My new Locus column, “Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise,” explores what it means for science fiction when the cost of knowing something falls to zero, and when the difference between knowing something can be done and doing it narrows away to nothing.

Tell someone that her car has a chip-based controller that can be hacked to improve gas mileage, and you give her the keywords to feed into Google to find out how to do this, where to find the equipment to do it — even the firms that specialize in doing it for you.

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.

This means that invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery.

Cheap Facts and the Plausible Premise

Diane from the World Science Fiction Convention sez, “Just wanted to drop you a quick note to say that the voting deadline for the Hugo awards is this Friday. Eligible voters must vote online by July 3rd, 23:59PM EST. People should vote as early as possible in case of computer problems and to ensure their ballot is received before the deadline.”

You get a vote if you’re signed up to attend the WorldCon (it’s in Montreal this year). It’s one of the best Hugo ballots I’ve seen in all my years as an sf reader. And yes, I’m eligible twice, once for best novel (Little Brother) and again for best novella (True Names, with Ben Rosenbaum).

Final Ballot for the 2009 Hugo Awards
and John W. Campbell Award

My latest Guardian column, “When I’m dead, how will my loved ones break my password?” describes the process my wife and I went through when we drew up our wills and realized that our encrypted hard-drives and our network passwords would go with us if we died or were incapacitated, and how important it was for us to have a secure, long-term solution for decrypting our data if we croak.

I don’t want to simply hand the passphrase over to my wife, or my lawyer. Partly that’s because the secrecy of a passphrase known only to one person and never written down is vastly superior to the secrecy of a passphrase that has been written down and stored in more than one place. Further, many countries’s laws make it difficult or impossible for a court to order you to turn over your keys; once the passphrase is known by a third party, its security from legal attack is greatly undermined, as the law generally protects your knowledge of someone else’s keys to a lesser extent than it protects your own.

I discarded any solution based on putting my keys in trust with a service that sends out an email unless you tell it not to every week – these “dead man’s switch” services are far less deserving of my trust than, say, my wife or my solicitor.

I rejected a safe-deposit box because of all the horror stories I’ve heard of banks that refuse to allow access to boxes until the will is probated, and the data necessary to probate the will is in the box.

I pondered using something called Shamir’s Secret Sharing Scheme (SSSS), a fiendishly clever crypto scheme that allows you to split a key into several pieces, in such a way that only a few of those pieces are needed to unlock the data. For example, you might split the key into 10 pieces and give them to 10 people such that any five of them can pool their pieces and gain access to your crypto-protected data. But I rejected this, too – too complicated to explain to civilians, and what’s more, if the key could be recovered by five people getting together, I now had to trust that no five out of 10 people would act in concert against me. And I’d have to keep track of those 10 people for the rest of my life, ensuring that the key is always in a position to be recovered. Too many moving parts – literally.

When I’m dead, how will my loved ones break my password?

Gardner Dozois and Jonathan Strahan’s new anthology The New Space Opera 2 came out today, featuring all original stories by me, John Scalzi, Robert Charles Wilson, Jay Lake, Garth Nix, Bruce Sterling, Elizabeth Moon, Justina Robson and many others. My story, “To Go Boldly,” is a look at the LARPing ethic that lurks under the skin of any space navy.

The New Space Opera 2: All-new stories of science fiction adventure

(via Scalzi)

My novel Little Brother has won the Campbell Award for best sf novel of the year (sharing the award with Ian MacLeod’s “Song of Time”). The award’s given out over the July 9 weekend at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, and includes free events that are open to the public. Also in attendance will be Ian MacLeod and James Allan Gardner, whose “The Ray Gun: A Love Story” won the Sturgeon award for best short story.

(Funny thing: there’s another Campbell award, given out with the Hugo Awards, for best new sf writer. I won it in 2000, and as near as anyone can work out, I’m the only writer to have won both!).

Hope to see you in Lawrence on July 11/12!

James Gunn, director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas, has announced winners of the 2009 John W. Campbell Award for the best science fiction novel of the year and the 2009 Theodore Sturgeon Award for the best short science fiction of the year.

The Campbell award is shared by Cory Doctorow’s “Little Brother” (Tor Books) and Ian MacLeod’s “Song of Time” (PS Publishing). James Alan Gardner’s “The Ray Gun: A Love Story” won the Sturgeon award. The authors will accept their awards July 10 at KU and will be featured at the Campbell Conference on Saturday, July 11, and Sunday, July 12.

The Campbell Conference will discuss “What’s Old, What’s New: The New Space Opera, the New Hard SF, the New Weird.” In the afternoon session the three winners will open a discussion on what’s new in publishing and its effect on writing and reading.

Science fiction writers earn awards for best novels, short story of the year