36 weeks ago — give or take — I set out to read my 2005 novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town aloud, in installments, in my podcast. And now I am done.

Someone Comes to Town is my weirdest book by far, a fantasy novel about a man whose father is a mountain and whose mother is a washing machine, who moves from small-town Ontario to Toronto to help build a citywide meshing wireless network with a crustypunk dumpster-diver.

Reading the book aloud was enormously satisfying. I hadn’t read it through since I finished the final draft in 2004, and in many ways it was like coming back to it for the first time.

But even more satisfying was the participation from my readers. First there was John Taylor Williams, of DC’s Wryneck Studios, who volunteered to master the audio for me, adding bed-music, editing out the gonks, and making it sound really good — he started this around week 27, and it seriously improved the final 9 episodes.

Then Glenn Jones, a reader in the UK, decided to create a dedicated podcast feed for the book, with all 36 episodes, to make it easy to fetch and play in one gulp.

Im not sure what I’ll podcast next — I have a little more than a week to think about it — but I’m really looking forward to it.

Podcast feed for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

My podcast feed

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

David Wallace Jackson wrote a script that randomly changes the names of the characters in my 2005 Tor Books novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — a book in which the characters’ names fluctuate, with only their first initials remaining constant. It’s an absolutely delightful idea!

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (remix)

Source code

Web Webster writes, “Enjoying the podcast of Someone Comes To Town Someone Leaves Town. Excellent hearing it read by the author and I’m amazed at how much I didn’t pick up the first time I read it. Wanted to share a link to a Flickr set I shot this weekend. We went to Smithville, Tennessee to The Joe C. Evins Center for Craft and its annual Celebration. In wandering through the Ceramics building I ran across a set of pieces that immediately recalled the Golems from Someone.”

The Golems and pieces of Davey

Pavol Hvizdos just finished translating two of my works into Slovak, releasing the translations under Creative Commons licenses and putting them on the Internet Archive. Pavol chose my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and my short story Truncat (a sequel, of sorts, to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). This is way too cool.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Slovakian,

Truncat in Slovakian

Pavol Hvizdos, a Slovak speaker, has translated three of my books into Slovakian — Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and Overclocked. The translations are Creative Commons licensed for your remixing and sharing pleasure.

I can’t tell you how awesomely cool it is to have readers spontaneously undertake major translation projects just for the fun of it. I believe that sharing my books under CC licenses inspires my readers to promote them, and this is the proof that it works. w00t!

Link

Last night’s episode of Criminal Minds on CBS opened with a quote from my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — keen!

1.6MB QuickTime Link

(Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this!)

I’m pleased as punch to say that my novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leave Town has been shortlisted for the Sunburst, Canada’s national science fiction award. The Sunburst jury honored me with the award in 2004 for my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and this is a double-helping of delight.

Someone Comes to Town… comes out in a new trade paperback edition this week, too!

Aust Gate, the excellent science fiction bookstore in Oxford, England is offering free UK shipping on signed copies of the paperback of my novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which comes out next month. Just contact the store with your order and inscription information, and I’ll sign and inscribe all the orders on June 19. They’ll also take orders for my other books, and I’m happy to sign/inscribe those too. Just get your order in before June 19!