Covering the transformation of Kodacell (formerly Kodak and Duracell) into a network of tiny teams, journalist Suzanne Church goes to Florida and the inventors behind it all, Lester and Perry, who have more ideas than they know what to do with. The New Work (i.e., the network) takes off, with a mini-startup in every abandoned strip mall in America. But suddenly, it crashes, and things get really interesting. Lester and Perry build an interactive ride in an abandoned Wal-Mart, a nostalgia trip through their glory days, that catches the eye of a vicious Disney exec—and the old corporate giants fight their last battle against the new economic order. Doctorow’s talent for imagining the near future is astonishing, and his novels keep getting better. His prognostications are unnervingly plausible and completely bizarre, obviously developed from careful observation of what’s going on at the bleeding edge of technology and culture. The characters are simultaneously completely geeky and suave, lovable and flawed. Even the suits, marketing people and lawyers, are interesting.
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Doctorow is also a master of one-upping himself, which should come as no surprise given his interest in the Singularity. In ‘Makers’ he manages to keep the readers’ jaws dropped, as one mind-boggling scheme is supplanted by another, each new plan in equal parts wacky, intelligent, and plausible. He uses creativity and invention as plot points, thus keeping our minds and hearts in sync as we race through the novel. And this is by far his most substantial work, topping out at just over 400 pages. This time around Doctorow gives readers time to really get immersed in his world, which is to say, our world as seen through his economic kaleidoscope.
But for all the science-fiction-of-economics inventiveness, for all the delightful plot shenanigans Doctorow cooks up, by far his best asset is to my mind his directness, a trait he shares with Lethem. Doctorow never beats around the bush. Everything he says, everything every character does is somehow more right there on the page than we’re usually accustomed to seeing. Doctorow’s art is to a degree his ability to strip out all the art. He’s got great ideas and makes no attempt to hide them or lead up to them. They just spill right out of his characters’ mouths. Even though we’re reading a sort-of science fiction novel, the real appeal of ‘Makers’ is that Doctorow just spills out one truth after another. It’s refreshingly fun to read a novel where everything you need is right there on the printed page — even if you didn’t print it yourself.
I stopped at the University of Ottawa’s CHUO radio and recorded an interview with the Audio Visual show; they’ve just popped it online as a podcast, along with an interview with Bob Wiseman.
Annalee Newitz from IO9 and I sat down for a chat over lunch at the WorldCon, and she’s published the transcript:
Novels are competing for attention with other media that can be peeled off from them. At the same time, novels are social objects and the web is social technology. My novels diffuse through the web in what tends to be a social context. I get new downloads because a bunch of Livejournal people are discussing it. The web makes it easier for people who love books to turn those books into part of their identities. That makes people buy books more. And it’s cheaper to make them, as well as easier to get direct compensation.
My new Guardian column, “The BBC is encrypting its HD signal by the back door,” describes a petition from the BBC to Ofcom, the UK telecoms regulator, seeking permission to encrypt its broadcast signals, something it is prohibited from doing. The BBC proposal goes like this: Hollywood studios are blackmailing us and demanding this. But the encryption won’t be bad, since it’ll only affect a few programmes and only in small ways.
It’s simply not true. The BBC is being deliberately misleading and extremely naive here. Naive because it’s just not credible that the Hollywood studios and other rightsholders will boycott broadcast TV without encryption. They made exactly the same threat in the US, saying that without the Broadcast Flag, they’d stop licensing sport and movies to broadcast TV. There’s no Broadcast Flag in the US. The broadcasts of sports and new release movies go on.
Misleading because the BBC’s proposal turns over control of the design of TV receivers and recorders in the UK to an offshore consortium called DTLA, effectively turning it, not Ofcom, into the British regulator. DTLA and its guidelines will determine what you can do with your TV signals, not Parliament and copyright law. DTLA prohibits the use of open source drivers, which means that this will render obsolete all cards and other devices with that can be used with free/open software. It also prohibits unencrypted digital outputs, which means that you won’t be able to buy a converter box that sends a HD digital signal to your SD Freeview box, so you’ll have to throw out the old box.
Be sure to check out the comments where I’m debunking the BBC’s talking points directly.
Some background: licence-fee-paid television must be free to receive in the UK. Unlike cable and commercial satellite signals, free-to-air television is carried on public airwaves, which broadcasters are allowed to use for free. In return, broadcasters are expected to provide programming on those airwaves, for free. And not just free as in “free beer”, but also free as in “free speech.” The terms and conditions for free-to-air telly are “Do anything you want with this, provided it doesn’t violate copyright law.”
But big rightsholder groups – US movie studios, mostly – object to this. They’d prefer a “copyright-plus” regime, in which they get to invent a bunch of new copyrights for themselves, without the inconvenience of public debate or parliamentary lawmaking. The way they do this is by slapping restrictive licence agreements on their media, or rather licence “agreements,” in inverted commas. You don’t get to negotiate these “agreements,” they’re imposed on you, and are sometimes even invisible to you.
Here’s the second installment of a story-in-progress, Epoch, commissioned by Mark Shuttleworth for my forthcoming short story collection WITH A LITTLE HELP.
Espen Andersen writes, “After buying ‘Little Brother’, I discovered that a page was torn out. Rather than exchange it, I just printed out the missing page from Cory’s webpage.”
Espen Andersen writes, “After buying ‘Little Brother’, I discovered that a page was torn out. Rather than exchange it, I just printed out the missing page from Cory’s webpage.”
I’m delighted and honored to announced that my YA novel Little Brother has won the 2009 Sunburst YA award for best Canadian sf novel for kids. The Sunburst is named for Phyllis Gottleib’s first novel, my friend and the “mother of Canadian science fiction,” who died this year, so it’s especially poignant and significant to have won this in 2009. I also won the Sunburst in the adult category for my first short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.
My sincere thanks to the jury for making this book their choice, and to the donors who make the Sunburst possible.
