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I’m coming to North Carolina on Feb 22 to give a talk on privacy at Duke University at 5PM and a talk on copyright at the University of North Carolina at 2PM. There’ll be books for sale at both — hope to see you there!
Other upcoming events: my Los Angeles book-launch this Thursday at 7PM at Secret Headquarters, and I’m going to be a Guest of Honor at Ad Astra, Toronto’s regional sf convention, from Mar 2-4.
I’m speaking at Vancouver, BC’s Simon Fraser University on March 8/9, in a couple of events that will include launches for my new book, Overclocked — and I’m delighted to note that the book has sold out its entire print run in two weeks and is going back to the presses!
The talk is presented by the Faculty of Applied Sciences’ Leonardo Institute, a non-credit graduate program that examines the risks, uncertainties, ethics, and art of applied science.Doctorow’s topic is The Totalitarian Urge: total information awareness and the cosmic billiards. “It’s about how technology changes the way we view social problems,” says Doctorow. “Older mechanical technologies make us see the world as deterministic, knowable and manipulable. New emergent technologies like the Internet teach us that control is an illusion, the universe is out of control and laughing at us, and that the more we watch and control, the more problems we have.”
The lecture will be presented twice:
Thursday March 8 at 6:00pm in the Fletcher Challenge theatre at SFU Vancouver (515 West Hastings St.) Free. Seating is limited. Reservations, 604-291-5100.
Friday March 9 at 3:30pm at SFU Burnaby in Academic Quadrangle, C9001. Free. Arrive early to ensure a seat
Randall “Sorcerer Mickey” Cooper came to my book-launch at San Francisco’s Borderlands Books last night, and caught audio of me reading “Printcrime” and answering a wide-ranging series of questions. The audio and a report are on his LiveJournal.
Ten Zen Monkeys has the transcript of the interview I did last week with RU Sirius on his radio program:
Well, I went to a little family reunion in St. Petersburg, Russia. My grandmother was born there, and her family still lives there. When I was growing up, she always used to tell me about the war, and about being a kid living through the Siege of Leningrad. And she would tell me how I would never understand the terrible horrors she’d faced. I didn’t know much about the Siege of Leningrad, but my understanding was… it wasn’t anything like Auschwitz, right? Like, “Boy, how bad could it have been? You were a civil defense worker. You weren’t in a death camp.” And a couple of years ago, on one of those long St. Petersburg days, my grandmother walked us through the streets of St. Petersburg and told us about what she saw and did during that period. It really changed my perception of it. I went out and read some books, most notably The 900 Days about the Siege of Leningrad. The privation and terrors of the Siege of Leningrad can’t be overstated. It was a nine hundred day siege. And Stalin bungled it so badly that people in Petersberg were also in bad shape. There was starvation and cannibalism and lots of people freezing to death. And my grandmother — this 12-year-old girl — was digging civil defense trenches in the frozen ground; and hauling bodies and throwing them out of fifteen story windows because they were too weak to haul them down the stairs. She was going to apartments where people had died and throwing them down, and then scraping them up off the ground. And she was seeing people who’d been rendered by cannibal black marketeers – who had parts of their body sliced off to sell on the black market.
They were the most amazing, incredible stories. And it got me thinking about writing about this as an allegory. At the same time, I’ve been doing all this work on copyright and related rights with developing nations, and with what they call emerging economies like the former Soviet territories. And these countries are getting really shafted in international copyright negotiations. They’re being forced to sign on to these regimes that are totally out of step with what they need.
America became an industrial power by being a pirate nation. After the American revolution, America didn’t honor the copyrights or patents of anyone except Americans. If you were a European or British inventor, your stuff could be widely pirated in America. That’s how they got rich. Only after America became a net exporter of copyrighted goods did it start to enter into treaties with other countries whereby American inventors and authors would be protected abroad in exchange for those foreign authors being protected in America. But now you have these countries in Africa, in Asia, and in Eastern Europe, who are signing on to trade agreements with the U.S. where they basically promise to just take huge chunks of their GDP and export it to the U.S. It’s a kind of information feudalism, you know? Info-serfs.
Locus Magazine has just posted its 2006 sf reader poll, looking once again to take the temperature of the audience for science fiction around the world. In addition to the standard demographic questions, Locus always asks for votes on its recommended reading list, and going over that list, I’m amazed by how many great books and stories came out in 2006 — it was a real vintage year.
I’m also proud to note that two of my stories, I, Row-Boat and When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth made the recommended list and are eligible for your votes!
I’ve just finalized the details of the Los Angeles launch for my new book, Overclocked — it’s going to be hosted at Silver Lake’s Secret Headquarters, the best comic shop in town, on Feb 15 at 7PM.
In related news, see this interview Amber MacArthur did with me on Toronto’s Citytv, this interview I did with the Indian site BornRich, and this upcoming podcast phone-in I’m doing with Waxxi on Feb 12.
And Torontonians, don’t forget tonight’s 7PM launch at Bakka Books (not to mention next Thursday’s launch at San Francisco’s Borderlands Books with Rudy Rucker)!
What: Launch for Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present
Where: The Secret Headquarters, 3817 W Sunset Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90026, 323-666-2228
When: Thursday, Feb 15, 7PM
The latest edition of RU Sirius’s Radio Show is online — and the guest this week is me!
The folks at the Beam Me Up radio show in Rockland Maine (who also do a podcast of the same name) have done their own audio adaptation of my story Printcrime, as featured in my new collection Overclocked — this joins the Escape Pod adaptation, the remix, and the origami mini-comic of the story.
(Thanks, Paul!)
I’m launching my short story collection Overclocked at Duke University’s Levine Science Research Center in Durham, NC on Feb 22 at 5PM. I’ll be giving a lecture on privacy and technology, followed by a signing and general schmooze. Hope to see you there! Here’s more detail on the event, and here’s a map. Admission is free and open.
Where: Love Auditorium, Levine Science Research Center
When: Feb 22, 5PM
A reminder: I’m also having launches in Toronto (Feb 1), San Francisco (Feb 8, with Rudy Rucker), and Vancouver, San Diego and Los Angeles (details TBD).
I’ve just uploaded a DIY mini-comic of my story “Printcrime,” which appears in my new short story collection, Overclocked. The mini was designed and illustrated by the talented illustrator Martin Cendreda, a former South Park animator whose new works include Dang! from Top Shelf Comix — a bitter and fantastic comic. The mini is published by Secret Headquarters, the best comic shop in LA.
To assemble the mini, download and print the PDF, then follow the directions included to fold it into a no-staple origami 8-page mini-comic — it’s all under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license — share it, tweak it, remix it, just don’t sell it.
