My latest Guardian column, “Transparency means nothing without justice,” is up. I wrote this before the G20 debacle (it was delayed due to an administrative problem at the Guardian), but all the points are just as relevant to the G20’s climate camp as they are to last summer’s version of it.

And here’s where transparency breaks down. We’ve known about all this since last August – seven months and more. It was on national news. It was on the web. Anyone who cared about the issue knew everything they needed to know about it. And everyone had the opportunity to find out about it: remember, it was included in national news broadcasts, covered in the major papers – it was everywhere.

And yet … nothing much has happened in the intervening eight months. Simply knowing that the police misbehaved does nothing to bring them to account.

Transparency means nothing unless it is accompanied by the rule of law. It means nothing unless it is set in a system of good and responsible government, of oversight of authority that expeditiously and effectively handles citizen complaints. Transparency means nothing without justice.

Transparency means nothing without justice

The Locus Award shortlist has been posted — this is the list of the best science fiction books and stories of the year, as chosen by the general public. I’m immensely gratified to say that I’m on the list three times, for my young adult novel Little Brother, my collaborative novella True Names (with Ben Rosenbaum), and my novelette The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away.

The whole list is a great jumping-off point for exploring the best written sf and fantasy of 2008!

2009 Locus Award Finalists

Cam writes in with just about the perfect parable about why DRM just sucks:

I thought you’d be amused to hear the circumstances which caused me to pick up and read Little Brother.

Being a pretty big nerd (I’m a tech director at Electronic Arts by day), I was excited to pick up a Sony ebook reader. I got the last one in the shop, which was actually a return – but the sales guy assured me that they’d “reconditioned it”.

After taking it home and installing Sony’s terrible, terrible ebook software I was only moderately surprised to find that I couldn’t “authorise” my new reader to read their DRM-laden ebooks. It gave me the always helpful error code of “3-013”. Googling this code told me that (of course) the reader was already authorised (presumably to the person who bought it the first time).

I contacted Sony’s only means of support, which was a web form on their site. Hours later, I received a response telling me that I needed to call their support line, which was open until 6PM. Naturally this email arrived at 5:58PM, and the support line kindly informed me that I should call back the next day. I think their time calculation function must suffer from some floating point inaccuracy.

Cursing my now apparently totally useless $300 device, I decided to read a free ebook to tide me over until I could call Sony the next day. I’m a regular boing boing reader and remembered your posts on Little Brother, so I downloaded it and started reading.

Needless to say, not only did I really enjoy reading it (and yes I know it’s nominally a book for kids!) but I’ve yet to make that call to authorise my device, and I’ve been reading more Creative Commons-licensed books.

So long story short, DRM turned me onto Little Brother and onto other CC-licensed works. I thought you might find that amusing.

Regards,
Cam Dunn

PS Nice work making Little Brother technically accurate in so many ways (ignoring the “near future” technologies). I get the impression that you’d lose your tech-savvy kid readers these days if you didn’t get that stuff so right.