My new short story collection: OVERCLOCKED

/ / News

My new short story collection, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present is out this week, and I’ve just launched the website that goes with it. Overclocked collects six of my most recent stories: Printcrime, When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, Anda’s Game, I, Robot, I Row-Boat, and After the Siege. Between them, these stories have been reprinted in five languages, won a Locus Award, been a Hugo finalist, and been selected for every one of the Best of the Year anthology series in the field, along with Michael Chabon’s tony Best American Short Stories collection.

All of these stories are available for download under a Creative Commons By-Noncommercial-Sharealike license. Take ’em, send them around, convert them to new formats, make new and cool things out of them — but don’t charge money for them without talking to me first — and no adding DRM to them, ever!

I’ve got a bunch of launch-events planned for the next couple months, in Toronto, San Francisco, LA, Vancouver, San Diego and Chapel Hill, NC (basically, places that I’m going to for work). I might be able to line up NYC too — but it’s too soon to tell. Details for all of them will be here, or you can sign up for my mailing list.


Additionally, you can get signed, personally inscribed copies of the book shipped right to your door. Canadians, contact Bakka Books in Toronto before Feb 1 with your order, Americans and others get in touch with Secret Headquarters in LA.

The first two launches are in Toronto at Bakka Books on Feb 1 at 7PM, and in San Francisco at Borderlands Books, along with Rudy Rucker, on Feb 8 at 7PM.

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. – SFRevu


Link

Speaking in NYC next week

/ / News

I’m speaking at two events in NYC next week:


Google Unbound, January 18, New York Public Library, 8AM-5PM: This is Google’s conference on the state of the publishing industry and what’s going on with the Internet and publishing. I’m speaking alongside of everyone from Tim O’Reilly to Chris Anderson to Stephen “Freakonomics” Dubner, along with a bunch of execs from the publishing industry. As far as I can tell, registration is open, and it looks like they feed you and liquor you up, too. Update: They’re full — no more registration, sorry!


FreeCulture NYU, January 19, 5PM: I’m speaking at this public event co-sponsored by FreeCulture NYU and the NYU Association for Computing Machinery, on “State of the Copyfight 2007: Looking up, not out of the woods yet.” No free food at the this one, I think, but probably a better crowd if you need some help configuring Ubuntu.

Hope to see you!

Eastern Standard Tribe podcast

/ / Eastern Standard Tribe, News

Here’s the first installment of the podcast of my second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, a novel of political intrigue among high-tech, sleep-deprived management consultants. This is my most ambitious podcasting project to date — I figure it’ll take 4-6 months to complete.

I’ve found a half-brick that was being used to hold down the tar paper around an exhaust-chimney. I should’ve used that to hold the door open, but it’s way the hell the other side of the roof, and I’d been really pleased with my little pebbly doorstop. Besides, I’m starting to suspect that the doorjamb didn’t fail, that it was sabotaged by some malevolently playful goon from the sanatorium. An object lesson or something.

I heft the brick. I release the brick. It falls, and falls, and falls, and hits the little blue fartmobile square on the trunk, punching a hole through the cheap aluminum lid.

And the fartmobile explodes. First there is a geyser of blue flame as the tank’s puncture wound jets a stream of ignited assoline skyward, and then it blows back into the tank and boom, the fartmobile is in one billion shards, rising like a parachute in an updraft. I can feel the heat on my bare, sun-tender skin, even from this distance.

Explosions. Partial nudity. Somehow, though, I know that this isn’t the climax.

MP3

Eastern Standard Tribe podcast

/ / News, Podcast

Here’s the first installment of the podcast of my second novel Eastern Standard Tribe, a novel of political intrigue among high-tech, sleep-deprived management consultants. This is my most ambitious podcasting project to date — I figure it’ll take 4-6 months to complete.

I’ve found a half-brick that was being used to hold down the tar paper around an exhaust-chimney. I should’ve used that to hold the door open, but it’s way the hell the other side of the roof, and I’d been really pleased with my little pebbly doorstop. Besides, I’m starting to suspect that the doorjamb didn’t fail, that it was sabotaged by some malevolently playful goon from the sanatorium. An object lesson or something.

I heft the brick. I release the brick. It falls, and falls, and falls, and hits the little blue fartmobile square on the trunk, punching a hole through the cheap aluminum lid.

And the fartmobile explodes. First there is a geyser of blue flame as the tank’s puncture wound jets a stream of ignited assoline skyward, and then it blows back into the tank and boom, the fartmobile is in one billion shards, rising like a parachute in an updraft. I can feel the heat on my bare, sun-tender skin, even from this distance.

Explosions. Partial nudity. Somehow, though, I know that this isn’t the climax.

MP3

Book launch in San Francisco, Feb 8 with Rudy Rucker

/ / News, Overclocked

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

Printcrime on Escape Pod

/ / News, Podcast

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.

MP3 Link

After the Siege on The Infinite Matrix

/ / News

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.”


Link

Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9

Book launch in Toronto, Feb 1, 2007

/ / News, Overclocked

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

About this site/FAQ

/ / News, Overclocked

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.