interview about Little Brother with the Podcrash podcast from the Bureaucrash folks:

Link, MP3 Link

In the run-up to last week’s benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Brian Heater of the Daily Crosshatch blog conducted a two part interview with me; he’s just posted part two.

Do you have this extended universe of fan fiction in mind when you work on these books?

No, not at all. It’s actually kind of interesting, I think. The way I approach the creative element of what I do and the critical element are almost completely separate. I sit down and write almost as a therapeutic exercise. When I’m finished writing for the day, I often don’t remember what I’ve written. I go back and review it, and I’m often surprised by it. I’ve written stories and novels and things that have taken me years and years to write and when I got to the ending, I didn’t like it and rethought it entirely and then rewrote the ending and then turned back to the first page, only to realize that I’d foreshadowed that ending, four years before, but hadn’t known until that day.

I have almost no premeditation on cultural-political things when I write. Even on a political book like Little Brother, it was actually an emotional reaction to a bunch of things that I was feeling in regard to the “war on terror.” I didn’t sit down and say, “what’s the best way to alarm children about surveillance?” I sat down and thought, “how can I artistically approach this subject in a way that I find the most aesthetically pleasing?”

But you are hoping that, once it’s out there, readers will adopt the work in creative ways.

Yeah, well, in the same way that there’s a compositional and editorial process, when you do anything creative, when I finish with the story, look at it, edit it, and prepare it for publication, and show it to my agent, and so on, I certainly do think of that at that stage. But the creative process, for me, is all about getting into a nice space and doing something totally creative that has almost no agenda aside from a creative one.

Part 1, Part 2

Christopher from Cubeecraft (purveyors of fine cubic papercraft people) was so impressed with the poster that Pablo Defendini made for my novel Little Brother that he whipped up this fantastic little papercraft feller based on it.

I love that Defendini poster — and this is the second awesome thing it’s inspired (the first was the Camerahead protest in Seattle against the CCTVs in public parks). It’s really turning into quite a little muse for a lot of peoples’ creativity.

Cubeecraft: Little Brother