Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has been integrated into the coursework at a Stanford university Information systems course:

Choose one of he following projects, or devise something of your own by Jan 15th, and let us know….

3) Reputation systems: this is the most speculative of the three project suggestions. Identify what kind of reputation systems would be important in the context of online communities and market places of the future, what their vulnerabilities are likely to be, and how these vulnerabilities can be tackled. Alternatively, read the science fiction book by Cory Doctorow, “Down and out in the magic kingdom (available for free or on amazon.com, bn.com etc)�, and architect the reputation system used in that book. Remember to address the issues of whether data needed to compute the reputations is stored centrally or in a distributed fashion. In the absence of any real currency, how would you provide a guarantee to the average Joe and Jane that the “system� does not shortchange them in terms of their reputation? If you decide that the reputation system used in this book is not realizable or has significant internal flaws, then make a cogent argument to this effect.

This week’s Entertainment Weekly lists the 10 Best Novels of 2003. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is number five. It’s also one of Sunday, December 28th’s NYT’s “New and Notable” paperbacks.

My novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has made the Amazon and Chapters/Indigo editors’ picks lists for best science fiction novels of 2003. Also, it’s only three recommendations short of making the preliminary Nebula ballot (any SFWA members out there who dug the book?). Oh yah, and the Livejournal people are considering adding Whuffie to their system. Killer news, all ’round.

(Thanks, Amanda and Bo and Micah!)

I finally got to see the paperback of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which is out just in time for Christmas. For various good reasons, Tor elected to publish the hardcover in January of last year, too late for Christmas shoppers. A lot of people complained (including me), but it’s clear that they knew what they were doing — the book didn’t end up competing with the big, frontlist holiday titles and sold very well indeed. Still, I’m very grateful indeed that the paperback (which Amazon has for $10.36) is out in time for the holidays this year.

Phillip Torrone, a leading home-robotics hobbyist, has just acquired a new Aibo, and he’s named it “Whuffie.” This video clip of the dog meeting its new masters is utterly charming.

Jack Willliam Bell has started a really interesting discussion about Whuffie and my novel on his Slashdot journal:

In these discussions the usual answer given is that human creativity will retain value and that people would still buy and sell hand-made items, artwork, books and songs. But this rings false to me on a number of levels, not the least of which is the fact that not everyone is talented enough to participate in such an ecomomy. A more important problem with this answer is the fact that, with the exception of hand-made items and original artwork, this actually relies on the continuation of false scarcity by requiring intellectual property limits which could not be maintained in a digitally networked world. (All this was before I ever heard of DRM of course.)

Reputation ecomonies, however, could be based on anything people valued in other people — not just their personal creativity. And such a currency would bring value to the creator of a song even if the song was freely traded without intellectual property limits. So, should money ecomonies collapse, you could still have a valuation system built on how others percieved you.

Canada’s Space Channel has posted a RealMedia stream of me reading from Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.

A reminder: I’ll be reading and signing books on Thursday night at Berkeley’s The Other Change of Hobbit (2020 Shattuck Ave, 1-510-848-0413) from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there!

A couple weeks ago, I did an in-game “book-signing” and interview in the Second-Life game-world. Wagner James Au, the Second Life “embedded reporter” who interviewed me, has posted the transcripts to the site, in two parts:
Part 1 and Part 2.

“That’s what the immortality in D&O is. You go to a backup kiosk and you decant a copy of yourself into a big storage cloud, and if you die — or even if you have a bad hangover, hell, why not — you have a force-grown clone, and you decant the consciousness into it and you off yourself. (Though [in the book] it’s dressed up in other language. That’s the existential view from today’s POV.)

“But everyone who gets squeamish about the euthanasia aspect just dies. Because they can’t use the backup-and-recover system. And there’s not a lot of social will to advance medical science beyond backup-and-recover, since it solves most every problem.

“It’s like [a medievalist’s view of] nutrition or hygiene. You may actually be right about the ‘ill humours’ that will invade you if you don’t smell like a bear’s [rear end]. But in the meantime, the people who bathe aren’t getting scabies and dying of infections started by the left-behind mouth-parts of dead ticks. And so everyone who thinks that way [about not bathing] ends up dead, and their ideas die with them. (A horribly simplified version of Darwinian mimetics, but you take my point.)

A reminder: I’ll be launching my new short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I’m going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you!