As part of the audiobook for my forthcoming experimental short story collection With a Little Help I asked Spider Robinson to read my story “Human Readable” aloud. He did a smashing job, and now he’s serializing the story on his podcast feed.
I just finished my podcast reading of my latest story, “Epoch,” which Mark Shuttleworth commissioned for my upcoming short story collection/experiment, With a Little Help. It’s the story of the sysadmin charged with shutting down the first and only functional AI, which no one can figure out a reason to save — and it’s the story of the AI’s bid to save its own life by fixing the Unix 32-bit rollover problem.
The podcast is in eight parts — I started reading it before I’d finished the story, so there’s some minor inconsistencies that’ll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I’ll be reading “Martian Chronicles,” my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.
The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in “I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet.” That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, “I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing.” Truth be told, I’d rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I’m smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.
Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity’s hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn’t a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren’t any killer apps for AI.
Here’s the eighth and final installment of a story-in-progress, Epoch, commissioned by Mark Shuttleworth for my forthcoming short story collection WITH A LITTLE HELP.
Today’s Toronto Star has a good piece about my upcoming book-launch for Makers in Toronto on Nov 12, and on the politics that informs my work.
Cory Doctorow will have mixed feelings when the news reaches him that employees of the Toronto Public Library system will not be on strike this week.
The U.K.-based author and blogger will launch his new novel, Makers, with an event Thursday at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy at the Lillian H. Smith Branch on College St. Had the library been surrounded by pickets, Doctorow planned to stage the event on the sidewalk outside, with the consent of the striking workers and their union. (A tentative agreement between the library and its unionized workers was reached on Wednesday.)
“I grew up in protest politics, so doing it on the street would be really fun,” he says, during a phone interview from his London home last week. “I’ve spent enough time standing on the street with a bullhorn that it would feel very natural to me. It would be great theatre to do it on the sidewalk.”
Today’s Toronto Star has a good piece about my upcoming book-launch for Makers in Toronto on Nov 12, and on the politics that informs my work.
Cory Doctorow will have mixed feelings when the news reaches him that employees of the Toronto Public Library system will not be on strike this week.
The U.K.-based author and blogger will launch his new novel, Makers, with an event Thursday at the Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation and Fantasy at the Lillian H. Smith Branch on College St. Had the library been surrounded by pickets, Doctorow planned to stage the event on the sidewalk outside, with the consent of the striking workers and their union. (A tentative agreement between the library and its unionized workers was reached on Wednesday.)
“I grew up in protest politics, so doing it on the street would be really fun,” he says, during a phone interview from his London home last week. “I’ve spent enough time standing on the street with a bullhorn that it would feel very natural to me. It would be great theatre to do it on the sidewalk.”
Here’s a radio interview I did recently with Off the Hook, the 2600 show, on New York’s WBAI, talking about MAKERS, maker politics, and the state of the world.
Here’s a radio interview I did recently with Off the Hook, the 2600 show, on New York’s WBAI, talking about MAKERS, maker politics, and the state of the world.
My latest Locus column, “Teen Sex,” explains why I think young adult literature should have sex — and other “mature” topics — in it.
There’s really only one question: “Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don’t you punish them for doing this?”
Now, the answer.
First, because teenagers have sex and drink beer, and most of the time the worst thing that results from this is a few days of social awkwardness and a hangover, respectively. When I was a teenager, I drank sometimes. I had sex sometimes. I disobeyed authority figures sometimes.
Mostly, it was OK. Sometimes it was bad. Sometimes it was wonderful. Once or twice, it was terrible. And it was thus for everyone I knew. Teenagers take risks, even stupid risks, at times. But the chance on any given night that sneaking a beer will destroy your life is damned slim. Art isn’t exactly like life, and science fiction asks the reader to accept the impossible, but unless your book is about a universe in which disapproving parents have cooked the physics so that every act of disobedience leads swiftly to destruction, it won’t be very credible. The pathos that parents would like to see here become bathos: mawkish and
trivial, heavy-handed, and preachy.
