The Sci Fi Channel has a stupendous print and web-presence, with net resources like the Sci Fi Wire and Sci Fiction.

That’s why it was such an honor to have my novel chosen to launch the SciFi Channel’s new book club, Sci Fi Essentials. SciFi specifically asked for my book to lead the program with, and we delayed it from March to July to line up with the program’s launch. Sci Fi will be promoting the book across its media properties, including the Web site and the magazine.

Thanks, Sci Fi — and welcome new readers!

Dorothea Salo, of textartisan.com, did the conversion of my first novel to html, converting an ASCII text file into something well-formed, with great typography and easy-to-hack semantics in the stylesheet.

Dorothea graced me with her skills again, producing the stupendous HTML verion of the book, producing something that is, again, standards-compliant, pretty to look at, and easy to mod.

Thank you, Dorothea.

I’m going to do an in-game signing and talk this July in Second Life, the massively mutiplayer online world (I did this before, for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it was really fun!).

To commemorate the event, Second Life’s Wagner James Au is coordinating an in-game contest to design a virtual book based on the text of the novel, a digital 3D object wiht turn-able pages, etc. I really hope that what they end up building is more than a simple 3D version of a meatspace book, though: electronic text is so much more protean than printed words, so it would be a shame to constrain it to behaving the way that dumb matter does.

…[F]or the next couple months, in preparation for Cory’s appearance, Residents will be creating book prototypes, and submitting them to me for an in-world expo, so the community can choose which one provides the best in-world reading experience. Within 48 hours of the announcement, one Resident had already submitted a screenshot of his own prototype (bottom screenshot), which sharp-eyed readers will recognize as the opening page to Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the novel he discussed with Residents at the first Book Club. The one to win the most votes at the Expo will get the honor of publishing Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Second Life. (Though of course, my personal hope is that this also helps launch a mini-explosion of virtual book technology in-world.)

Have you found a typo, continuity problem or factual error in my book? Good! Here’s a wiki (a community-editable webpage) where we’re keeping track of errata. I’ll fix any errors I can in the electronic editions (though just in the canonical PDF, text and html versions, I have no way of editing the user-submitted versions). When the next edition of the treeware version of the book comes out, I’ll see to it that all the errata are collected there, too!

Beneath all the tech, cultural references, and imaginative indulgence, Wired correspondent Doctorow’s geek fantasy portrays a misfit’s struggle to connect with the people around him. An ex-shopkeeper courts a reluctant-angel babe next door and helps deploy a grassroots Wi-Fi network, all while he struggles with his impossible family (his mom is a washing machine, and his little brother, Davey, is a murderous corpse).
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