Subterranean Press just released a free podcast of my story After the Siege, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novella of 2008 last night in Seattle. The reader is the wonderful sf writer (and talented voice actor) Mary Robinette Kowal, who really nailed her performance. I’m so happy about this!
(Thanks, William!)
See also: Locus Award winners announced — After the Siege is best novella 2008!
Subterranean Press just released a free podcast of my story After the Siege, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novella of 2008 last night in Seattle. The reader is the wonderful sf writer (and talented voice actor) Mary Robinette Kowal, who really nailed her performance. I’m so happy about this!
(Thanks, William!)
See also: Locus Award winners announced — After the Siege is best novella 2008!
Last night, Locus Magazine held its annual Locus Awards Ceremony in Seattle, the winners include several of my favorite books of the year — and my novella, “After the Siege” — which was collected in my short story collection Overclocked and adapted for comics in my new collection Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now“. (The story’s first publication was in the Russian magazine Esli, and the translation is also downloadable).
Many thanks to all who voted for this story, to Eileen Gunn for publishing the story and accepting the award on my behalf, and especially to my grandmother, Valentina Rachman, for sharing her stories of life as a child-soldier in the civil defense corps during the Siege of Leningrad.
SF NOVEL
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Michael Chabon (HarperCollins)
FANTASY NOVEL
Making Money, Terry Pratchett (Doubleday UK; HarperCollins)
YOUNG ADULT BOOK
Un Lun Dun, China Miéville (Ballantine Del Rey; Macmillan UK)
FIRST NOVEL
Heart-Shaped Box, Joe Hill (Morrow; Gollancz)
NOVELLA
“After the Siege”, Cory Doctorow (The Infinite Matrix Jan 2007)
NOVELETTE
“The Witch’s Headstone”, Neil Gaiman (Wizards)
SHORT STORY
“A Small Room in Koboldtown”, Michael Swanwick (Asimov’s Apr/May 2007)
COLLECTION
The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories, Connie Willis (Subterranean)
ANTHOLOGY
The New Space Opera, Gardner Dozois & Jonathan Strahan, eds. (Eos)
NON-FICTION
Breakfast in the Ruins, Barry N. Malzberg (Baen)
ART BOOK
The Arrival, Shaun Tan (Lothian 2006; Scholastic)
EDITOR
Ellen Datlow
MAGAZINE
F&SFPUBLISHER
Tor
ARTIST
Charles Vess
Last month while on my Little Brother book-tour, I sat down for an interview in Chicago with Elliott Serrano from the Chicago Red-Eye.
Jeff Clark made this bad-ass “StreamGraph” of the word-frequency distributions in Little Brother — they show how often proper names were used in the course of the book. It’s a really fascinating look into the novel’s storyline.
(Thanks, Jeff!)
My latest Guardian column “Surveillance: You can know too much,” explains how collecting too much information on innocent people makes it harder to catch guilty ones:
At a certain point, data gathered to predict the weather overwhelms your capacity to add it to your calculations efficiently, resulting in ever-longer runtimes that give less accurate predictions. It’s better to crunch the data needed to calculate tomorrow’s weather in 10 minutes (and refine your guess twice an hour) than to shovel so much data into the hopper that you don’t get tomorrow’s forecast until next week.
The sweet spot lies somewhere between gathering too much information and gathering too little – and the secret to hitting that spot is intelligent, discriminating data-acquisition.
Take London: cover every square inch of the city with CCTVs and you’ll get so much information that you’ll never make any sense of it. Scotland Yard says that CCTVs help solve fewer than 3% of all crimes, while a study in San Francisco found that at best, criminals simply move out of camera range, while at worst they assume no one is watching.
Similarly, if you take fingerprints from every person who applies for a visa – or worse still, from every person in Britain who has to carry one of the proposed new biometric cards – you will fill the databases with chaff that slows down searches, generates endless false matches, and threatens everyone in the database with the worst kind of identity theft.
The flood of positive reviews for Little Brother has been nothing short of amazing, but two very special ones came in today. One is from John E. Cook’s son Ean, left on their kitchen whiteboard last night after Ean finished the book (pictured here), the other from my friend and colleague William Gibson: “I’ve not previously expressed my admiration for Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. As Wm. Burroughs was fond of saying, “young boys need it special”. In the case of Cory’s book, though, young girls need it special too.”
At the end of my book-tour last month, I stopped at the Google NYC office and did a reading from the book and spoke about general subjects related to it.
Link
Book-binder Abi Sutherland took one of the misprints from Pablo Defendini’s limited edition prints of his concept art for a paperback edition of my young adult novel Little Brother and custom-bound a hardcover of the book with it. I am consumed with lust for this one-of-a-kind edition. I hope Abi will let me see it in person some day!
Oh, and while I’m on the subject: the book’s just gone into its fifth week on the NYT bestseller list, and it’s still on the Indie list (formerly the Book Sense list) and as of this week, it’s also on Publishers Weekly’s bestseller list! Ho-ah!
Update: Abi sez,
Slight corrections: it’s a blank book rather than a copy of Little Brother, mostly due to printer constraints. Printing out a whole book double-sided on my printer would be soul-destroying, and I don’t have signature-sewn editions to tear down.
The binding is a “sewn boards” binding, about halfway between hardcover and softcover. The paper that Pablo used for the prints has such a nice feel and weight; I wanted to work with its sensual qualities.
And I confess that it’s not one of a kind. I plan to make five or six of this set, one of which will be heading your way in the very near future. I was going to surprise you with it, but that requires secrecy. I got too excited about how the book came out and had to show it off: secrecy fail.
