I did an interview with KRUU FM’s Sundar Raman about free software, DRM and sf:
The site went down — here are some mirrors:
This summer marks the first year that the venerable Clarion Writers’ Workshop will run at the University of California at San Diego. Previously, the legendary science fiction writers’ boot-camp was hosted at Michigan State, where I attended it in 1992 and taught in 2005.
I’m returning as an instructor this year, along with a truly superb line-up of teachers: Greg Frost, Jeff VanderMeer (he was one of my Clarion 1992 classmates!), Karen Joy Fowler, Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Each instructor teaches for a week (the last pair of instructors co-teach for two weeks). Every day, the small group of students (generally fewer than 20) critique each others’ manuscripts, with the instructor pitching in. The instructors give lectures and meet one-on-one with students, sometimes throwing in assignments. They’re available to chat with about the writing life, the business of writing, the creative process and so on — it’s an incredible opportunity for writers at the beginning of their careers to glean a wide range of industry contacts and perspective on what it means to be a professional science fiction writer.
Mostly, this is about the writing, though. Writing stories. Most students write a story every week of the workshop, and you will usually critique 3-5 stories on any given day. This is a lot of work — it’s not for the faint of heart. Clarion challenges its students to go beyond their limits and accomplish more than they ever knew they could. Writing that much, critiquing that much — you end up living and breathing the craft, thinking of nothing else for weeks on end. It changes you.
I’m the writer I am today because of my Clarion experiences. There isn’t a day that’s gone by in the past 15 years that I haven’t thought of some bit of wisdom I gleaned during my six weeks. It’s an honor to teach there, and to serve on the board of The Clarion Foundation, the nonprofit that administers Clarion.
I’m not the only one. Clarion’s roster of alumni include Bruce Sterling, Kelly Link, Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Lucius Sheppard, Eileen Gunn, James Patrick Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tim Pratt and Gordon Van Gelder.
The application deadline is April 1, 2007 — you’ll need two complete short stories between 2,500 and 6,000 words, the willingness to give up six weeks of your life to writing, and the tuition money. I hope to see you there.
See also: Kate Wilhelm’s must-read writerly advice/history of Clarion
Today’s Vancouver Sun has a nice article on me on the front page of the Business section.
Webtoonist Neil Gorman has bessed me with a new toon in my honor — and it’s a good ‘un!
The British sf podcast “Yatterings” (produced by Iain Elmsley, proprietor of the brilliant Aust Gate bookseller) has a new interview up with me about sf writing and how it relates to the future.
A reminder: I’m coming to Toronto this coming weekend (Mar 2-4) to be a guest of honor at Ad Astra, the regional sf convention. It was my first-ever con — I volunteered as a gofer in exchange for free admission, and slept on the floor of the “gofer hole,” a shared hotel room — and it’s an incredible thrill to be asked back as Guest of Honor.
On that note, the British sf podcast “Yatterings” (produced by Iain Elmsley, proprietor of the brilliant Aust Gate bookseller) has a new interview up with me about sf writing and how it relates to the future.
See also:
Torontonians: win the right to name a character in my book
Jason Adams attended my lecture on privacy (From Myspace to Homeland Security: Privacy and the Totalitarian Urge) last week at Duke University and recorded it for his podcast. He’s just posted it — thanks, Jason!
Link,
Bill Seabrook has compiled an astounding and comprehensive bibliography of all my books and stories, with cover art, tables of contents, and publication data. This is about 10,000 times more detail oriented than anything I’ve ever done, and I’m speechless with gratitude to him for doing this. I’ve put it all online — hope you find it as useful as I do! Thanks, Bill!
Review:
Claude LaLumiere
In these quirky, brashly engaged “stories of the future present” Cory Doctorow shows us life from the point-of-view of the plugged-in generation and makes it feel like a totally alien world.
Claude Lalumiere, Montreal Gazette
Review:
Sci Fi Weekly
Cory Doctorow gives away his vital writing secret right here in these pages, a guaranteed method for producing cutting-edge, engaged, supercharged SF. In his preface to “Anda’s Game,” he says, “The easiest way to write futuristic (or futurismic) science fiction is to predict, with rigor and absolute accuracy, the present day.” Ah, but like the words of all oracles, his pronouncement has a cryptic, paradoxical air to it. What exactly can this mean?
Well, he’s simply giving us the classical, core methodology of SF from its Golden Age, restated for post-modern times. Doctorow is just doing, after all, what Robert Heinlein did at his best: steeping himself in the culture of the present and them amping up what he registers as significant to a day-after-tomorrow condition. Sounds trivial, put that way, doesn’t it? But the relative paucity of Heinleins and Doctorows on the market indicates it’s not as easy as it looks. One has to canvass thoroughly the whole of scientific, artistic and sociological progress, distill the essences, and then find a plot and characters that can best embody the lessons to be conveyed. Knowing a lot about history and the human heart is essential as well. In other words, even before one begins the conventional task of storytelling, one already faces a full-time job of analysis and prognostication.
But Doctorow, like Heinlein, is up to the task. As these stories illustrate, he has a knack for identifying those seminal trends of our current landscape that will in all likelihood determine the shape of our future(s). Add in a recursive affection for past landmarks of SF (besides the Asimovian references, there’s a lot of Clifford Simak in the “Row-Boat” piece), and a gentle empathy for the underdogs in such scenarios, and you get a winning narrative and ideational combination.
Paul Di Filippo, SciFi Weekly
