If you want to glimpse the future of copyright policing, video-game sweatshops, robotic intelligence, info war, and how computer geeks will survive the apocalypse, then this collection of shorts is your oracle. Studio Pitch: I, Robot meets Dr. Strangelove. Lowdown: The four-page opening fable is as absorbing and prescient as the gruesome 76-page war story that ends the book. Doctorow is rapidly emerging as the William Gibson of his generation.
Dave Younce has created a great machine-generated remix of Printcrime, the lead story in my new collection Overclocked. Every time you reload the page, it reorders the sentences. Says Dave, “Some sentences inevitably repeat, which makes it
sound like poetry or drug-addled memories. Sometimes the story’s
outcome is the same, sometime’s it’s completely different, often its
nonsensical. It’s fun to refresh.”
The kind of thing that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of thing 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. God knew what he went through in prison. “Lanie, I’m going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for everyone.”
“There’s no hat or laptop that’s worth going to jail for.” “Let me tell you the thing that I decided while I spent ten years in lockup.”
I’m launching Overclocked at a signing with cyberpunk legend Rudy Rucker at Borderlands books in San Francisco on Thursday, February 8 at 7PM. I’ve had three book launches at Borderlands so far, each better than the last. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Where: Borderlands Books 866 Valencia St. San Francisco CA 94102 USA 415.824.8203/888.893.4008
When: Thursday, February 8, 7PM
I’m launching Overclocked with a special appearance at Bakka Books, the world’s oldest science fiction bookstore, in Toronto, Canada. I started shopping at Bakka when I was 9, started working there when I was 17, and had my first book launch there at 29. Hope to see you there!
Where: Bakka Books 697 Queen Street West, Toronto, ONT M6J 1E6, ph 416 963 9993.
When: Thursday, 1 February 2007, 7PM
This is the site for my new short story collection, “Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present,” published by Avalon Books in January 2007, exactly four years after my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was published. And just as with Down and Out, this collection is released under a liberal Creative Commons license.
That means you can buy it in a store, or you can download it for free. Or both.
Why would I do this? Because I’m a science fiction writer. That means I have to be attuned to the future, or at least the present. Most people seem to live in the distant past, pausing occasionally to look around, do a spit-take, and say, “Holy hells, when did all this happen?”
I try to live in the present. In my present, bits are easy to copy and they will never get harder to copy. Bits love to be copied. It’s probably in their Buddha nature or something.
In my present, electronic books sell the everlasting crap out of print books. Electronic books are naturally social beasts. They want you to paste them into your email signature, or pass them on to a friend. They want you to talk about them. They want you to search them. They want you to print out favorite chunks and pass them around the office. They want you to beam them from your PDA to a friend’s phone.
In my present, readers who love my work are the most important thing in the world. Readers have told me that they want electronic text and that they want paper text. That each adds value to the other.
So, living in the present, I have wrapped these six stories — intense, personal things that I sweated bullets over, good friends all — in Creative Commons licenses that encourage you to:
* Share them
* Improve on them
* Make new things from them
You’re free to do all this stuff, provided that you:
* Don’t charge money for your new works or copies
* Pass the same freedoms on when you distribute my stories or their offspring
* Don’t put any anti-copying technology (“DRM” “Technological Protection Measures” “Copy-protection”) on my work
I’m doing this because I’m convinced that ebooks sell print books. And because I’m convinced — in the immortal words of Tim O’Reilly — that my biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy.
So make me well known. Adapt my works in ways that make them suitable to your conversation. Tweak the format. Tweak the writing. Make videos. Make art. Make crap! There’s no such thing as a creator who creates alone, from the whole cloth. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. I’m no giant, but my shoulders are available anytime.
Mail me with your hacks, please and thanks! I’d love to hear what you make!
Now, some FAQs:
1. I want to send you money. Where should I send it?
Keep it! If you like the ebooks and you want to reward me, buy the print books. If you don’t want the print books, give them to a library or shelter. If you don’t like libraries or shelters, you should be ashamed of yourself there are other ways to reward me:
* Post a review of the book to your blog, MySpace, LiveJournal or other personal site — and paste it up at BN.com, Powells.com and Amazon.com. Personal endorsements from real readers are the best thing a writer like me can have.
* Attach the stories to an email and send it to five friends telling them why you liked it.
* Remix the stories in some cool way and put them back online.
And if none of that strikes your fancy, don’t sweat it. It’s on me.
2. You are a communist. Writers deserve to get paid.
First of all, that’s not a question.
Secondly, I’m more of a techno-agnostic social-democrat libertarian.
Lastly, I think the idea that writers deserve to get paid sounds great, but the truth is that most writers — nearly all writers — have not been paid through history. The Internet doesn’t change that. But it does make it possible for writers to earn their living in new and exciting ways. That’s what I’m doing here. If you have a scheme to provide full employment to writers, I’d love to hear it, but I think you’re going to have some problems getting it rolling.
Giving writers more copyright doesn’t make them more money. You could give me ten million years of copyright and the right to personally impale anyone who makes an unauthorized copy of my work and it wouldn’t change the word-rate at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
More copyright just means that working writers have to go through more permissions-clearance hell when they want to create new things from old. More copyright means that dead writers’ works vanish from the historical record because their idiot descendants turn into lunatic saber-rattlers, or because no one can figure out who the right idiot descendant is. More copyright means that the public is denied the benefit of the 98 percent of works in copyright that have no visible owner, and that are out of print.
3. I want to do something commercial with your work. Is that possible?
Hell yeah! Just talk to my agent, Russell Galen, of Scovil Chicak Galen. For film inquiries, talk to my film agent, Justin Manask, of the IP Group.
4. Will you come and speak at my school/company/conference/whatever?
It’s possible. Email me.
Interested in getting a personalized, signed copy of Overclocked shipped right to your door? Two booksellers, one in Toronto, the other in Los Angeles, are taking orders for customized copies of Overclocked.
Canada:
Bakka Books, Toronto – Place orders before Feb 1, 2007
Bakka is the world’s oldest science fiction bookstore (I used to work there!). They’re hosting a launch for me on Feb 1 and I’ll sign any special orders then.
Canadian shipping is CDN$10, plus the CDN$19.95 cover price. Inquire for overseas rates.
Bakka Books 697 Queen Street West, Toronto, ONT M6J 1E6, ph 416 963 9993.
USA:
Secret Headquarters, Los Angeles
Secret HQ is my local comics emporium — they’re terrific. I stop by at least once a week to sign special orders.
US shipping is $5, plus the $15.95 cover price. Inquire for overseas rates.
Secret Headquarters: 3817 W Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90026, 323-666-2228
SFRevu
In this collection of stories by SF author, technopundit, uber-geek, and now college professor Cory Doctorow, you’ll find a half dozen award worthy stories about the “future present”, with brilliant extrapolations “ripped from the headlines” and recast as tales of tomorrow. This is what SF has always done, though rarely with the self awareness Cory brings to the stage. Each short story is an idea bomb with a candy coating of human drama, wrapped in shiny tech tropes and ready to blow your mind. Overclocked is SF info-warfare ammunition of the highest caliber, so load up, move out, and take no prisoners…let Asimov sort em out.
Overclocked, which you probably recognize as a computer term for running a processor faster than the clock rate it’s rated for, generally courting some sort of meltdown, is a fantastic collection of stories about people living with technology for better or worse and you should feel free to stop reading here and just go buy the book. At least if there’s a drop of geekazoid blood anywhere in your veins, which there is or you wouldn’t be here…
The hard part of all this is that every one of these stories deserves consideration for a Hugo and I’d hate to see him split his own vote as a result. Not that it matters. What matters is that this is a collection really worth reading, sharing, downloading and generally infecting others with. Overclocked is SF info-warfare ammunition of the highest caliber. Load up, move out, and remember, take no prisoners…let Asimov sort em out.
Kirkus Reviews
Five substantial stories plus one short-short, all previously published, all computer-related and
bulging with knowing SF references… The appealing characters, snappy
writing and swift pace will surely tempt the younger and/or geekier sections of the SF audience.
Publishers Weekly
An unabashed promulgator of the Internet and its democratic potential, Doctorow explores the benefits and consequences of online systems in this provocative collection of six mostly long stories. “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” is a moving chronicle of widely dispersed techno-geeks laboring to keep the World Wide Web running as an epitaph to an earth devastated by a bioweapon apocalypse. In “After the Siege” — the bleak chronicle of a modern siege of Stalingrad — the horrors of war become fodder for a documentary film crew’s reality-based entertainment. Two tales riff on classic sf themes: “I, Robot,” in which Isaac Asimov’s positronic bots are cogs in a dysfunctional totalitarian state, and “Anda’s Game,” a brilliant homage to Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s saga, in which a role-plaing enthusiast finds herself immersed in a surprisingly real world of class warfare fought online by avatars of game players. Most “meat”-minded readers will find much to savor.
