Here’s a short interview I did last week in Chicago with WNIJ, an NPR affiliate. 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.
Here’s a podcast of my last Publishers Weekly column, Digital Lysenkoism :
Talking with the lower echelon employees of publishing reminds me of a description I once read about the mutual embarrassment of Western and Soviet biologists when they talked about genetics. Soviet-era scientists were required, on pain of imprisonment, to endorse Lysenkoism, a discredited theory of inheritance favored by Stalin for ideological reasons. Lysenko believed, incorrectly, that you could create heritable characteristics by changing a parent organism—that is, if you cut off one of a frog’s legs, a certain number of its offspring would be born with three legs.
Lysenkoism was a disaster. When it was applied to food cultivation it led to ghastly famines that killed millions. So, when Soviet scientists met their Western counterparts, everyone knew that Lysenkoism was an awful absurdity. But the Soviet scientists had to pretend it wasn’t. Not unlike some of the discussions inside today’s major publishing houses when it comes to DRM.
I recently solicited several writers for inclusion in the Humble E-book Bundle, for which I’m acting as a volunteer editor. The Humble E-book Bundle is the first foray into e-books by the Humble Indie Bundle project, a nonprofit that has run several insanely successful video-game distribution events in which customers got to name their own prices for a collection of independent, DRM-free games. Each of the Humble Indie Bundle projects so far has grossed around a million dollars and has made hundreds of thousands of dollars for each contributor . And I’ve recruited enthusiastic contributors from all of the big six publishers for the Humble E-Book Bundle—that is, all except one, which has an all-DRM-all-the-time policy and won’t consider publishing anything without DRM in any of its divisions.
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.
I did an interview last week with the CBC Radio show The Spark (I podcasted the complete interview when they posted it); now they’ve put up the edited episode. MP3 link
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
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)
