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.

Link to interview,

Link to review

My story, “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” has been published in the magazine The Rake, including the online edition. You may remember the earlier podcast of the story, which tells the tale of gangs of sysadmins stuck in the world’s data-centers as a string of nuclear, biological and conventional attacks herald the end of the Earth. The story will also appear in my forthcoming short story collection Overclocked, which will be published later this month.

“Main routers not responding. BGP not responding.” The mechanical voice of the systems monitor didn’t care if he cursed at it, so he did, and it made him feel a little better.

“Maybe I can fix it from here,” he said. He could log in to the UPS for the cage and reboot the routers. The UPS was in a different netblock, with its own independent routers on their own uninterruptible power supplies.

Kelly was sitting up in bed now, an indistinct shape against the headboard. “In five years of marriage, you have never once been able to fix anything from here.” This time she was wrong—he fixed stuff from home all the time, but he did it discreetly and didn’t make a fuss, so she didn’t remember it. And she was right, too—he had logs that showed that after 1:00 a.m., nothing could ever be fixed without driving out to the cage. Law of Infinite Universal Perversity—aka Felix’s Law.

Link

Podcast: Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3,
Part 4,
Part 5,
Part 6

I’m heading out for a couple weeks’ holidays now — back on January 2. Taking a cue from danah boyd, I’m discarding all the mail that comes in between now and then; that way I won’t come back from hols with a million emails shouting for my attention and harshing my mellow. It’s a good way of managing holiday away-time, keeping work from creeping into downtime — I’m seeing it more and more.

Of course, the rest of the gang will still be here. If you want to submit a Boing Boing suggestion, use the form. I just delete Boing Boing suggestions I get by email, anyway, so this is always the right thing to do, no exceptions, ever, period.

If you want to talk to someone about doing business with Boing Boing, visit FM Publishing.

If you’re looking to talk to someone about licensing some of my stories or novels, or commissioning a speech, article or whatnot, contact my agent, Russell Galen.

Have a great holiday, everyone! See you in 07!

Cory

Last night’s episode of Criminal Minds on CBS opened with a quote from my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — keen!

1.6MB QuickTime Link

(Thanks to everyone who wrote in about this!)

Last week I did an interview with Tom from the Command Line podcast, and I was immediately struck by how knowledgeable and quick Tom was on the subjects that I care about — technology, civil liberties, and social change. Curious, I downloaded some of the previous episodes of his podcast and found them to be even better than I’d hoped — thoughtful, informative, and deep, a real plunge into the geeky end of the news-pool. There’s great analysis and rumination, as well as detailed explanations of important security issues with common OSes and so on. Tom’s just posted the episode with my interview, but don’t stop there — I’ve added this one to my subscription list.

Link, Podcast feed link, iTunes “enhanced” podcast feed link

Lirevite is a new, free/open speed-reading program for mobile devices that displays a long text one word at a time, quickly. The three initial test books for the system were my novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.