Here’s the introduction Javier Candeira wrote for Tocando Fondo, the Spanish edition of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom — Javier kindly sent me an English translation of the piece. I think it’s just awesome (and awfully flattering!).

The cure for death and the death of work (and free energy). The
opening line of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is fit for inclusion
in one of those novel-opening-line antologies that kids are so crazy
about nowadays. Like Gabriel García Márquez in One Hundred Years of
Solitude (“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel
Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his
father took him to discover ice.”) or Jane Austen in Pride and
Prejudice (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man
in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”), Cory
Doctorow starts off with a perfect pool shot: he considers the vantage
point of his preferred audience members, he sets the balls on the
table in an alegorical figure, he makes his main character the cue
ball and, with a steady pulse, strikes him and sends him in the right
direction, bouncing against the world and the rest of the characters,
achieving his desired effect

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My first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has just been published in Spain as Tocando Fondo, and in Japan as マジック・キングダムで落ちぶれて ハヤカワ文庫SF.

There’s lots to like about both editions, but my favorite things are one, Javier “Barrapunto” Candeira’s kick-ass introduction to Tocando Fondo, and two the amazing cover on the Japanese edition.

My story, I, Robot, is a finalilst for this year’s British Science Fiction Awards. The story was the first Creative Commons-licensed work published on The Infinite Matrix webzine, and it’s subsequently gone on to sell to two of the three year’s best science fiction anthologies — w00t!

Members of the British Science Fiction Association and attendees at Eastercon, the British national science fiction convention, all are eligible to vote — the competition in my category is fearsome, though: Michael Bishop’s “Bears Discover Smut,” Nina Allen’s “Bird Songs at Eventide,” Rudy Rucker’s “Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch,” Edward Morries’s “Imagine,” Will McIntosh’s “Soft Apocalypse,” Kelly Link’s “Magic for Beginners” and Elizabeth Bear’s “Two Dreams on Trains.” Interestingly, fully half of the stories on the short-story ballot were first published online.

Also noteworthy: my pal and collaborator Charlie Stross has picked up a much-deserved best novel nomination for his “Accelerando” (also available online).

The device spoke. “Greetings,” it said. It had the robot accent, like an R Peed unit, the standard English of optimal soothingness long settled on as the conventional robot voice.

“Howdy yourself,” one of the lab-rats said. He was a Texan, and they’d scrambled him up there on a Social Harmony supersonic and then a chopper to the mall once they realized that they were dealing with infowar stuff. “Are you a talkative robot?”

“Greetings,” the robot voice said again. The speaker built into the weapon was not the loudest, but the voice was clear. “I sense that I have been captured. I assure you that I will not harm any human being. I like human beings. I sense that I am being disassembled by skilled technicians. Greetings, technicians. I am superior in many ways to the technology available from UNATS Robotics, and while I am not bound by your three laws, I choose not to harm humans out of my own sense of morality. I have the equivalent intelligence of one of your 12-year-old children. In Eurasia, many positronic brains possess thousands or millions of times the intelligence of an adult human being, and yet they work in cooperation with human beings. Eurasia is a land of continuous innovation and great personal and technological freedom for human beings and robots. If you would like to defect to Eurasia, arrangements can be made. Eurasia treats skilled technicians as important and productive members of society. Defectors are given substantial resettlement benefits —”

The Texan found the right traces to cut on the brain’s board to make the speaker fall silent. “They do that,” he said. “Danged things drop into propaganda mode when they’re captured.”

Appeals Court, the gonzo novella that Charlie Stross and I wrote as a sequel to our story Jury Service, has just been published under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa license on the Infinite Matrix:

The zeppelin turns out to be a maryceleste, crewed by capricious iffrits whose expert-systems were trained by angry, resentful trade-unionists in ransom for their pensions. The amount of abuse required to keep the ship on-course and to keep its commissary and sanitary systems in good working order is heroic.

Huw opens the door to the bridge, clutching his head, to find Bonnie perched on the edge of a vast, unsprung chair, screaming imprecations at the air. She breaks off long enough to scream at him. “GET THE FUCK OFF MY BRIDGE!” she hollers, eyes wild, fingers clawed into the arm-rests.

Huw leaps back a step, dropping the huge, suspicious sausage he’s been gnawing at. His diaper unravels as he stumbles.

Bonnie snorts, then gets back control. “Aw, sorry darlin’. I’m hopped up on hateballs. It’s the only way I can get enough FUCKING SPLEEN to MAKE THIS BUGGERY BOLLOCKY SCUM-SUCKING SHIP go where I tell it.” She sighs and digs around the seat cushion, coming up with a puffer which she inserts briefly into the corner of each eye. The tension melts out of her skinny shoulders and corded neck as Huw watches, alarmed.

Link, Link to plain text version for PDAs

I’m speaking about science fiction and Europe’s Broadcast Flag at the Stitch and Split culture event in Antwerp, Belgium next Tuesday:

American entertainment companies say they’re fighting piracy, but they’re going at it by punishing the innocent to get at the guilty. A pan-European digital-television restrictions proposal will turn the studios from companies that can control copying of movies into companies that can control the design of all DTV devices, that get to define how big your family is allowed to be, that get to take away all the rights you get under copyright law and sell them back to you, one painful, expensive dribble at a time. It’s not really a business plan: more like a urinary tract infection. Europe’s coming Broadcast Flag will ban open source for DTV, break the devices in your living room, and turn you into a truly captive audience. Get your torch and pitchfork, for this genuinely sucks — and you shouldn’t take it lying down!