I did a quick interview with the CBC Radio programme “The Spark” last week from my office in London, talking about my idea of “the upcoming war on general purpose computing.” They’ve just posted the unedited audio in advance of airing a shorter excerpt. MP3 link
All About:
Podcast
My Podcast is a regular feed in which I read from one of my stories for a few minutes at least once a week, from whatever friend’s house, airport, hotel, conference, treaty negotiation or what-have-you that I’m currently at. Here’s the podcast feed.
The StarShipSofa podcast has the second installment of Jeff Lane’s reading of my YA novella The Martian Chronicles (here’s part one). Lane does a great job with the reading. MP3 link.
Here’s a podcast of my last Locus column, A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future:
Science fiction writers and fans are prone to lauding the predictive value of the genre, prompting weird questions like ‘‘How can you write science fiction today? Aren’t you worried that real science will overtake your novel before it’s published?’’ This question has a drooling idiot of a half-brother, the strange assertion that ‘‘science fiction is dead because the future is here.’’
Now, I will stipulate that science fiction writers often think that they’re predicting the future. The field lays claim to various successes, from flip-phones to the Web, waterbeds to rocket-ships, robots to polyamory.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
The Starship Sofa podcast has produced an excellent reading of my novella “The Martian Chronicles,” which was originally published in Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology Life on Mars. The reading is by jeff Lane, who’s really talented. Here’s the MP3 (the reading starts around 1:50).
Here’s a transcript of my keynote at the 28th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin over Christmas week, “The Coming War on General Purpose Computation.” Here’re the relevant links:
* Video
* Transcript (Joshua Wise)
* German translation (Christian Wöhrl)
* Subtitles in German, French, Spanish and Italian (you can add more!)
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
No reading this time — I’m too hard at work on finishing the sequel to Little Brother — but a Christmas wish from me to you: fight SOPA and save the Internet before the year is out!
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
This week on The Command Line podcast, a recording of a live chat between host Thomas Gideon and myself at the New America Foundation, discussing (among other things), my new essay collection Context. (MP3)
Here’s a reading of my story “Another Place, Another Time,” which was my contribution to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, a companion volume to Chris Van Allsburg’s classic Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a collection of illustrations and titles from a lost (imaginary) short story collection. I was commissioned to produce a story for the collection along with Sherman Alexie, M.T. Anderson, Kate DiCamillo, Jules Feiffer, Stephen King, Tabitha King, Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Walter Dean Myers, Linda Sue Park, Louis Sachar, Jon Scieszka, Lemony Snicket, and Chris Van Allsburg.
Gilbert hated time. What a tyrant it was! The hours that crawled by when his father was at sea, the seconds that whipped past when he was playing a brilliant game in the garden with the Limburgher children. The eternity it took for summer to arrive at the beach at the bottom of the cliffs, the flashing instant before the winter stole over them again and father took to the sea once more.“You can’t hate *time*,” Emmy said. The oldest of the three Limburghers, and the only girl, she was used to talking younger boys out of their foolishness. “It’s just *time*.”
Gilbert stopped pacing the treehouse floor and pointed a finger at her. “That’s where you’re wrong!” He thumped the book he’d taken out of his father’s bookcase, a book fetched home from London, heavy and well-made and swollen with the damp air of the sea-crossing home to America. He hadn’t read the book, but his tutor, sour Senor Uriarte, had explained it to him the day before while he was penned up inside watching the summer moments whiz past the study’s windows. “Time isn’t just time! Time is space! It’s just a dimension.” He thumped the book again for emphasis, then opened it to the page he’d marked with a wide blade of sawgrass he’d uprooted before, and chewed while Senor Uriarte explained time and space to him.
“See this? This is a point. That’s one dimension. It doesn’t have length or depth. It’s just a dot. When you add another dimension, you get *lines*.” He pointed at the next diagram with a chewed and dirty fingernail. “You can go back and you can go forward, you can move around on the surface, as though the world was a page. But you can’t go up and down, not until you add another dimension.” He pointed to the diagram of the cube, stabbing at it so hard his finger dented the page. “That’s three dimensions, up and down, side to side and in and out.”
Emmy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of a 13 year old girl whose tutor had already explained all this to her. Gilbert smiled. Em would always be a year older than him, but that didn’t mean he would always be dumber than her.
“And Mr Einstein, who is the smartest man in the whole history of the world, he has proved — absolutely *proved* — that time is just *another dimension*, just like space. Time is what happens when you can go up and down, side to side, in and out, and *before and after*.”
Em opened her mouth and closed it. Her twin brothers, Erwin and Neils, snickered at the sight of their sister struck dumb. She glared at them, then at Gilbert. “That’s stupid,” she said.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Jan Rubak has once again set out to create a fan-audiobook of my essays, reading aloud from my book Context as he did with my earlier collection, Content. He’s a great reader, and he’s uploaded half the book so far, with the rest promised soon. Here’s an MP3 of his reading of “Think Like a Dandelion.”
“Context” by Cory Doctorow : Jan Rubak : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive
(Thanks, Jan!)
Here’s an interview I did last week with the SF-Fantasy.de podcast in Berlin
