There’s a new stage adaptation of my novel Little Brother opening in San Francisco. Charlie Jane Anders from IO9 got to go to the preview and loved it, which is incredibly heartening, since I won’t get to see it!

So I’ll just say that the version I saw was powerful and brilliant, and the cast was note-perfect, especially Daniel Petzold as Marcus Yallow. (The other two castmembers, Marissa Keltie and Cory Censoprano, have a harder task in some ways, since they play a variety of roles throughout the show. And they’re both great as well.) The stage play uses a lot of pre-recorded video and some very clever sets to create a lot of different settings, as well as giving a primer in topics like the futility of using data-mining to catch terrorists.

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother becomes a must-see stage play

The Guardian

In my latest Guardian column, “The internet is the best place for dissent to start,” I look at Ethan Zuckerman’s recent talk on the Internet and human rights, and the way that cute cats create the positive externality of a place for dissent to begin and flourish, and look at the problems this causes:

Zuckerman’s argument is this: while YouTube, Twitter, Facebook (and other popular social services) aren’t good at protecting dissidents, they are nevertheless the best place for this sort of activity to start, for several reasons.

First, because when YouTube is taken off your nation’s internet, everyone notices, not just dissidents. So if a state shuts down a site dedicated to exposing official brutality, only the people who care about that sort of thing already are likely to notice.

But when YouTube goes dark, all the people who want to look at cute cats discover that their favourite site is gone, and they start to ask their neighbours why, and they come to learn that there exists video evidence of official brutality so heinous and awful that the government has shut out all of YouTube in case the people see it.

The internet is the best place for dissent to start

The Hugo Award nominations are open. Attendees of last year’s World Science Fiction in Reno and next year’s WorldCon in Chicago (as well as those who paid for “supporter” status) can nominate their favorite science fiction and fantasy stories, books, movies and other media for one of the most prestigious awards in the field.

Just in case you were wondering, my eligible publications for the year are:

* “Knights of the Rainbow Table,” novella (Intel, 2011)
* “Martian Chronicles,” novella (Life on Mars, 2011)

* “Shannon’s Law,” novelette, (Welcome to Bordertown, 2011)
* “Clockwork Fagin,” novelette (Steampunk!, 2011)
* “Another Place, Another Time, short story (The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, 2011)
* “Brave Little Toaster,” short story (TRSF, 2011)
* “Authorised Domain,” short story (podcast, 2011)
* Context, related book (Tachyon, 2011)
* The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, related book (PM Press, 2011)

2012 Hugo Award and John W. Campbell Award Nominating Ballot