Anda’s Game on Android

/ / Futuristic Tales Of The Here And Now, News

Last year, IDW published a collection of six comics adapted from my short stories called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now, all of these stories also licensed under Creative Commons.

Now, Robot Comics, a firm that provides comics for Android mobile phones, has begun to make the comics available free under the same CC license for mobile phones, beginning with my story Anda’s Game (which was also included in my short story collection Overclocked, and podcasted as a reading by Alice Taylor of Wonderland. The adaptation is by the excellent Dara Naraghi, illustrated by Esteve Polls.

The story is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two — netting them about $0.02 an hour — but this is a very different proposition indeed.

Cory Doctorow’s Anda’s Game

Previously:

Serbo-Croatian interview

/ / News

The Serbian City Magazine just published the first-ever interview with me in Serbo-Croatian!

Gomila mojih prijatelja je napisala knjige za mlade i odlično su se zabavljali. Moja prijateljica Kathe Koja je bila poznata horor spisateljica koja je pisala veoma živopisan horor, kada je, za svaki slučaj, odlučila da piše te skoro hemingvejske romane za mlade(ž). Iskustva koja mi je opisala su bila tako cool, pisati za decu koja ne čitaju samo iz zabave nego iz potrebe da prokljuve kako svet funkcioniše.

Povratna informacija koju je dobila je bila tako otvorena i iskrena i ona je bila tako jako, jako, jako uzbuđena da je promenila žanr.

Druga stvar koju sam želeo je bila da napišem roman u kom tehnologija zbilja funkcioniše, gde je tehnologija – prava tehnologija. Mislio sam da je young adult pravi žanr za to. U fikciji prozi za mlade postoji časna tradicija pisanja o tome kako tehnologija radi – prave lekcije – i stvarno mi se sviđao taj način rada. [Robert Anson] Heinlein je bio veliki zagovornik toga. Kada sam bio dete dosta sam saznao o finansijama i politici u knjigama kao što je Have Space Suit—Will Travel. Moja knjiga (Little Brother) je neka vrsta radikalne, političke Have Space Suit—Will Travel. Tako da se literatura za mlade nametnula kao pravi žanr za taj posao.

Intervju: Cory Doctorow

(Thanks, Zoran!)

The Golems

/ / News, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town


Web Webster writes, “Enjoying the podcast of Someone Comes To Town Someone Leaves Town. Excellent hearing it read by the author and I’m amazed at how much I didn’t pick up the first time I read it. Wanted to share a link to a Flickr set I shot this weekend. We went to Smithville, Tennessee to The Joe C. Evins Center for Craft and its annual Celebration. In wandering through the Ceramics building I ran across a set of pieces that immediately recalled the Golems from Someone.”

The Golems and pieces of Davey

To Market, To Market: podcast

/ / News, Podcast

Roy Trumbull has just posted his latest installment in his podcast readings of science fiction stories, and for this one he’s chosen my story “To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey,” which was published in my first short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Roy really nailed the reading — this is one of my more comic stories, about elementary school kids who worry endlessly about their personal brands and sponsorship opportunities.

Billy and Principal Andrew Alty went all the way back to kindergarten, when Billy had convinced Mitchell McCoy that the green fingerpaint was Shamrock Shake, and watched with glee as the little babyface had scarfed it all down. Billy knew that Andrew Alty knew his style: refined, controlled, and above all, personal. Billy never would’ve dropped a dozen M-80s down the girls’ toilet. His stuff was always one-on-one, and possessed of a degree of charm and subtlety.

But nevertheless, here was Billy, along with the sixth-grade bumper-crop of nasty-come-latelies, called on the carpet in front of Andrew Alty’s massive desk. Andrew Alty was an athletic forty, a babyface true-and-through, and a charismatic thought-leader in his demographic.

To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey by Cory Doctorow

MP3 Link

Previously:

To Market, To Market: podcast

/ / A Place So Foreign and Eight More, News

Roy Trumbull has just posted his latest installment in his podcast readings of science fiction stories, and for this one he’s chosen my story “To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey,” which was published in my first short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Roy really nailed the reading — this is one of my more comic stories, about elementary school kids who worry endlessly about their personal brands and sponsorship opportunities.

Billy and Principal Andrew Alty went all the way back to kindergarten, when Billy had convinced Mitchell McCoy that the green fingerpaint was Shamrock Shake, and watched with glee as the little babyface had scarfed it all down. Billy knew that Andrew Alty knew his style: refined, controlled, and above all, personal. Billy never would’ve dropped a dozen M-80s down the girls’ toilet. His stuff was always one-on-one, and possessed of a degree of charm and subtlety.

But nevertheless, here was Billy, along with the sixth-grade bumper-crop of nasty-come-latelies, called on the carpet in front of Andrew Alty’s massive desk. Andrew Alty was an athletic forty, a babyface true-and-through, and a charismatic thought-leader in his demographic.

To Market, To Market: The Branding of Billy Bailey by Cory Doctorow

Previously:

Guardian column: text-to-speech is the wrong thing to worry about with the Kindle

/ / News

My latest Guardian column, “Authors have lost the plot in Kindle battle,” argues that the Authors’ Guild is nuts to focus on the text-to-speech feature, and should really be paying attention to the fact that it’s apparently possible to remotely disable features in the ebook reader.

Maybe I’m right and maybe I’m wrong, but the important thing is, we don’t need new theories about copyright law to test the proposition. The existing, totally non-controversial aspect of copyright law that says, “Amazon can’t publish and sell my book without my permission” covers the territory nicely.

But while we were all running our mouths about the plausibility of the singularity emerging from Amazon’s text-to-speech R&D, a much juicier issue was escaping our notice: it is technically possible for Amazon to switch off the text-to-speech feature for some or all books.

That’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it? Now that Amazon has agreed with the Authors Guild that text-to-speech will only be switched on for authors who sign a contract permitting it, we should all be goggling in amazement at the idea that this can be accomplished.

Authors have lost the plot in Kindle battle

French fan-translation (Eric Moreau)