Sweet! “Whuffie” (from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) worked its way into today’s episode of the web-comic “Terror Island!”
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Sweet! “Whuffie” worked its way into today’s episode of the web-comic “Terror Island!”
My new short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present is out this week, and I’ve just launched the website that goes with it. Overclocked collects six of my most recent stories: Printcrime, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, Anda’s Game, I, Robot, I Row-Boat, and After the Siege. Between them, these stories have been reprinted in five languages, won a Locus Award, been a Hugo finalist, and been selected for every one of the Best of the Year anthology series in the field, along with Michael Chabon’s tony Best American Short Stories collection.
All of these stories are available for download under a Creative Commons By-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. Take ’em, send them around, convert them to new formats, make new and cool things out of them — but don’t charge money for them without talking to me first — and no adding DRM to them, ever!
I’ve got a bunch of launch-events planned for the next couple months, in Toronto, San Francisco, LA, Vancouver, San Diego and Chapel Hill, NC (basically, places that I’m going to for work). I might be able to line up NYC too — but it’s too soon to tell. Details for all of them will be here, or you can sign up for my mailing list.
Additionally, you can get signed, personally inscribed copies of the book shipped right to your door. Canadians, contact Bakka Books in Toronto before Feb 1 with your order, Americans and others get in touch with Secret Headquarters in LA.
The first two launches are in Toronto at Bakka Books on Feb 1 at 7PM, and in San Francisco at Borderlands Books, along with Rudy Rucker, on Feb 8 at 7PM.
Each short story is an idea bomb with a candy coating of human drama, wrapped in shiny tech tropes and ready to blow your mind. Overclocked is SF info-warfare ammunition of the highest caliber, so load up, move out, and take no prisoners…let Asimov sort em out. Overclocked, which you probably recognize as a computer term for running a processor faster than the clock rate it’s rated for, generally courting some sort of meltdown, is a fantastic collection of stories about people living with technology for better or worse and you should feel free to stop reading here and just go buy the book. At least if there’s a drop of geekazoid blood anywhere in your veins, which there is or you wouldn’t be here… The hard part of all this is that every one of these stories deserves consideration for a Hugo and I’d hate to see him split his own vote as a result. Not that it matters. What matters is that this is a collection really worth reading, sharing, downloading and generally infecting others with. Overclocked is SF info-warfare ammunition of the highest caliber. Load up, move out, and remember, take no prisoners…let Asimov sort em out. – SFRevu
I’m speaking at two events in NYC next week:
Google Unbound, January 18, New York Public Library, 8AM-5PM: This is Google’s conference on the state of the publishing industry and what’s going on with the Internet and publishing. I’m speaking alongside of everyone from Tim O’Reilly to Chris Anderson to Stephen “Freakonomics” Dubner, along with a bunch of execs from the publishing industry. As far as I can tell, registration is open, and it looks like they feed you and liquor you up, too. Update: They’re full — no more registration, sorry!
FreeCulture NYU, January 19, 5PM: I’m speaking at this public event co-sponsored by FreeCulture NYU and the NYU Association for Computing Machinery, on “State of the Copyfight 2007: Looking up, not out of the woods yet.” No free food at the this one, I think, but probably a better crowd if you need some help configuring Ubuntu.
Hope to see you!
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.
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 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.
I’m launching Overclocked at a signing with cyberpunk legend Rudy Rucker at Borderlands books in San Francisco on Thursday, February 8 at 7PM. I’ve had three book launches at Borderlands so far, each better than the last. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Where: Borderlands Books 866 Valencia St. San Francisco CA 94102 USA 415.824.8203/888.893.4008
When: Thursday, February 8, 7PM
My short-short story Printcrime, originally published in Nature Magazine (and since reprinted in my brand new short story collection, Overclocked) has just been adapted for audio by the brilliant SF podcast show, Escape Pod. Download it free!
The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals — performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma’s trunk, the one she’d brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
My story After the Siege has been published in a special edition of The Infinite Matrix magazine. Siege is a parable about the Siege of Leningrad, based in part on the stories my grandmother told me about her ordeal in the Leningrad civil defense corps when she was a little girl. The story was previously published in the Russian magazine Elsi, and I podcasted a reading of it as I read it. It appears in Overclocked, my new short story collection, Thunder’s Mouth Press.
“You can’t go!” Popa shouted at her. “Are you crazy? You can’t go to the front! You have two small children, woman!” He was red-faced, and his hands were clenching and unclenching. Trover was having a tantrum that was so loud and horrible that Valentine wanted to rip her hearing aids out.
Mata’s eyes were red. “Harald, you know I have to do this. It’s not the ‘front’ — it’s our own city. My country needs me — if I don’t help to fight for it, then what will become of our children?”
“You never got over the glory of fighting, did you?” Her father’s voice was bitter in a way that she’d never heard before. “You’re an addict!”
She held up her left hand and shook it in his face. “An addict! Is that what you think?” Her middle finger and little finger on that hand had never bent properly in all of Valentine’s memory, and when Valentine had asked her about it, she’d said the terrible word knucklebreakers which was the old name for the police. “You think I’m addicted to this? Harald, honor and courage and patriotism are virtues, no matter that you would make them into vices and shame our children with your cowardice. I go to fight now, Harald, and it’s for all of us.”
Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9
I’m launching Overclocked with a special appearance at Bakka Books, the world’s oldest science fiction bookstore, in Toronto, Canada. I started shopping at Bakka when I was 9, started working there when I was 17, and had my first book launch there at 29. Hope to see you there!
Where: Bakka Books 697 Queen Street West, Toronto, ONT M6J 1E6, ph 416 963 9993.
When: Thursday, 1 February 2007, 7PM
