This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007

Infinite Matrix

Romanian translation (SCI-FI Magazin, September 2007)

Yo, robot, Spanish fantrans by Fernando Orbis, December 2009

Hugo Award nominee, 2005 (Novelette)

Locus Award for Best Novelette, 2005

Finalist, 2005 British Science Fiction Awards

Podcast: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V

Hebrew translation by Haggay Averbuch in Bli Panika magazine, October 2006

In spring 2004, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of Fahrenheit 451 to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf’s classic narratives.

Infinite Matrix magazine published one of these, a story called “I, Robot,” which describes the police state that would have to obtain if you were going to have a world where there was only one kind of robot allowed and only one company was allowed to make it.
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This story appears in my collection Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007

Salon
Best American Short Stories, Michael Chabon, ed, 2005

Podcast read by Alice Taylor of Wonderland: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Fan art by Jeremy Shuback

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This is a riff on the way that property-rights are coming to games, and on the bizarre spectacle of sweat-shops in which children are paid to play the game all day in order to generate eBay-able game-wealth. When I was a kid, there were arcade kings who would play up Gauntlet characters to maximum health and weapons and then sell their games to nearby players for a dollar or two — netting them about $0.02 an hour — but this is a very different proposition indeed.

There are a lot of firsts in this story:

• It’s the first story I’ve written since moving to the UK, and the story is told from the point of view of an English girl
• It’s the first in a series of stories I’m writing that riff on the titles of famous SF novels and stories (this one is a play on Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” — also coming are “I, Robot,” “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “Jeffty is Five,” and “True Names” — this last with Ben Rosenbaum). This started as a response to Ray Bradbury’s assertion that Michael Moore was a “thief” and a “horrible human being” for using the word “Fahrenheit” in the title of his last movie — but now I’m just finding it fun to deconstruct the stories of the writers who came before me.
• It’s the first story that Salon has ever published under a Creative Commons license — which means that you can put it on a P2P network or email it to a friend without running afoul of the law.

I’m really proud of this one: I read it to an audience at the WorldCon last September and the response was really warm and enthusiastic.
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