Next Wednesday, June 29, I’m speaking on Europe’s coming Broadcast Flag in Cambridge, England, at the Communications Research Network/Communications Futures Program Bi-Annual Conference. Attendance is free — hope to see you there!

At the Plenary Day on Wednesday 28 June, delegates will hear the latest results from the CRN and CFP working groups on Broadband, QoS, Viral, DoS-Resistant, Core-Edge, Spectrum, Security and Photonics. The Plenary day will be of particular interest to CEOs, CTOs and board level decision makers, looking to get up to speed on the communication industry’s cutting-edge in the shortest possible time.

Cory’s novel is out today!

Today, my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town ships to bookstores. It’s another fine Tor hardcover, with jaw-droppingly beautiful cover art by genius Dave McKean to boot. This is a physical artifact worth owning. Hell, buy two.

As with my first and second novels, I’ve posted the entire text of this book online under a Creative Commons license that allows the unlimited, noncommercial redistribution of the text. You can send it around, paste it into a chat, beam it to a friend’s PDA, or print out a chapter to hand out in the university common room. Like Woody Guthrie said, “Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

The whole point of giving away electronic books is to experiment with electronic text and spot where the new opportunities for earning a writer’s living lie — working with my audience, not against them. So with every release, I’ve tried some experimentation. This book is no exception.

This book is the first novel to employ the new Creative Commons Developing Nations License. That’s a license that lets anyone living in a country that’s not on the World Bank’s list of high-income countries treat the book as if it were in the public domain. If you live in a developing nation, you can print your own editions of this book and sell them, you can make your own movies, radio plays, translations and whatever else you can think of, charge whatever the traffic will bear for them, and never give me a penny or ask my permission (though I hope you’ll drop me a line and let me know what you’re up to so I can keep up on the book’s spread!). The only limitation on this right is that you may only export your works to other developing nations: the rich nations where my paying customers live are strictly off-limits.

I’m doing three signings for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in the first two weeks of July. The first two are in the Detroit region (I’m spending July 4 week in East Lansing, Michigan teaching at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop), and the third is in Toronto, at BakkaPhoenix books, the oldest sf bookstore in the country, where I once worked. I hope to see you at these!

July 5, 7PM: Archives Bookshop, 517 West Grand River, East Lansing, MI, 48823, (517)332-8444

July 7, 7:30PM: Schuler Books and Music, 1982 West Grand River Avenue, Okemos, MI, 48864, (517)349-8840

July 11, 7PM: BakkaPhoenix Books, 697 Queen St West, Toronto, ON, M6J 1E6, (416)963-9993

Also, Second Life players can attend an in-game signing on Sunday, July 24 at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT/10pm London time.

Here’s the spanking-new website for the book. I hope you’ll spare a moment to take a look. This is the longest thing I’ve ever written, and the early reviews have been stunning. I’m as proud of this as I could be, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it:

SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.

– Gene Wolfe

My story NIMBY and the D-Hoppers was first published in June 2003 in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, and subsequently reprinted in Cramer and Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 9.

Last year, Quebec’s Solaris magazine ran a French translation by the talented sf author Elisabeth Vonarburg, and the current issue of Russia’s ESLI magazine has a Russian translation.

I’ve uploaded both the Russian and the French versions under a Creative Commons license, and they’re joined by the pirate Chinese edition that China’s SF World published last year, which is under a CC license as well.

Поймите меня правильно ─ мне нравится первозданная природа. Мне
нравится, когда небо чистое и голубое, а в моем городе не
громыхают автомобили и отбойные молотки. Я не приверженец
технократии. Но, черт побери, кто бы отказался от полностью
автоматизированного, самозаряжающегося личного оружия с лазерной
наводкой?

Как вам такая фразочка? Я наконец-то выучил ее однажды вечером, в
очередной раз услышав от очередного прыгуна. Когда тот стоял у
меня в спальне, наставив свою “пушку” на другого прыгуна, и
перечислял ее многочисленные достоинства: “Это полностью
автоматизированный, ля-ля-ля… Брось оружие, руки за голову,
ля-ля-ля…”. В тот месяц я слышал подобный диалог почти каждый
день ─ всякий раз, когда прыгуны из другого измерения
катапультировались в мой дом, ранили его, разбивали окно, рыбкой
ныряли на улицу и гонялись друг за другом по моему злосчастному
городку, ломая все подряд, до полусмерти пугая зевак, а затем
перескакивая в другое несчастное измерение, чтобы продолжить это
развлечение уже там.

Next Easter weekend (Apr 14-17, 2006), I’ll be a writer guest-of-honor at Conjure, Australia’s 45th National Science Fiction convention. I’ve never been to Australia before, nor have I been a GoH at a national convention — color me mightily chuffed!

Progress continues on my virtual book launch for my next novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which will be available in stores and as a free download on July 1. I’m going to be doing a virtual launch in the Second Life massively multiplayer world on Sunday, July 24 at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT/10pm London time.

The Second Lifers have been holding a competition to see who can design the coolest in-game ebook for my launch, and the finalists are in. Each one is amazing, a worthy re-think of what a book means in the virtual world. Just looking at the sketches for these things makes me go crosseyed with futurismicness.

They’re also competing to come up with an avatar for me to wear in-game, which is pretty excitingly weird in and of itself!

Frans Charming’s prototype features a retro-cool chair that’s a little like one of those odd bubble seats from the old “Prisoner” TV series; that’s where the reader sits, because once there, the sitter’s camera is auto-locked into an ideal reading position, with a clickable GUI beneath it, for turning the pages. The contraption itself turns the novel into a conveyor belt of text; pages you’ve just read are sent on their way down a track, while incoming pages are put on the rail, and prepared for instant delivery.