/ / News, Overclocked

Eduardo Mercer’s just produced a Brazilian Portuguese fan-translation of my story Printcrime — making five translations in total (as well as two audio adaptations, a mini-comic and some wicked 3D fan-art). For a 700 word story, it’s sure attracted a lot of attention and fan activity!

Os tiras destruiram a impressora do meu pai quando eu tinha oito anos. Eu me lembro do cheiro quente de rolopack no microondas, do olhar de concentração furiosa do papi enquanto ele a enchia de geleca fresca e da sensação de recém tirado do forno dos objetos que saíam dela.


Os tiras entraram brandindo os cacetetes, um deles lendo o mandato através de um megafone. Um dos clientes do papi tinha vendido ele. A polícia pagou em drogas de alto nível – anabolizantes, suplementos de memória, aceleradores metabólicos. O tipo de coisa que custa uma fortuna na farmácia; o tipo de coisa que você pode imprimir em casa, se não se importar com o risco da sua cozinha se encher de corpos grandes e musculosos com cacetetes balançando no ar acertando tudo e todos em seu caminho.

Printcrime – Copie esta história

/ / News, Overclocked

Greg Elmensdorp was inspired by my story Printcrime (a short-short story I wrote for Nature Magazine) to created this blue-red 3D illustration. I think it’s terrific and really captures the mood of the story.


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.

Printcrime in 3D

(Thanks, Greg!)

/ / News, Overclocked

Subterranean Press just released a free podcast of my story After the Siege, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novella of 2008 last night in Seattle. The reader is the wonderful sf writer (and talented voice actor) Mary Robinette Kowal, who really nailed her performance. I’m so happy about this!

Link

(Thanks, William!)

See also: Locus Award winners announced — After the Siege is best novella 2008!

/ / News, Overclocked

Last night, Locus Magazine held its annual Locus Awards Ceremony in Seattle, the winners include several of my favorite books of the year — and my novella, “After the Siege” — which was collected in my short story collection Overclocked and adapted for comics in my new collection Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now“. (The story’s first publication was in the Russian magazine Esli, and the translation is also downloadable).

Many thanks to all who voted for this story, to Eileen Gunn for publishing the story and accepting the award on my behalf, and especially to my grandmother, Valentina Rachman, for sharing her stories of life as a child-soldier in the civil defense corps during the Siege of Leningrad.

SF NOVEL
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)

FANTASY NOVEL
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)

YOUNG ADULT BOOK
Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)

FIRST NOVEL
Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz)

NOVELLA
“After the Siege”, Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007)

NOVELETTE
“The Witch’s Headstone”, Neil Gaiman (Wizards)

SHORT STORY
“A Small Room in Koboldtown”, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Apr/May 2007)

COLLECTION
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Connie Willis (Subterranean)

ANTHOLOGY
The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos)

NON-FICTION
Breakfast in the Ruins, Barry N. Malzberg (Baen)

ART BOOK
The Arrival, Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic)

EDITOR
Ellen Datlow

MAGAZINE
F&SF

PUBLISHER
Tor

ARTIST
Charles Vess

Link

/ / News, Overclocked

The annual Locus Magazine Poll and Survey is online and anyone can participate. The Locus Poll tries to take the global temperature of science fiction, gathering detailed, long-running stats on the state of the field and its readership. It’s also the basis for the Locus Award, science fiction’s most-participated-in popular award (I’m up in two categories this year: Best Novella for After the Siege; and Best Short Story Collection for Overclocked).

Link

/ / News, Overclocked

The annual Locus Magazine Recommended Reading List just came out — it’s the critical consensus of Locus’s reviewers on the best science fiction and fantasy of the year, and a more reliable guide to great speculative fiction you will not find. I’m pleased to say that my short story collection Overclocked and my novella After the Siege made the cut!

SF novels

* HARM, Brian W. Aldiss (Del Rey; Duckworth)
* The Sons of Heaven, Kage Baker (Tor)
* Conqueror, Stephen Baxter (Gollancz; Ace)
* Undertow, Elizabeth Bear (Bantam Spectra)
* Till Human Voices Wake Us, Mark Budz (Bantam Spectra)
* The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
* Spook Country, William Gibson (Putnam; Viking UK)
* In War Times, Kathleen Ann Goonan (Tor)
* The Accidental Time Machine, Joe Haldeman (Ace)
* Mainspring, Jay Lake (Tor)
* The Execution Channel, Ken MacLeod (Orbit UK; Tor)
* Brasyl, Ian McDonald (Pyr; Gollancz)
* Black Man, Richard Morgan (Gollancz; Del Rey as Thirteen)
* Shelter, Susan Palwick (Tor)
* Engineer Trilogy: Devices and Desires / Evil for Evil / The Escapement, K. J. Parker (Orbit UK; Orbit US)
* The Prefect, Alastair Reynolds (Gollancz; Ace 6/08)
* Sixty Days and Counting, Kim Stanley Robinson (Bantam Spectra; HarperCollins UK)
* Bad Monkeys, Matt Ruff (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
* Queen of Candesce, Karl Schroeder (Tor)
* Halting State, Charles Stross (Ace)
* Ha’Penny, Jo Walton (Tor)
* Axis, Robert Charles Wilson (Tor)

Link

/ / News, Overclocked

Zen le Renard, a French reader of my stories, has translated my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, which appeared in my short story collection Overclocked and was released under a Creative Commons license that allows for noncommercial remixing. Zen le Renard reads English, but wanted to share the story with his monolingual sysadmin friends in France, so he took on the project. Voila!


Quand le mobile de Félix se mit à sonner à 2 heures du mat, Kelly se retourna, lui tapa l’épaule et grogna « Pourquoi t’as pas éteint ce putain de téléphone avant qu’on se couche ? »

« Par ce que je suis d’astreinte,» lui répondit Félix en s’asseyant au bord du lit. Il attrapa son futal qu’il avait laissé par terre avant de se pieuter et Kelly, en continuant de lui boxer l’épaule, lui dit : «T’es pas un putain de médecin non plus, t’es rien qu’un foutu administrateur système »

« C’est mon boulot,» qu’il lui dit.

« Ils te font bosser plus dur qu’un cheval de trait ! » lui dit Kelly. « Tu sais bien que j’ai raison, bon dieu. T’es un père maintenant, tu peux plus te casser en pleine nuit à chaque fois que quelqu’un perd l’accès à sa dose de porn. Ne réponds pas à ce putain de téléphone »

Il savait bien qu’elle avait raison. Il répondit au téléphone.

Link, Link to HTML version, Link to text version

Review:

Some Fantastic

Cory Doctorow has the gift of both turning the present day on its head while writing what could be considered hard SF in some cases that doesn’t baffle or lose the less technically-oriented reader, all while never forgetting that it is always the characters that should come first in any story.

Danny Adams, Some Fantastic