My novel deals with a group of people setting about to “unwire” Toronto by deploying free WiFi networks across the city. Wireless Toronto is just such a group in real life, and they’ve just launched their website. Truth is stranger than fiction!
Wireless Toronto is a not-for-profit group dedicated to bringing no-fee wireless Internet access to Toronto. Our aim is to encourage the growth of wireless networking and to build community in interesting and innovative ways.
Michael Parenti has put together an amazing short video based on Someone Comes to Town. He says, “Lets just say that i can’t agree with him more in his framing of the freedom of access debate in a zeitgeist fairy tale of good vs evil remniscent of the science fiction trilogy by C.S. Lewis.”
Fine modern fantasy from up-and-coming SF writer (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003) and happening Web editor (boingboing.net) Doctorow, with the potential to please both SF and mainstream readers.
This chimera of a novel takes a plot with the geek appeal of a Neal Stephenson story and combines it with a touching family tale built out of absurdist elements that could have come from Italo Calvino or Kurt Vonnegut. We first meet Alan in Toronto, after he’s made some money running a series of vaguely bohemian enterprises—bookstores, used-clothing stores, etc. He has painstakingly renovated a house in the student district as the perfect setting for writing, but he’s distracted by his neighbors, primarily the sadistic punk Krishna, who is immediately hostile, and Krishna’s girlfriend, Mimi, an attractive young woman who’s revealed to have a set of wings, which Krishna regularly hacks off so that Mimi might pass among us. Both recognize Alan as something other than normal, and in the story’s other thread, they’re proven right. His mother was a washing machine, his father the mountain in which he grew up. Among his brothers are an island and three nesting-doll-like creatures, all of whom help Alan murder their resentful and dangerous brother David. Alan is further distracted when he meets Kurt, a techno-punk slowly installing wireless access points throughout the city to provide universal free Internet, a scheme that immediately engages Alan, who becomes the co-mastermind. Crisis blossoms when, with Krishna as his Renfrew, decomposing brother David returns to seek revenge, first by murdering the brothers, then targeting Mimi, now with Alan, and Kurt.
The Book Standard has a great article on the use of Creative Commons licenses for electronic distribution of commercial print books, and the growing schism between the kinds of publishers and authors who complain about Google and Amazon’s services for searching the whole text of books and the kinds of publishers and writers who celebrate it.
“I don’t want to condone piracy,” says Hayden of Tor Books. “But in general I find it not so much appalling as encouraging. We’re the genre that the readers care enough about to be this obsessive about. I want to do something with this, not fight against it.”
Doctorow agrees. “Think about the care that goes into pirating a book!” he says. “That person has not done that because he hates the author and wishes to do the author harm, but because he loves the work and loves the author. Calling that person a thief is about the most suicidal thing you can do.” And, as Stross points out, “the availability of a free e-book actually undercuts the profitability of pirate paper or electronic editions.”
Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, the leading publisher of computer books in America, says his company certainly does encounter piracy, the more so since their work attracts the most technically savvy people in the world. The books of theirs that sell the best are the books that are most often pirated (and the most shoplifted, incidentally), but this doesn’t stop those books from selling well. “I’m sure there are people who pass around the links and use the pirate links,” says O’Reilly. “But in our experience they’re not the people who are likely to buy the books anyway.”
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a perfect example of why we shouldn’t be trying to stuff books into genres (although I will say this book is definitely InfernoKrusher). This wonderful, loopy, deep, moving story has a mystery, or maybe lots of mysteries (including the mystery of the human condition), there are a couple of romances, (not to mention the love of life and technology) and there are wonderful, intoxicating, flights of fantasy.
Dragonpage radio have recorded a podcast with me about the book and it went live today. I love doing interviews with these guys — they’re really knowledgeable and fun. Here’s the MP3 link
On July 24, I’ll be appearing in the online world Second Life to do a book signing/launch for my new novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. The Second Lifers have been conducting a contest to see who can come up with the coolest in-game programmed book-object to decant the novel into, and they’ve picked a winner:
Falk Bergman was the first to bring me by to have a look at his prototype in development, a giant book positioned next to a seat. Sitting on it automatically fixes your camera position in place, to give you the best possible view of the book.“The viewer in-world itself is very simple,” Falk tells me modestly. “It is basically a shopping agent with two displays that hooks into Page Up and Down [on the keyboards] for changing the pages.”
It’s only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow’s fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he’s the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt.
Alan tries desperately to behave like a human being–or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist’s plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead brother who’s now resurrected and bent on revenge.
I’m doing three signings for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in the first two weeks of July. The first two are in the Detroit region (I’m spending July 4 week in East Lansing, Michigan teaching at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop), and the third is in Toronto, at BakkaPhoenix books, the oldest sf bookstore in the country, where I once worked. I hope to see you at these!
July 5, 7PM:
Archives Bookshop, 517 West Grand River, East Lansing, MI, 48823, (517)332-8444
July 7, 7:30PM:
Schuler Books and Music, 1982 West Grand River Avenue, Okemos, MI, 48864, (517)349-8840
July 11, 7PM:
BakkaPhoenix Books, 697 Queen St West, Toronto, ON, M6J 1E6, (416)963-9993
This is my third novel, and as with my first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and my second, Eastern Standard Tribe, I am releasing it for free download on the Internet the very same day that it ships to the stores. The books are governed by Creative Commons licenses that permit their unlimited noncommercial redistribution, which means that you’re welcome to share them with anyone you think will want to see them. In the words of Woody Guthrie:
“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”
Why do I do this? There are three reasons:
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