Canada’s Space Channel has posted a RealMedia stream of me reading from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
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The (admittedly modest) initial print-run of my short story collection has nearly sold out in just over a month since the initial publication (w00t!). My publisher is going back to the press for a second run, and he’s asked me to provide him with any errata that I would like fixed before it goes to press (this means that the missing acknowledgements page will finally see print!).
If you’ve noticed any typos in the print edition (not the electronic texts), I’d love to know about them so we can get them fixed in the second printing (oh, also, this means that this is just about your last chance to get a copy of the first edition, which is sure to be an errata-filled collector’s item after my untimely death). Please email me by Friday with any tyopos, etc.
A reminder: I’ll be reading and signing books on Thursday night at Berkeley’s The Other Change of Hobbit (2020 Shattuck Ave, 1-510-848-0413) from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there!
A couple weeks ago, I did an in-game “book-signing” and interview in the Second-Life game-world. Wagner James Au, the Second Life “embedded reporter” who interviewed me, has posted the transcripts to the site, in two parts:
Part 1 and Part 2.
“That’s what the immortality in D&O is. You go to a backup kiosk and you decant a copy of yourself into a big storage cloud, and if you die — or even if you have a bad hangover, hell, why not — you have a force-grown clone, and you decant the consciousness into it and you off yourself. (Though [in the book] it’s dressed up in other language. That’s the existential view from today’s POV.)
“But everyone who gets squeamish about the euthanasia aspect just dies. Because they can’t use the backup-and-recover system. And there’s not a lot of social will to advance medical science beyond backup-and-recover, since it solves most every problem.
“It’s like [a medievalist’s view of] nutrition or hygiene. You may actually be right about the ‘ill humours’ that will invade you if you don’t smell like a bear’s [rear end]. But in the meantime, the people who bathe aren’t getting scabies and dying of infections started by the left-behind mouth-parts of dead ticks. And so everyone who thinks that way [about not bathing] ends up dead, and their ideas die with them. (A horribly simplified version of Darwinian mimetics, but you take my point.)
A reminder: I’ll be launching my new short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I’m going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you!
A reminder: I’ll be launching A Place So Foreign and Eight More at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I’m going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you!
This is pretty flattering: a reader of mine has set up a MeetUp day for fans of my writing. If you’re interested in hanging out with people in your town who dig my stuff, you can sign up for the International Cory Doctorow Meetup Day:
The San Mateo Daily Journal has a nice article on my talk at the Silicon Valley Futurists’ Salon meeting last week.
“Has this benefited me?” he said. “I don’t have a firm answer. I don’t have another first novel that I can compare with the sales of the first one to. The evidence points to yes, it’s at least been neutral.”
Many at the salon seemed to agree with Doctorow.
“Someone’s finally saying something sensible,” said Daniel Ford, a 24-year-old graduate student at Stanford University. “I guess the base of it [is] that it’s about [ensuring] creativity. If new technological problems come about you deal with them.”
I’ll be reading from my short story collection and signing books on October 9th, at the Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore in Berkeley from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there!
There’s a book launch for A Place So Foreign and Eight More, my new short story collection, coming on Thursday, October 2nd at 7:00 pm at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I’ll be doing a reading, answering questions, and signing all the books I can lay hands on. Hope to see you there!
