Tor has updated the tile game that accompanies the ongoing serial of my forthcoming novel Makers, which comes out at the end of the month (and boy am I excited! Publishers Weekly called it “Brilliant” and a “Tour de force” and Library Journal called it “Enthusiastically recommended”).

Each installment in the serial has been accompanied by a CC-licensed image from Idiots’ Books, and the images tile, lining up with one another on all four sides. Tor is tossing these images into a Flash-toy that allows you to arrange and rotate these to your heart’s content.

The serial is up to 44 parts now, and the first 36 illos have been combined into a new, expanded, 6X6 version of the tile game (we’ll do the 7×7 soon, then the 8×8 and finish up with a 9×9 incorporating all 81!).

Makers Tile Game 6×6

Index of Makers installments

I’m speaking at a Hoxton LibDems dinner in London on Oct 19 at 7:30PM, at the Hoxton Apprentice in Hoxton Square, near Old Street Station. The event is open to the public — though they will try to get you to join/donate to the LibDems, whom I support for many reasons, not least because they’re a national party who don’t expect me to carry a biometric radio-enabled ID card as a condition of my spousal visa. Not surprisingly, I’ll be talking on “Privacy, Civil Liberties and Technology – Is Privacy Possible in the 21st Century?”

Date: Monday, October 19, 2009
Time: 7.30pm – 10.00pm

We have a top speaker for our autumn dinner this year, the science fiction writer and civil liberties campaigner; Cory Doctorow.
The theme is; “Privacy, Civil Liberties and Technology – Is Privacy Possible in the 21st Century?”. Find out more on our website where you can book in advance at the cheaper rate of £10 (£12 on the door).

The venue is just 5 minutes walk from Old Street tube in near the City in Central London.

Hackney Lib Dems autumn dinner in Hoxton Square near Old Street tube, with special guest speaker Cory Doctorow

I’ll be in Brighton, England next Saturday, Oct 17 for a Battle of Ideas event entitled “The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age.” I’ll be on a panel with Michael Bull from the University of Sussex and Nico Macdonald, chaired by Robert Clowes of Brighton Salon. It’s at 8PM in the Jubilee Library and tickets are £7.50 (£5 concessions). Hope to see you there! (I’ll also be doing a London Battle of Ideas event on Oct 31, “Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing”)

The 21st century looks set to be age of online collaboration. While old forms of community and solidarity have waned, leaving us apparently more fragmented and individualised, the social web enables many of us to work, play and organise with others in ways previously unimaginable. Technologies like Flickr, Delicious and Wikipedia evidence new means of sharing information and working together. Many suggest these technologies will have far-reaching social implications, and even presage a new form of production and work outside the market system. While traditional free market capitalism is compromised by the worldwide recession, the world wide web is said to promise an exciting alternative. Wired’s Kevin Kelly suggests we are entering a new collectivist epoch, a ‘New Socialism’. Technology guru Howard Rheingold sees these developments as disruptive, and will change the way people ‘meet, mate, work, fight, buy, sell’. Charles Leadbeater, author of We-Think, sees the new means of networked collaboration as presaging a new production model: ‘Mass Innovation rather than Mass Production’.

The Future of Collaboration: Sharing and Work in the Networked Age

I’ll be in Waterloo, Ontario on 22 Oct 2009 for the Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos event, which will also feature Neal Stephenson, Stewart Brand, Neil Gershenfeld, Stephen Hawking, Tara Hunt, Jaron Lanier, and many other distinguished scientists and writers. I’m doing a solo talk on copyright at 4PM and then a panel on AI and robotics for TVO’s The Agenda at 8PM.

Quantum to Cosmos

Quantum to Cosmos tickets

Samlaget, the Norwegian publisher for Little Brother, have released the full text of the book as a downloadable PDF. Samlaget have been incredibly forward-looking and a delight to work with. They brought me to Norway to participate in a debate on the future of copyright law at the Litteraturhuset, and my translator, editor, and publicist were all excited by the possibilities opened up by free digital distribution as a means to sell print books.

I often get asked why the foreign editions of my books aren’t available as a free download and the answer is simple: I rarely have any direct contact with my non-English publishers, let alone the kind of close working relationship that has enabled me to sell my UK and US publishers on the idea. But every now and again, a publisher will be excited enough about this to opt to put materials online off their own bat, and this is always wonderful for me. Samlaget is one of those publishers; Ragnfrid, my editor there, was the first non-English-language editor to buy the rights to Little Brother, right after it was published in English (her husband downloaded a free copy from my site, and shoved it into her hands!).

Cory Doctorow Veslebror Ser Deg

The inaugural Reading and Democracy National Reading Summit is coming up in Toronto on Nov 12-13, and I’m coming to Toronto to speak at it. The plan is to “create a national reading strategy for Canada” — a noble goal.

The TD National Reading Summit will engage participants in crafting a blueprint for a reading Canada. Over two days, delegates will hear from an impressive line-up of speakers from across the country and around the world. Ana Maria Machado (Brazil), Ingrid Bon (Netherlands), Elisa Bonilla (Mexico), Richard C. Anderson (USA), Cory Doctorow (UK/Canada), Tom King (Canada), Charles Pascal (Canada), and others will explore what it means to be a reader in a democratic society and share their research and experience in developing reading promotion programs. Conference sessions will inspire delegates to collaborate and lay the groundwork for new provincial and federal programs that will ultimately foster a reading culture in Canada.

Becoming a reader is at the very heart of responsible citizenship