A Place So Foreign and Eight More, has won the 2004 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, winning out over such worthy competitors as Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Robert Charles Wilson’s Blind Lake. I am bursting with pride.

The Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic is a
prized and juried award. Based on excellence of writing, it will
be presented annually to a Canadian writer who has had published
a speculative fiction novel or book-length collection of
speculative fiction any time during the previous calendar year.
Named after the first novel by Phyllis Gotlieb, one of the first
published authors of contemporary Canadian science fiction, the
award consists of: a cash award of $1000 and a medallion which
incorporates a specially designed “Sunburst” logo. The winner
will receive his or her award in fall 2004.

My short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, has been shortlisted for the Sunburst Award, a juried prize that goes to the best Canadian science fiction book each year. I am pleased as PUNCH.

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn’t.

So here we are, just a little over a year later, and I am currently, at this moment, standing on a stage at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, delivering a talk called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, in which I lay out the case for what I’ve done and explain the myraid ways in which the sky has not fallen on me, and just about now, I’m announcing what’ sin this blog post:

That I am re-licensing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, effective today, under the terms of one of the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which explicitly allows anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptation of my book s/he can think of: translations, radio plays, movies, sequels, fanfic, slashfic…you get the picture.

I can’t wait to see what you-all make of this. Surprise me, please!

0wnz0red, the final story in this book, has just qualified as a finalist for the 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novelette. I am over the moon.

Mars Magazine has republished my story A Place So Foreign, with some keen fan art.

RainTaxi magazine has a great review of Place So Foreign in its winter 2003 ish:

Doctorow embeds exposition in the action and dialogue, making his fiction fun to read–in other words, you don’t have to slog through idle descriptions of technology or mythical family trees. When the “robutler” in the title story affixes its “electrode fingertips” to the narrator’s temples to “juice” them and clear away his headache, the incident passes so quickly that it doesn’t seem too cute or campy. The author’s minimalist style is a refreshing change from the meticulous, heavy-handed prose of classic fantasy and SF novels, aptly conveying what it might feel like to have your temples juiced.