Erik Wecks has a thoughtful and smart analysis of my little book The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow in Wired‘s GeekDad today (spoilers ahoy!)
Review:
GeekDad
What makes Doctorow’s story so unique is that in almost every science fiction story meat-space is privileged over cyber-space. The hero wins when they successfully resist technology and establish their humanity as an opposing force against the tyranny of the machine. Doctorow and other techno-positive thinkers like him argue forcefully that such thinking can only lead to dystopia and suffering. In a world of ever-quickening technological upheaval the question remains important for us: Change or Progress?
Erik Wecks, Wired GeekDad
Erik Wecks has a thoughtful and smart analysis of my little book The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow in Wired‘s GeekDad today (spoilers ahoy!)
Noah Brewer just successfully defended his MA English thesis Re-Makers: The Novel in Digital Collaborative Space at the University of Georgia. As the title implies, the piece is about my novel Makers. It’s a smart piece of work, and I’m both tickled and honored.
Here’s a podcast of my last Locus column, A Prose By Any Other Name:
Back in 2005, I did something weird. I decided that I would embark on a project to write short stories with the same (or similar) titles to famous science fiction books and stories. My initial motivation for this was Ray Bradbury objecting to Michael Moore calling a movie Fahrenheit 9/11, which led Bradbury to call Moore an ‘‘asshole’’ and a ‘‘horrible human being’’ who’d ‘‘stolen’’ the title. Like many other writers, Bradbury has rightfully never shied from taking and adapting titles from other writers and works (‘‘I Sing the Body Electric’’, ‘‘Something Wicked This Way Comes’’, ‘‘The Women’’, etc.), and I thought that this was a silly thing for a respected writer to say. I suspected that, despite his denials, Bradbury disagreed with Moore’s politics and invented an ad hoc ethical code regarding titles to explain why what he did to Walt Whitman was fundamentally different from what Moore had done to him.
The more I thought about writing stories with ‘‘borrowed’’ titles, the more interesting it all got. Every time I thought about a famous title – one I hated, one I loved, one I had mixed feelings about – I found my subconscious simmering and then bubbling over with ideas. Stories – more so than novels – are often the product of odd subconscious associations. I’ll see something, I’ll see something else, the two will rub together, and wham, there’s a story idea crystallizing in my mind, and off I go to find a keyboard.
But for every story fragment that finds a complementary fragment to bond with and form into an idea, there are dozens of lonely haploids, grains of potential that never find another grain to join and synthesize with. Seven years into the project, the single most significant and reliable trait of ‘‘title’’ stories is that the titles exert a powerful gravity on story fragments, aggregating them into full-blown inspiration.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.
Noah Brewer just successfully defended his MA English thesis Re-Makers: The Novel in Digital Collaborative Space at the University of Georgia. As the title implies, the piece is about my novel Makers. It’s a smart piece of work, and I’m both tickled and honored.
My latest Locus column, “A Prose By Any Other Name,” is a state-of-the-project report on my longrunning habit of writing science fiction stories with the same titles as famous books, and the interesting things I’ve discovered about creativity and my subconscious along the way.
The more I thought about writing stories with ‘‘borrowed’’ titles, the more interesting it all got. Every time I thought about a famous title – one I hated, one I loved, one I had mixed feelings about – I found my subconscious simmering and then bubbling over with ideas. Stories – more so than novels – are often the product of odd subconscious associations. I’ll see something, I’ll see something else, the two will rub together, and wham, there’s a story idea crystallizing in my mind, and off I go to find a keyboard.
But for every story fragment that finds a complementary fragment to bond with and form into an idea, there are dozens of lonely haploids, grains of potential that never find another grain to join and synthesize with. Seven years into the project, the single most significant and reliable trait of ‘‘title’’ stories is that the titles exert a powerful gravity on story fragments, aggregating them into full-blown inspiration.
My latest Guardian column, “Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers,” looks at the wider consequences of Tor Books’ dropping DRM on its ebooks, and what it would mean for writers and publishers if DRM was dropped across the industry:
oat.
Back when ebook sales began to kick off, most major publishers were still DRM believers — or at least, not overly skeptical of the claims of DRM vendors. They viewed the use of DRM as “better than nothing”.
When queried on the competitive implications of giving control over their business relationships to DRM vendors, they were sanguine (if not utterly dismissive). They perceived “converting ebooks” as a technical challenge beyond the average book buyer. For the absence of DRM to make any kind of difference in the marketplace, they believed that book buyers would have to download and install a special program to let them convert Kindle books to display on a Nook (or vice-versa), and they perceived this to be very unlikely.
But it’s only the widespread presence of DRM that makes “converting ebooks” into a technical challenge. Your browser “converts” all sorts of graphic formats — GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc — without ever calling your attention to it. You need to take some rather extraordinary steps to find out which format of the graphics on your screen right now are using. Unless you’re a web developer, you probably don’t even know what the different formats are, nor what their technical differences are. And you don’t need to.
Why the death of DRM would be good news for readers, writers and publishers
I’m incredibly chuffed to learn that the Japanese edition of Little Brother is up for this year’s Seiun award, along with Bacigalupi’s Windup Girl, Mieville’s The City & the City, Wilson’s Chronoliths, Delany’s Dhalgren and Ballad’s Millennium People.
