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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!
(Thanks, William!)
See also: Locus Award winners announced — After the Siege is best novella 2008!
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&SFPUBLISHER
Tor
ARTIST
Charles Vess
Woohoo! I’m on the Locus Award ballot — twice! Once for Best Novella for my story After the Siege and again for Best Collection for my book Overclocked. Thanks to everyone who voted for me!
DailyLit, the excellent free ebook-by-email service, has been putting a ton of my Creative Commons-licensed works online. DailyLit lets you subscribe to receive books in small, quickly-readable chunks every day. They started with my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and now they’ve got all my novels and short story collections and a couple of my uncollected stories, too!
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).
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)
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.
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.
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!
(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.”
