Here’s part 2 — chapters 5-8 — of the reading of my novel Eastern Standard Tribe.
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 the first installment of the podcast of my second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, a novel of political intrigue among high-tech, sleep-deprived management consultants. This is my most ambitious podcasting project to date — I figure it’ll take 4-6 months to complete.
I’ve found a half-brick that was being used to hold down the tar paper around an exhaust-chimney. I should’ve used that to hold the door open, but it’s way the hell the other side of the roof, and I’d been really pleased with my little pebbly doorstop. Besides, I’m starting to suspect that the doorjamb didn’t fail, that it was sabotaged by some malevolently playful goon from the sanatorium. An object lesson or something.
I heft the brick. I release the brick. It falls, and falls, and falls, and hits the little blue fartmobile square on the trunk, punching a hole through the cheap aluminum lid.
And the fartmobile explodes. First there is a geyser of blue flame as the tank’s puncture wound jets a stream of ignited assoline skyward, and then it blows back into the tank and boom, the fartmobile is in one billion shards, rising like a parachute in an updraft. I can feel the heat on my bare, sun-tender skin, even from this distance.
Explosions. Partial nudity. Somehow, though, I know that this isn’t the climax.
My short-short story Printcrime, originally published in Nature Magazine (and since reprinted in my brand new short story collection, Overclocked) has just been adapted for audio by the brilliant SF podcast show, Escape Pod. Download it free!
The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals — performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma’s trunk, the one she’d brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
Here’s part three of the three-part podcast of my story Power Punctuation!, originally published in Starlight 3 in 2001. It’s a funny Pygmalion story about a corporate distopia, secure shredding, and conspiracy theories.
Here’s the audio from last night’s talk at PSU, courtesy of Chris Dawson.
Here’s part two of the three-part podcast of my story Power Punctuation!, originally published in Starlight 3 in 2001. It’s a funny Pygmalion story about a corporate distopia, secure shredding, and conspiracy theories.
Here’s part one of the three-part podcast of my story Power Punctuation!, originally published in Starlight 3 in 2001. It’s a funny Pygmalion story about a corporate distopia, secure shredding, and conspiracy theories.
Wow, you won’t believe what happened today. First of all, I was nearly late for work because my new roommate is worried about the electrical and he pulled out all the plugs last night, even my alarm clock! His name is Tony, and I think he is either weird or crazy, or maybe both! He keeps saying that the Company uses the plugs to listen to our minds! He unplugged all the electricals and put tape over them in the middle of the night. When I woke up this morning, my room was totally black! I had my flashlight from work on the chair near my bed, and I used that to find the living room. Tony was sitting in his shorts on the sofa, in the dark, watching the plug behind the TV. Hey, I said, you watch the television, not the plug, and then he said some bad words and told me that he didn’t want me plugging in _anything_. He is skinny like Jimmy got when he had the AIDS, but he is not sick, he is hyperkinetic, like Manny was when he went to the special school. That is why he is management and I still work on a truck. If I have to be skinny and crazy to be management, I’ll take the truck all day long!
Last week I recorded an interview with Mur Lafferty, of the I Should Be Writing podcast. Mur wrote the book on Podcasting (literally) and I was privileged to have her as one of my students at the Viable Paradise workshop in Martha’s Vineyard.
Last night, I did an interview on The Linux Link Tech Show, a venerable free software radio show/podcast. We talked DRM, mostly, and the audio is here (MP3 — also available as OGG).
Here’s part four, the conclusion of my podcast of 0wnz0red, a story about trusted computing, geek culture, and getting root on your body. It was originally published on Salon, a reprinted in my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. 0wnz0red was a runner up for the Nebula Award in 2003, and has been widely reprinted.
