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)

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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

Rock band Wintergreen’s latest video — “Can’t Sit Still,” directed by Keith Schofield — features one of the musicians reading a copy of my latest short story collection, Overclocked. Sweet!

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(Thanks, Terry!)

Michael Buckbee, proprietor of a “Fabjectory” (Bruce Sterling’s neologism “fabject” + “factory” = Fabjectory) has created a Second Life version of the print-and-fold minicomic of Printcrime, created by talented comics artist Martin Cendreda (the story appears in my collection Overclocked. He sez, “We use rapid prototyping machines to create real life objects from the avatars and sculptures that people make in SecondLife and I’ve been vainly trying to explain to people that this isn’t so much about creating expensive immobile dolls for people as it is breaking ground for a new way to interact with the world, something Print Crime does so well.”

Screenshot Link 1, Screenshot Link 2

Ariel Maidana has produced a Spanish fan-translation of Printcrime, the short-short story that opens my latest collection, Overclocked. Like all the stories in that book, Printcrime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that encourages readers to play with, remix and adapt the text.

Los policías machacaron la impresora de mi padre cuando yo tenía ocho años. Recuerdo su olor como de papel film recién salido del microondas, y la mirada de feroz concentración de Pa cuando la llenaba con pasta fresca, y el aire cálido, como recién horneado, de los objetos que salían de ella.

Los policías entraron por la puerta agitando sus porras, uno de ellos recitando los términos de la orden de allanamiento con un megáfono. Uno de los clientes de papá lo había vendido. La ipolicía pagaba en fármacos de alta calidad — mejoradores de rendimiento, suplementos para la memoria, estimulantes metabólicos. La clase de cosa que cuesta una fortuna sin receta; la clase de cosa que podrías imprimir en casa, si no te importara el riesgo de tener tu cocina llena con una súbita aglomeración de cuerpos grandes y robustos, grandes porras agitándose en el aire, machacando a cualquier persona o cosa que se pusiera en su camino.

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Pavol Hvizdos, a Slovak speaker, has translated three of my books into Slovakian — Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and Overclocked. The translations are Creative Commons licensed for your remixing and sharing pleasure.

I can’t tell you how awesomely cool it is to have readers spontaneously undertake major translation projects just for the fun of it. I believe that sharing my books under CC licenses inspires my readers to promote them, and this is the proof that it works. w00t!

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I could not be happier right now! My novella, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (published in my collection Overclocked) just won the Locus Award for best novelette of 2006. A million thanks to everyone who voted for it — I’ve got a 12h plane ride coming up, and this’ll keep me warm the whole way.

Also: check out the awesome company I’m in: Vernor Vinge and Ellen Kushner and Charlie Stross and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett and Naomi Novik!

This is the third Locus Award I’ve won in a row. A million thanks to Eileen Gunn for delivering this acceptance speech on my behalf: “Systems administrators are the unsung heroes of the twenty first century, our tireless morlocks who keep the entire universe running. The best sysadmins I’ve met treat their jobs as holy callings. They understand that they’re keeping the infrastructure of the information age alive and functional.

Many thanks to my sysadmin, Ken Snider, and to all the other sysadmins who make my life possible. And many thanks to Jim Baen and Eric Flint for publishing this. ”

Best Science Fiction Novel:

Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge (Tor)

Best Fantasy Novel:

The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner (Bantam Spectra)

Best First Novel:

Temeraire: His Majesty’s Dragon/Throne of Jade/Black Powder, Naomi Novik (Del Rey; Voyager); as Temeraire: In the Service of the King (SFBC)

Best Young Adult Book:

Wintersmith, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperTempest)

Best Novella:

“Missile Gap”, Charles Stross (One Million A.D.)

Best Novelette:

“When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, Cory Doctorow (Baen’s Universe 8/06)

Best Short Story:

“How to Talk to Girls at Parties”, Neil Gaiman (Fragile Things)

Link

Midnight.Haulkerton, the band that recorded a song based on my collection Overclocked, have just released the song elements themselves under a CC license for your remixing pleasure. Joel Falconer from Midnight.Haulkerton sez,

Today, we released the remix pack for the Overclocked song. Now listeners can remix, re-sing or do whatever they want with it. All the individual tracks that make up the song have had all their effects stripped and are now stuffed in a zip.

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Jesse has created a podcast feed containing all the stories from my collection Overclocked — these all appeared on my podcast, but not in a neatly packaged form like this. Here’s the feed. Thanks, Jesse!