I’m launching Overclocked at a signing with cyberpunk legend Rudy Rucker at Borderlands books in San Francisco on Thursday, February 8 at 7PM. I’ve had three book launches at Borderlands so far, each better than the last. Looking forward to seeing you there!
Where: Borderlands Books 866 Valencia St. San Francisco CA 94102 USA 415.824.8203/888.893.4008
When: Thursday, February 8, 7PM
My short-short story Printcrime, originally published in Nature Magazine (and since reprinted in my brand new short story collection, Overclocked) has just been adapted for audio by the brilliant SF podcast show, Escape Pod. Download it free!
The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals — performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma’s trunk, the one she’d brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
My second short story collection is Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, from Thunder’s Mouth Press. It contains six of my favorite, net-centric tales: Printcrime, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, Anda’s Game, I, Robot, I, Row-Boat, and After the Siege.
See the Overclocked section for full downloadable texts of all these stories!
Slovakian fan-translation by Pavol Hvizdos.
My story After the Siege has been published in a special edition of The Infinite Matrix magazine. Siege is a parable about the Siege of Leningrad, based in part on the stories my grandmother told me about her ordeal in the Leningrad civil defense corps when she was a little girl. The story was previously published in the Russian magazine Elsi, and I podcasted a reading of it as I read it. It appears in Overclocked, my new short story collection, Thunder’s Mouth Press.
“You can’t go!” Popa shouted at her. “Are you crazy? You can’t go to the front! You have two small children, woman!” He was red-faced, and his hands were clenching and unclenching. Trover was having a tantrum that was so loud and horrible that Valentine wanted to rip her hearing aids out.
Mata’s eyes were red. “Harald, you know I have to do this. It’s not the ‘front’ — it’s our own city. My country needs me — if I don’t help to fight for it, then what will become of our children?”
“You never got over the glory of fighting, did you?” Her father’s voice was bitter in a way that she’d never heard before. “You’re an addict!”
She held up her left hand and shook it in his face. “An addict! Is that what you think?” Her middle finger and little finger on that hand had never bent properly in all of Valentine’s memory, and when Valentine had asked her about it, she’d said the terrible word knucklebreakers which was the old name for the police. “You think I’m addicted to this? Harald, honor and courage and patriotism are virtues, no matter that you would make them into vices and shame our children with your cowardice. I go to fight now, Harald, and it’s for all of us.”
Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9
I’m launching Overclocked with a special appearance at Bakka Books, the world’s oldest science fiction bookstore, in Toronto, Canada. I started shopping at Bakka when I was 9, started working there when I was 17, and had my first book launch there at 29. Hope to see you there!
Where: Bakka Books 697 Queen Street West, Toronto, ONT M6J 1E6, ph 416 963 9993.
When: Thursday, 1 February 2007, 7PM
This is the site for my new short story collection, “Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present,” published by Avalon Books in January 2007, exactly four years after my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was published. And just as with Down and Out, this collection is released under a liberal Creative Commons license.
That means you can buy it in a store, or you can download it for free. Or both.
Why would I do this? Because I’m a science fiction writer. That means I have to be attuned to the future, or at least the present. Most people seem to live in the distant past, pausing occasionally to look around, do a spit-take, and say, “Holy hells, when did all this happen?”
I try to live in the present. In my present, bits are easy to copy and they will never get harder to copy. Bits love to be copied. It’s probably in their Buddha nature or something.
In my present, electronic books sell the everlasting crap out of print books. Electronic books are naturally social beasts. They want you to paste them into your email signature, or pass them on to a friend. They want you to talk about them. They want you to search them. They want you to print out favorite chunks and pass them around the office. They want you to beam them from your PDA to a friend’s phone.
In my present, readers who love my work are the most important thing in the world. Readers have told me that they want electronic text and that they want paper text. That each adds value to the other.
So, living in the present, I have wrapped these six stories — intense, personal things that I sweated bullets over, good friends all — in Creative Commons licenses that encourage you to:
* Share them
* Improve on them
* Make new things from them
You’re free to do all this stuff, provided that you:
* Don’t charge money for your new works or copies
* Pass the same freedoms on when you distribute my stories or their offspring
* Don’t put any anti-copying technology (“DRM” “Technological Protection Measures” “Copy-protection”) on my work
I’m doing this because I’m convinced that ebooks sell print books. And because I’m convinced — in the immortal words of Tim O’Reilly — that my biggest problem is obscurity, not piracy.
So make me well known. Adapt my works in ways that make them suitable to your conversation. Tweak the format. Tweak the writing. Make videos. Make art. Make crap! There’s no such thing as a creator who creates alone, from the whole cloth. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. I’m no giant, but my shoulders are available anytime.
Mail me with your hacks, please and thanks! I’d love to hear what you make!
Now, some FAQs:
1. I want to send you money. Where should I send it?
Keep it! If you like the ebooks and you want to reward me, buy the print books. If you don’t want the print books, give them to a library or shelter. If you don’t like libraries or shelters, you should be ashamed of yourself there are other ways to reward me:
* Post a review of the book to your blog, MySpace, LiveJournal or other personal site — and paste it up at BN.com, Powells.com and Amazon.com. Personal endorsements from real readers are the best thing a writer like me can have.
* Attach the stories to an email and send it to five friends telling them why you liked it.
* Remix the stories in some cool way and put them back online.
And if none of that strikes your fancy, don’t sweat it. It’s on me.
2. You are a communist. Writers deserve to get paid.
First of all, that’s not a question.
Secondly, I’m more of a techno-agnostic social-democrat libertarian.
Lastly, I think the idea that writers deserve to get paid sounds great, but the truth is that most writers — nearly all writers — have not been paid through history. The Internet doesn’t change that. But it does make it possible for writers to earn their living in new and exciting ways. That’s what I’m doing here. If you have a scheme to provide full employment to writers, I’d love to hear it, but I think you’re going to have some problems getting it rolling.
Giving writers more copyright doesn’t make them more money. You could give me ten million years of copyright and the right to personally impale anyone who makes an unauthorized copy of my work and it wouldn’t change the word-rate at Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
More copyright just means that working writers have to go through more permissions-clearance hell when they want to create new things from old. More copyright means that dead writers’ works vanish from the historical record because their idiot descendants turn into lunatic saber-rattlers, or because no one can figure out who the right idiot descendant is. More copyright means that the public is denied the benefit of the 98 percent of works in copyright that have no visible owner, and that are out of print.
3. I want to do something commercial with your work. Is that possible?
Hell yeah! Just talk to my agent, Russell Galen, of Scovil Chicak Galen. For film inquiries, talk to my film agent, Justin Manask, of the IP Group.
4. Will you come and speak at my school/company/conference/whatever?
It’s possible. Email me.
Interested in getting a personalized, signed copy of Overclocked shipped right to your door? Two booksellers, one in Toronto, the other in Los Angeles, are taking orders for customized copies of Overclocked.
Canada:
Bakka Books, Toronto – Place orders before Feb 1, 2007
Bakka is the world’s oldest science fiction bookstore (I used to work there!). They’re hosting a launch for me on Feb 1 and I’ll sign any special orders then.
Canadian shipping is CDN$10, plus the CDN$19.95 cover price. Inquire for overseas rates.
Bakka Books 697 Queen Street West, Toronto, ONT M6J 1E6, ph 416 963 9993.
USA:
Secret Headquarters, Los Angeles
Secret HQ is my local comics emporium — they’re terrific. I stop by at least once a week to sign special orders.
US shipping is $5, plus the $15.95 cover price. Inquire for overseas rates.
Secret Headquarters: 3817 W Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90026, 323-666-2228
In this collection of stories by SF author, technopundit, uber-geek, and now college professor Cory Doctorow, you’ll find a half dozen award worthy stories about the “future present”, with brilliant extrapolations “ripped from the headlines” and recast as tales of tomorrow. This is what SF has always done, though rarely with the self awareness Cory brings to the stage. Each short story is an idea bomb with a candy coating of human drama, wrapped in shiny tech tropes and ready to blow your mind. Overclocked is SF info-warfare ammunition of the highest caliber, so load up, move out, and take no prisoners…let Asimov sort em out.
Overclocked, which you probably recognize as a computer term for running a processor faster than the clock rate it’s rated for, generally courting some sort of meltdown, is a fantastic collection of stories about people living with technology for better or worse and you should feel free to stop reading here and just go buy the book. At least if there’s a drop of geekazoid blood anywhere in your veins, which there is or you wouldn’t be here…
The hard part of all this is that every one of these stories deserves consideration for a Hugo and I’d hate to see him split his own vote as a result. Not that it matters. What matters is that this is a collection really worth reading, sharing, downloading and generally infecting others with. Overclocked is SF info-warfare ammunition of the highest caliber. Load up, move out, and remember, take no prisoners…let Asimov sort em out.
Five substantial stories plus one short-short, all previously published, all computer-related and
bulging with knowing SF references… The appealing characters, snappy
writing and swift pace will surely tempt the younger and/or geekier sections of the SF audience.
SFRevu magazine has just published a wide-ranging interview with me and a great review of my forthcoming short story collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.
SFRevu: Will ebooks ever get traction? Do you read electronically? How does that experience differ from reading on a full size display and print?Cory: People already read “ebooks” — that is to say, the majority of readers presently spend the majority of their reading time reading on screens. They don’t read longer form works that way (by and large) and it’s likely they never will. The computer screen has its own affordances that will drive new forms of creativity.
This isn’t just about resolution or form-factor. The point of a computer is that it is multi-purpose, networked, and social. It does lots of things, and it wants your attention to wander around its infinite depths. Long linear narratives just don’t work well in that medium.
I’ll channel a little Eric Flint here. Reading novels has always been a minority pass-time, and the people who read novels fetishize the form factor the way that, say, a classic car hobbyist loves his tailfins. I recently wrote an op-ed for Forbes where I described these people as “pervy for paper” (I count myself among them). For us, the paper codex has value that has nothing to do with its technical merit.
