Peter Tupper has written a great feature on my books for the Vancouver Sun, with a special emphasis on Eastern Standard Tribe (there’s also a review of EST, but you have to buy a daily subscription to the print paper to read it — lame!).
Abbie Hoffman titled his counterculture guide/how-to manual Steal This Book. Toronto-born science fiction writer Cory Doctorow could call his work Download this Book.
Jill Smith has begun a distributed audiobook project for my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, whose new, liberal Creative Commons license allows for exactly this kind of mishegas (see the distributed audiobook project for Lessig’s Free Culture for an example of how well this can work). She’s recorded a reading of the prologue and posted it to the Internet Archive’s public submission area, where open-licensed material is hosted for free.
I’m immensely gratified by this — audiobooks are my favorite nontextual medium for storytelling and I can’t fall asleep at night without one. I would love for others to take Jill’s lead and finish it out.
(Thanks Jill!)
Eric writes, on his blog, that he’s found himself recommending people for jobs whom he’s only “met” by reading their blogs. He describes the process as a burgeoning tribal affiliation, enabled by the ‘Net.
For me, I feel like the tribes are beginning to grow up much more around the little nodes and bubbles of the blogosphere, and they’re becoming rapidly more important as us early-twenties bloggers own real sphere of influence grows in the meatspace.
10 years from now, I can see not being part of the community be a really detrimental thing for a job hunter.
The power of Eastern Standard Tribe draws on traditional storytelling elements — tight plotting, sharp characterization and keen thematic treatment. The novel is immediately accessible, the near-future setting all too familiar. Despite the shifting between chronologies and tenses (first- to third-person throughout), Doctorow maintains an unrelenting pace; many readers will find themselves finishing the novel, as I did, in a single sitting.
I’ve just gotten word that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has qualified for the Preliminary Ballot for the 2004 Nebula Awards. That’s still a ways off — the book still has to make the final ballot in spring 2005, and then the award will be announced in April 2005. But this is a hell of a mitzvah, I gotta say.
Inspired by Fark photoshopping contest whose theme was unlikely places for low-carb diets, Eldon Brown produced this terrific
parody of my latest novel’s cover.
Inspired by Fark photoshopping contest whose theme was unlikely places for low-carb diets, Eldon Brown produced this terrific parody of my latest novel’s cover.
Corlin has produced a really interesting audio remix of Eastern Standard Tribe:
1) Record a page of text with Apple speech. (voice “Vicky”) No editing this is just a straight read.
2) Run this audio file through “MetaMix”, recording the output again…
MetaMix cuts any audio file into chunks of a set duration then plays these chunks back in a preset algorithmic way.
To make smoother transitions from one chunk to the next, MetaMix actually overlaps up to six chunks at a time. As a new chunks gradually fades in, an older chunk gradually fades out. This not only makes the sound more connected, but it can also create interesting composite textures.
There’s a certain casual but insistent forward flow to his writing that makes you want to keep reading. It’s rather like the motion of a Haunted Mansion Doombuggy: it shows you something cool, but its wiggle tells you that something cooler is waiting just over there in the next chamber… [The book is full of] argumentative personalities, smooth-talking biz-dev guys and anal-rententive user experience orthos so real that you want to pimp-slap them with a hardcover edition of Tufte.
Cory Doctorow writes fast and furiously, the words gushing out of him in a stream of metaphor and imagery that keeps you glued to his futurist tales…
Doctorow offers characters that are absolutely human. There are no robots here — these people are sexed up and emotionally charged.
