This weekend, I'll be wrapping up my US/Canada tour for Makers, my new novel, with a weekend at Philcon, near Philadelphia. I'll be signing books, doing a reading, giving a speech, and appearing on several panels. Hope to see you there!

Important note: I had previously announced a couple of readings tomorrow at the Philadelphia Free Library. It turns out that these are not open to the public (they're for school groups, which no one told me until last night). Sorry about this, folks.

Philcon: Nov 20-22
The Crowne Plaza Hotel, Cherry Hill, NJ

US/Canada Tour

Lucy Knisley's comic "Downloading Optimism: Pessimism Detected" is a thoughtful response to a panel where great indie comix creators (Linda Barry, Jules Feiffer, Matt Groening, Chris Ware) decried online comics and online reading. Click through for the whole thing.

Downloading Optimism

(Thanks, Ape Lad!)

When I found out that a graphic novel about the life of Bertrand Russell was in the works, I imagined it would be interesting, but I never thought it would be as spellbinding as it turned out to be. Logicomix, created by a team of Greek artists and writers is full color graphic novel about Bertrand Russell and his ardent quest for the logical foundation of mathematics. The creators of the graphic novel put themselves into the story, between chapters of Russell's life, to discuss their thoughts on key moments. It's a clever and useful way to add additional context to the story.

The book is 352 pages long -- 10 pages less than what it took Russell and Whitehead to prove that 1+1 = 2 in their book Principia Mathematica, but I was tearing through it to find out what happened. Afterwards, I went back to admire the artwork, which is masterfully composed and filled with terrific architecture and other detials. All-in-all, this was a surprisingly terrific book.

Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth

Hey, New Yorkers! I'm reading from and signing my new novel Makers tonight at the Borders in Columbus Circle at 59th Street, starting at 7PM. Hope to catch you there! Philadelphians, you're next -- Philadelphia Free Library on Friday, then Philcon (in Cherry Hill, NJ) over the weekend.

US/Canada Tour

Uitgeverij De Vliegende Hollander is the Dutch publisher for Little Brother, and they've really put a big push behind it. Unfortunately, they're also locked into distributing their catalog as DRM-crippled ebooks through an online retailer that is the only major ebook vendor in the Netherlands.

But they're good folks at my publisher, and they're not fond of DRM either. When I asked them if there was some way we could sell the ebook without DRM, they told me that it was impossible (only one major ebook vendor, remember?), but would I mind if they just gave away the ebook in DRM-free ePub form?

Would I mind? That's a dandy solution! Here's a link to the free, DRM-free Dutch ePub version of Little Brother. Tell your (Dutch) friends, and be sure to stay clear of that infected DRM copy that's being sold.

Little Brother ePub (DRM-free) (Thanks, Rienk!)

A new conservative children's book titled Help! Mom! The Radicals Are Ruining My Country! prominently features Nancy Pelosi as an evil villain. Author Katharine DeBrecht, whom you may have seen on Fox News, explains:

When Nancy Pelosi was elected Speaker of the House all we heard was how wonderful it was that a mother and grandmother rose through the ranks to such a position. In reality, that mother and grandmother has played an enormous role in ensuring that our children and grandchildren are shackled with debt for decades to come.

I've just started podcasting a new story: MARTIAN CHRONICLES is a story I'm working on for Jonathan Strahan's forthcoming LIFE ON MARS young adult anthology. It's a story about the colonization of Mars by free-market absolutists and the video-games they play.

They say you can't smell anything through a launch-hood, but I still smelled the pove in the next seat as the space-attendants strapped us into our acceleration couches and shone lights in our eyes and triple-checked the medical readouts on our wristlets to make sure our hearts wouldn't explode when the rocket boosted us into orbit for transfer to the *Eagle* and the long, long trip to Mars.

He was skinny, but not normal-skinny, the kind of skinny you get from playing a lot of sports and taking the metabolism pills your parents got for you so you wouldn't get teased at school. He was kind of pot-bellied with scrawny arms and sunken cheeks and he was brown-brown, like the brown Mom used to slather on after a day at the beach covered in factor-500 sunblock. Only he was the kind of all-over-even brown that you only got by being *born* brown.

He gave me a holy-crap-I'm-going-to-MARS smile and a brave thumbs-up and I couldn't bring myself to snub him because he looked so damned happy about it. So I gave him the same thumbs up, rotating my wrist in the strap that held it onto the arm-rest so that I didn't accidentally break my nose with my own hand when we "clawed our way out of the gravity well" (this was a phrase from the briefing seminars that they liked to repeat a lot. It had a lot of macho going for it).

The pove smelled like garbage. There, I said it. No nice way of saying it. Like the smell out of the trash-chute at the end of our property line. It had been my job to haul our monster-sized tie-and-toss bags to the curb every day and toss them down that chute and into the tunnel-system that took them out to the Spruce Sunset Meadows recycling center, which was actually *outside* the Spruce Sunset Meadows wall, all the way in Springville, where there was a gigantic mega-prison. The prisoners sorted all our trash for us, which was good for the environment, since they sorted it into about 400 different categories for recycling; and good for us because it meant we didn't have to do all that separating in our kitchen. On the other hand, it did mean that we had to have a double cross-cut shredder for anything like a bill or a legal document so that some crim didn't use it to steal our identities when he got out of jail. I always wondered how they handled the confetti that came out of the shredder, if they had to pick up each little dot of it with their fingernails and drop it into a big hopper labelled "paper."

Martian Chronicles, Part 01

MP3 Link

Podcast feed

Hey, Bostonites! I'll see you tonight at the Harvard Bookstore (1256 Mass Ave) at 7PM for the US launch of my new novel, Makers! (New Yorkers, and Philadelphians -- see you later this week!)

US/Canada tour

Dan sez, "Where the Wild Things Are was my favorite book as a child. It was the first book I gave to my five year olf daughter India and my 6 month old son Aldous has a fresh copy waiting for him. So as a moving-in present to ourselves we commissioned our friend Simon Ings my favourite scene in stone. But Max was replaced by Aldous and India was carved in alongside. My wife and I get to be the wild things! As a kid, I dreamt of making mischief and sailing off to be crowned king of the wild forest. Now I get to swing from the trees with the whole family."

Where the Wild Things Are in stone (Thanks, Dan!)

Jon Skovron's debut novel, the YA book Struts & Frets, is a dynamite, nuanced story about fannish love, musical obsession, first romance and true friendship. It follows the adventures of Sammy Bojar, a small-town, midwestern high-school senior who's life revolves around his band, a trainwreck of ego and conflict called "Tragedy of Wisdom." The band means everything to Sammy because music means everything to him. He frames his whole world with indie pop, seeking out authenticity with a driven, blinding passion.

Sammy's at the turning point in his life. His best male friend is coming out, his best female friend is in love with him (and it turns out it's mutual, though he didn't know it). The frontman for his band is a roiling, angry bully who is ever on the verge of physical violence. His beloved grandfather, a minor jazz legend, is sliding into incapacity as age and a hard life catch up with him.

The plot-points are all pretty standard YA set-pieces, but there's never a stale (or dull) moment in Struts & Frets. That's thanks to the incredible nuance and heart that Skovron brings to the interpersonal relationships, using these familiar emotional scenes as pivots for a deft emotional acrobatic act that is as moving as it is engrossing.

I was never a (good) musician, but I've always been passionate about music. I remember what it was like to be in the band, to be wrapped up in all the issues around creativity, friendship and identity; to seek out answers to life's big questions in music, to worry at the unanswerable questions of commercialism, success and popularity. Struts & Frets will feel instantly authentic to anyone who's ever felt the pride and shame of being an outsider.

Struts & Frets

Rick sez, "SFFaudio has just announced their 4th Annual Make an Audiobook, Get an Audiobook Challenge. They have twenty Science Fiction and Fantasy titles of public domain and Creative Commons novels that they'd like to see freely available as audiobooks on the internet. They're looking for participants to commit to recording and editing the sound files and then making them available online. At that point they will get to choose a free audiobook for a prize. But the real prize is the satisfaction of creating a creative work that can be shared with all. Previous SFFaudio Challenges have generated some great audiobooks of classic and obscure titles that would otherwise be unavailable in audio. This year's challenges has a variety of authors including Jack London, Mack Reynolds, James E. Gunn and many others."

The 4th Annual SFFaudio Challenge (Thanks, Rick!)

The title is a mouthful: Hocus Pocus Junior The anatomy of legerdemain. Or, The art of iugling set forth in his proper colours, fully, plainly, and exactly; so that an ignorant person may thereby learn the full perfection of the same, after a little practise.

The publication date is 1634. Although it's the earliest book devoted to magic as a performing art, it apparently takes its text almost exactly from a 1584 book called The Discoverie of Witchcraft. The Witchcraft book was meant to be a debunking text, proving to people that witches didn't exist and, thus, that we shouldn't go about condemning other people for witchcraft. Hocus Pocus Junior took the chapters on sleight of hand and slightly (heh) reworked them as an instructional manual.

Comparing Hocus Pocus Junior and the Discoverie of Witchcraft at Early Modern Whale.
Two Posts on the History of Hocus Pocus Junior from Bookride.com

Thanks to Holly Tucker!

Welcome to the fifth serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' human cloning thriller 7th Son: Descent. A recent review in Publishers Weekly said, "(T)hriller readers seeking edge-of-your-seat action flavored with conspiracy and futuristic tech will love every page."

If this is your first exposure to our free serialization of 7th Son, you can easily catch up by reading part one, part two, part three and part four. If you're enjoying this serialized experience, support the book by purchasing a copy.

Part 5

Tonight, I'm launching my latest novel, Makers in Canada, at the excellent Toronto sf reference library, the Merril Collection, at 239 College St. (3rd floor), east of Spadina. The event starts at 7PM, and I'll be doing a reading, taking questions, and signing books.

Books are being sold by Bakka Phoenix, and if you can't make it tonight, they're happy to take your pre-orders for signed, personalized copies -- I'll sign them tonight and they'll ship them out right away. They're at +1 416 963 9993 or inquiries@ bakkaphoenixbooks. com.

Hope to see you there!

US-Canada Tour

Here's the Guardian's Alison Flood's detailed look at Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, Galileo's Dream, a fictionalized biography of Galileo that features time-travel.

What he came up with was three different temporal dimensions - the first moving very fast, at the speed of light, the second very slow and "vibrating slowly back and forth, as if the universe itself were a single string or bubble", the third - antichronos - in reverse. We experience them as one, creating a three-way interference pattern, which accounts for sensations such as foresight, déjà vu, nostalgia and precognition. The compound nature of time, Robinson writes, "creates our perception of both transience and permanence, of being and becoming". He's shown the novel to people who are "much more serious about the time travel stuff" and they're "having a blast". "They immediately map my three strands of time onto their system. They think I've partially discovered the real thing," he says gleefully...

So Galileo makes his telescope. He sees the Seven Sisters constellation, surrounded by "thickets of lesser stars, granulated almost to white dust in places ... No one else in the history of the world had ever seen these stars, until this very night, this very moment". He discovers Jupiter's four moons. He studies acceleration and motion. He observes sunspots. He frequently, frequently rings "like a struck bell" as his genius strikes: "Here it was, the truth of the situation - the cosmos revealed in a single stroke as being one way rather than another. The Earth was spinning under his feet, also rolling around the sun ... Again he rang like a bell. His flesh buzzed like struck bronze, his hair stood on end. How things worked; it had to be; and he rang." He stamps on the ground after he is tried by the Inquisition for supporting Copernicanism: "'It still moves!' he said. 'Eppur si muove!'"

Kim Stanley Robinson: science fiction's realist (Thanks, Robert!)

The last of this year's excellent "SF in SF" reading series is coming up on Nov 14, at 7PM:

Jeff VanderMeer, recent Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention 2009, is touring for his final novel in his Ambergris Cycle, "Finch," published by Underland Books, and for his writers' guide "Booklife," published by Tachyon Publications. His associated Booklifenow website focus on sustainable creativity, and is a unique writing guide to sustainable careers and sustainable creativity - the first to fully integrate discussion of the role of new media into topics that have always been of interest to writers.. With his wife, Ann VanderMeer, he's edited the charity anthology "Last Drink Bird Head," "New Weird," and "Steampunk." His short fiction has appeared in Conjunctions, Library of America's American Fantastic Tales, and several year's best anthologies. He writes nonfiction for The Washington Post Book World, Omnivoracious, The New York Times Book Review, the B&N Review, and many others.

S. G. Browne, is the author of "Breathers: A Zombie's Lament," a dark comedy about life after undeath told from the perspective of a zombie. His second novel, "Fated," is a dark, irreverent comedy about fate, destiny, and the consequences of getting involved in the lives of humans. His take on zombies, "So what happened to make them so popular today? I'll tell you what happened. Zombies were taken out of their proverbial archetypal box. No longer are they just the shambling, mindless, flesh-eating ghouls we've known and loved for most of the part four decades. They've expanded their range, become more versatile. More well-rounded. And who doesn't enjoy a well-rounded zombie?" Introduce the modern complications of a zombie trying to find himself in this mad, mad world, and how best to bring your undead girlfriend home to meet mom, and you've got yourself a story!! Check out the blog on http://www.sgbrowne.com, and ask him your own zombie apocalypse questions.

Seating is limited - first come first seated

The Variety Preview Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor - entrance is between Quiznos & Citibank 582 Market St. @ 2nd and Montgomery, San Francisco
phone, night of event - 415-225-7445

SF in SF Reading/Event (San Francisco, CA) (Thanks, Rina!)

Gretchen Rubin, author of the forthcoming book, The Happiness Project, offers several good de-cluttering tips in a blog post titled "Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering."

Here are the first three:

1. "I need to get organized." No! Don't get organized is your first step.

2. "I need to be hyper-organized." I fully appreciate the pleasure of having a place for everything, and perhaps counter-intuitively, I believe it’s easier to put things away in an exact place, rather than a general place (“the third shelf of the coat closet,” not “a closet.”) However, this impulse can become destructive: if you’re spending a lot of time alphabetizing your spices, organizing your shoes according to heel height, creating eighty categories for your home files, etc., consider whether you need to be quite so precisely organized. I find this particularly true with toys – I’ve spent hours sorting pretend food, Polly Pockets pieces, and tea sets, only to find everything a jumble the next day.

3. "I need some more inventive storage containers." See #1. If you get rid of everything you don’t need, you may not need any fancy containers.

In short, she's a fan of getting rid of stuff. Me, too!

Eleven Myths of De-Cluttering

I always celebrate when a new Terry Pratchett novel hits the stands -- doubly so now that health problems are slowing him down from his normal superhuman output to a merely impressive one. But I confess I was a little less excited to learn that the newest Pratchett Discworld book, Unseen Academicals, was about football (AKA soccer). I'm not a sports fan. I wasn't a hockey fan when I lived in Canada. I wasn't a baseball fan when I lived in the US. I'm not a footie fan now that I live in the UK. But I gave it a whirl: this is Terry Pratchett, after all. I'd read his grocery lists.

A word about Pratchett for the uninitiated. Terry Pratchett is an incredibly funny, warmly human British fantasy (mostly) novelist. He writes at an impossible rate. Most of his books are part of a sprawling, infinitely varied fantasy series called Discworld, about a flat, disc-shaped planet that is carried on the backs of four gigantic elephants who tramp in slow circles around the back of a vast, interstellar turtle called A'Tuin. On Discworld, everything happens. There are imperial battles and barbarians; witches and trolls and dwarves in the hills; animist spirits on lost continents; and there is a vast and wonderful and terrible city called Ankh-Morpork. Ankh-Morpork is presided over by a tyrant called Lord Vetinari, who is quite progressive as tyrants go. For one thing, he's let the trolls, vampires, medusae, dwarves, werewolves, zombies, and assorted other nonhumans into the city. For another, he's organized the thieves into a guild to whom one can pay an annual license and be guaranteed a life free from official thieving (freelance thieves are dealt with most firmly by the guild).

You can read the Discworld books in almost any order. Some of them run in little trilogies that follow the same characters, but even if you picked up the second or third volume of these, you'd probably get along OK -- Pratchett is quite good at getting newcomers to Discworld up to speed on its basics.

Back to Unseen Academicals. Here's the setup: the wizards of Unseen University have discovered that a key grant from a former Archchancellor requires them to keep a football team that plays regular matches. It's been decades since the last UU team was fielded, and they're in imminent danger of losing a substantial source of funding. Meanwhile, football itself -- as played on the streets of Ankh-Morpork -- is a vicious game that is more riot than sport, and the wizards of UU have no intention of getting involved in that mess.

So they cook up a plan to reform football -- and to field a team of their own, coached by Nutt, a mysterious (and erudite) goblin who has been heretofore employed as a candle-dribbler (no self-respecting wizard wants to do magic by the light of a pristine, unmarked candle) in the cellars of UU.

That's the setup. Here's the payoff: it's brilliant. The novelist's best trick is to make you care about stuff you don't care about. It's what Fever Pitch does. And it's what Unseen Academicals does, too. Pratchett shows us how sport is part of the emotional life of a city, and how its significance resonates across generations, across regional parochialism, across social strata, uniting us behind something that transcends the mere game.

What's more, Pratchett shows us how fragile a thing this is, how vulnerable it is to greed and thuggishness and venality, and how those who defend the game do so for the best reasons imaginable. As Pratchett says, "The thing about football is, it's not about football."

I wouldn't call this the best Discworld novel ever (I think my vote for that honor would go to Monstrous Regiment, which, incidentally, can be read without having read any of the other Pratchett novels). But it's in the top five.

A word of warning: it's also one of the most inside-baseball (you should forgive the expression) of the Discworld books, requiring a fair bit of familiarity with the previous books in the series to be fully appreciated. It's a real gift from Pratchett to his fans, in other words, and I, for one, am grateful for it.

Unseen Academicals (Amazon US)

Unseen Academicals (Amazon UK)

This is not a book. It's a fabulous little clutch purse that looks like a book cover made by Olympia LeTan.

via Kottke.org

Lavie sez, "The Apex Book of World SF is the first anthology of SF/F/H stories from around the world, including Yang Ping's tale of Chinese hackers in a future game world, Aleksandar Ziljak's Men in Black meets Boogie Nights thriller and S.P. Somtow's classic examination of post-World War II Thailand and its most notorious serial killer. This rare anthology of international SF sets out to showcase some of the best international writers have to offer and the different perspectives of people from outside the American-British sphere of publishing - with authors from Malaysia, China, the Philippines, Israel and Palestine, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere."

The Apex Book of World SF (Amazon)

Apex Book of World SF Released! (The World SF News Blog)

(Thanks, Lavie!)

I just finished my podcast reading of my latest story, "Epoch," which Mark Shuttleworth commissioned for my upcoming short story collection/experiment, With a Little Help. It's the story of the sysadmin charged with shutting down the first and only functional AI, which no one can figure out a reason to save -- and it's the story of the AI's bid to save its own life by fixing the Unix 32-bit rollover problem.

The podcast is in eight parts -- I started reading it before I'd finished the story, so there's some minor inconsistencies that'll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I'll be reading "Martian Chronicles," my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.

The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in "I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet." That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.

No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, "I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing." Truth be told, I'd rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I'm smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.

Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity's hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn't a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren't any killer apps for AI.

MP3s: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Podcast feed

The Fables comics are an infinitely entertaining and moving series of comics about a world in which every fable, legend and belief of humanity has been chased from the worlds of fantasy to exile on Earth, hiding in a secret side-street in Manhattan. The chaser is The Adversary, an evil emperor, and his numberless goblin shock-troops. This is such rich material, as it allows for tellings and retellings of every beloved story of humanity.

In Peter & Max: A Fables Novel, writer Bill Willingham tells a key piece of the story in prose form, and proves that he's every bit as wonderful a prose-writer as he is a comics-writer. Peter and Max is the story of two brothers, Peter (Piper, also Pumpkin Eater) and Max (the Pied Piper), who grow estranged from one another on the eve of the Adversary's invasion of their homeworld, and lose themselves in a blood-soaked Black Forest, where they are both fired by the crucible of war and magic into men whose innocence will never be recovered.

Max is the villain here, jealous of Peter's inheritance of Frost, the magic flute of their father. Max acquires Fire, another powerful magic flute, from Frau Totenkinder, the evil witch of the Black Forest, and he and Fire warp each other into something monstrous.

Peter, meanwhile, is orphaned in Hamelin, where he becomes an accomplished thief, escaping from the worst circumstances with the help of Frost, and forever pining for his lost love, Bo Peep, disappeared into the evil woods.

The action moves from this mythic backstory to a contemporary tale in which Max has come at last to contemporary Fabletown, and Peter must hunt him, even though it means his certain doom.

As with the Fables comics, Willingham manages to merge the gentle, meandering feel of fairy tales with a breakneck, contemporary pacing -- a very clever trick indeed. The characters and stories are very engaging, the tension real, the mythos powerful. There's everything to like about Peter & Max, even if you've never cracked a Fables comic (though you probably will, once you've finished reading the book).

Peter & Max: A Fables Novel

In today's Observer Business column, John Naughton discusses what a ripoff it is for ebook vendors to "sell" you books with abusive, multi-thousand word "license agreements," pretending that because you bought your book over the network, it wasn't a sale, and so you don't get to own it. These "licenses" aren't about upholding copyright (if they were, you could replace thousands of words of lawyerese with four simple words: "Don't violate copyright law"). They're about overriding copyright -- which has all kinds of guarantees for the rights of book-owners -- with a private law that gives every advantage to the publisher or retailer, converting you from a noble reader to a wormy, contemptible licensor who doesn't deserve to own books.

The Kindle EULA is a good example. Section 3, which deals with "Digital Content" (such as downloaded books), says that "Unless specifically indicated otherwise, you may not sell, rent, lease, distribute, broadcast, sublicense or otherwise assign any rights to the Digital Content or any portion of it to any third party, and you may not remove any proprietary notices or labels on the Digital Content." In other words, you are forbidden to lend or sell the book you've just "bought". In real-world terms, you can't lend your copy of 1984 to a friend or donate it to the school jumble sale.

Under the subsection on "Use of Digital Content', the Kindle EULA says: "Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use."

Translation: you can't back up your electronic books on to any other device - which means that if your Kindle packs up, or if Amazon moves on to another technical standard, you're screwed: your entire digital library has effectively been vaporised. Then you look round your house and note the number of electronic devices that no longer work.

Kindle readers beware - big Amazon is watching you read 1984

My latest Locus column, "Teen Sex," explains why I think young adult literature should have sex -- and other "mature" topics -- in it.

There's really only one question: "Why have your characters done something that is likely to upset their parents, and why don't you punish them for doing this?"

Now, the answer.

First, because teenagers have sex and drink beer, and most of the time the worst thing that results from this is a few days of social awkwardness and a hangover, respectively. When I was a teenager, I drank sometimes. I had sex sometimes. I disobeyed authority figures sometimes.

Mostly, it was OK. Sometimes it was bad. Sometimes it was wonderful. Once or twice, it was terrible. And it was thus for everyone I knew. Teenagers take risks, even stupid risks, at times. But the chance on any given night that sneaking a beer will destroy your life is damned slim. Art isn't exactly like life, and science fiction asks the reader to accept the impossible, but unless your book is about a universe in which disapproving parents have cooked the physics so that every act of disobedience leads swiftly to destruction, it won't be very credible. The pathos that parents would like to see here become bathos: mawkish and trivial, heavy-handed, and preachy.

Cory Doctorow: Teen Sex

Joe R Lansdale's comic book adaptation of Robert E "Conan" Howard's classic horror story Pigeons From Hell has everything going for it: a spooky original story to adapt, a masterful horror writer on the adaptation, and terrifying art and colors by Nathan Fox and Dave Stewart. Together, they are a potent mix of gore, suspense, folklore, and terror.

Howard's original story is a much-loved gothic bayou horror classic, about a haunted house where the blood of slaves and the cruelty of their masters wreak a curse on a huge, rotting mansion. Lansdale's update of the story -- the new protagonists are a pair of sisters descended from the slaves who inherited the house from their masters; they go to take possession with their friends in a kind of Scooby Doo pack -- only lightly changes the material, leaving the scare intact.

But best of all is Fox's art and Stewart's coloring, which are blood-soaked, entrail-laden, and painted in an eerie palette.

If you like a good scare -- and creepy, gothic art -- then this is your thing. Many thanks to Dark Horse for supplying a review copy.

Pigeons From Hell

We've covered Theodore Gray on Boing Boing a lot, and for good reason -- he's amazing. His Mad Science book was filled with spectacularly fun science experiments, he built a Periodic Table table with little compartments to hold samples of elements, and now he has a new coffee table photo book called The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe.

Each element is treated to a gorgeous two page spread, with photos and a fascinating short history.

Did you know:

... if you keep your household smoke detector around for a couple of thousand years, most of the americium will have decayed into neptunium (wait another 30 million years or so and it will become thallium, which the CIA can use to make Castro's beard fall out, if he's still alive)

... if you touch tellurium you will smell like rotten garlic for a few weeks?

... arsenic is commonly added to chicken feed (to promote their growth)?

... a chunk of gallium will melt in your hand (you can buy a sample here)?

... a speck of scandium ("the first of the elements you've never heard of") added to aluminum creates a very strong alloy (like the kind used in the Louisville Slugger that was involved in a recent $850,000 lawsuit)? Books that reveal how truly weird our world is are always welcome in my home. This one's a gem.

The Elements: A Visual Exploration of Every Known Atom in the Universe

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook is Eleanor Davis's kids' comic glorifying science, invention, and the joys of personal exploration. Julian Calendar is a bright 11-year-old who has moved to a new school where he is determined to fit in by masking his voracious intellect, but instead he finds himself (gladly) fallen in with two other science kids -- Greta Hughes, a "bad kid" with a reputation and Ben Garza, a "dumb jock" who shines on the basketball court but chokes on tests. Both kids are, in fact, natural scientists (as is Julian), but they aren't the right kind of smart to get ahead in school.

Together, the three of them form The Secret Science Alliance, complete with an underground lair chock full of marvellous inventions, and they set out to create the most wonderful things they can imagine.

But then the sour old R&D chief from down the block begins to steal their inventions, and the three find themselves embroiled in a caper that requires all of their skills.

Funny, inspiring, and wicked-nerdy, The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook is filled with hyper-detailed drawings of secret lairs and scientific inventions, and handles the idea of multiple intelligences with a good deal of grace and compassion. The author says the book is enjoyable by kids 8 and up -- and as a 38 year old, I can affirm the "and up" part! I'm grateful to Ms Davis for sending me a review copy.

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook

Welcome to the fourth serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' SF thriller 7th Son: Descent (part 1, 2, 3), a novel set in present day featuring human cloning, dangerous technologies, and "beyond Top Secret" government conspiracies .

THE STORY SO FAR: Yesterday, seven men were kidnapped and brought to a secret government science facility. There, they discovered that they were unwitting human clones, with identical flesh and childhood memories. Their creators assembled them to stop the man behind the recent assassination of the U.S. president: a psychopath code-named John Alpha ... the very man they were cloned from years ago.

John, Kilroy2.0, Father Thomas and the other "Beta Clones" were told that Alpha's plans for chaos were just beginning, and he had terrifying technologies at his disposal that permit him to record and implant human memories into anyone. Further, he abducted Dania Sheridan, the woman the clones remember as their mother ... and left a clue for them to find him.

Part IV

Anne Innis Dagg's "Love of Shopping" is Not a Gene is a scathing, entertaining and extremely accessible geneticist's critique of "Darwinian Psychology" -- that is, the "science" of ascribing human behavior to genetic inevitability. Dagg, a biologist/geneticist at the University of Waterloo, identifies Darwinian Psychology as a nexus of ideological pseudoscience cooked to justify political agendas about the inevitability of social inequality, especially racial and sexual inequality.

One after another, Dagg examines the cherished shibboleths of Darwinian Psychology, examining the research offered in support of such statements as "Rape is genetic" or "Black people are genetically destined to have lower IQ scores than white people" and demolishes each statement by subjecting it to scientific rigor, including an examination of all the contradictory evidence ignored by proponents.

Dagg opens the book with what seems to be an issue of personal affront: the story that "many" animals practice infanticide as a means of eliminating the genetic competition. This claim originates in part with Craig Packer, who seemingly lost his head when Dagg dared to point out that the overall data suggested that lionesses, not lions, were apt to kill cubs, and not cubs born to other lionesses, but their own progeny, to give the remaining offspring a better chance of survival. When Packer was sent a paper to review, he sent Dagg a threatening note promising to go public with a "harsh" characterization of her as a "fringe scientist" with a "bizarre obsession." Meanwhile, Dagg's investigation of the references cited in support of infanticide among other animals, especially primates, finds them to be just as specious as the claims of infanticide among lions.

Tin House, a literary magazine, asked me to introduce the current science fiction issue with an overview of the field. I wrote them an essay called "Radical Presentism," about the way that science fiction reflects the present more than the future.

Mary Shelley wasn't worried about reanimated corpses stalking Europe, but by casting a technological innovation in the starring role of Frankenstein, she was able to tap into present-day fears about technology overpowering its masters and the hubris of the inventor. Orwell didn't worry about a future dominated by the view-screens from 1984, he worried about a present in which technology was changing the balance of power, creating opportunities for the state to enforce its power over individuals at ever-more-granular levels.

Now, it's true that some writers will tell you they're extrapolating a future based on rigor and science, but they're just wrong. Karel Čapek coined the word robotto talk about the automation and dehumanization of the workplace. Asimov's robots were not supposed to be metaphors, but they sure acted like them, revealing the great writer's belief in a world where careful regulation could create positive outcomes for society. (How else to explain his idea that all robots would comply with the "three laws" for thousands of years? Or, in the Foundation series, the existence of a secret society that knows exactly how to exert its leverage to steer the course of human civilization for millennia?)

For some years now, science fiction has been in the grips of a conceit called the "Singularity"--the moment at which human and machine intelligence merge, creating a break with history beyond which the future cannot be predicted, because the post-humans who live there will be utterly unrecognizable to us in their emotions and motivations. Read one way, it's a sober prediction of the curve of history spiking infinity-ward in the near future (and many futurists will solemnly assure you that this is the case); read another way, it's just the anxiety of a generation of winners in the technology wars, now confronted by a new generation whose fluidity with technology is so awe-inspiring that it appears we have been out-evolved by our own progeny.

CORY DOCTOROW: RADICAL PRESENTISM

Sara says:

I'm an archival researcher--I work part-time at Princeton Architectural Press in the editorial department and the other half of the week freelance researching book projects. Last year I researched the subject of Nothing for the author Joan Konner (former Dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism). Her book, You Don't Have to be Buddhist to Know Nothing, just came out last week. It's a sound bite history of the presence of Nothing in Western thought (including some essential bites from Eastern minds as well). The quotations come from a long list of thinkers, writers, artists, scholars (Dickinson, Sartre, Beckett, Rilke, Shakespeare, but also Steven Wright, Edward Albee, Philippe Petit, etc.). A really neat collage of Nothing.

The blog is a delight! I didn't know so much could be said about nothing.

You Don't Have to Be Buddhist to Know Nothing

I was fortunate to meet artist James Gurney at Babytattooville last month. He's the creator of the gorgeous Dinotopia series of books, and is a very friendly guy. His work reminds me of old masters of book illustration like N.C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle.

James has a new book out called Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist, in which he describes his creative process. It's a rare treat to learn how a talented artist creates his art. James has also made a couple of fun YouTube videos to promote the book: Gallery Flambeau Video and Unicycle Painter.

Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn't Exist

The RevolveR notebook uses a design similar to a cloth Jacob's Ladder toy to create a journal with "floating" bindings, so that you can turn it inside-out.

RevolveR (via Making Light)

I've written before here about the impact that Sue Townsend's comic Adrian Mole novels have had on my life since I was a young teenager, so it'll come as no surprise to learn that I was completely delighted by the latest volume, Adrian Mole: the Prostrate Years, which is sweeter, darker, more sentimental and more grim than the earlier installments.

For the uninitiated, the Adrian Mole books chronicle the life of a young man born near Leicester, whose dysfunctional family, intellectual impulses, gormless bumbling and terrible poetry make for a meaty, multi-volume series that serves as a wicked history of Britain and the world since the 1980s.

In the latest volume, Adrian is nearly 40, and is increasingly estranged from his (latest) wife, the mysterious and sexy Daisy, who seduced Adrian in Weapons of Mass Destruction. Their five year old is a High-School Musical-crazed monster, their finances are in tatters, and they're living with Adrian's elderly parents in their converted pigsty. Adrian's mother is writing a fictionalized agony memoir called A Girl Called Shit, and the lovely bookstore Adrian works at is going bust. And there's something wrong with Adrian's prostate, a problem compounded by all the friends and acquaintances who insist on calling it a "prostrate."

And yet, there's plenty that's sweet here. Adrian is figuring out fatherhood. His childhood flame, Pandora Braithwaite (now an MP) is back in his life. His half-brother Brett is back, his career as a hedge-fund manager in ruins. His son, Glenn, on deployment in Afghanistan, is shaping up to be a critically minded sharp young man. And Bernard, the alcoholic librophile who's helping out at the store, turns out to have quite a good approach to life that Adrian stands to learn much from.

Reading these books every year or two is a magic experience. Townsend recounts and recasts recent history in a way that makes you realize just how funny and tragic it all is. Townsend's vision has recently failed her, but she continues to write these books at an amazing clip. It's a real inspiration, as well as superb entertainment.

Adrian Mole: the Prostrate Years

Entire Adrian Mole series

Jeff VanderMeer sez, "Finch, the final novel in my Ambergris series, is now out, and I'm offering online posters, slogans, icons, and other cool stuff, including the Murder by Death soundtrack for the novel on a new page just for readers. I totally believe in and love the idea of 'PR artifacts'--creations that stand on their own as works of art. Does it support the publication of the novel? Maybe, but the main point is to have fun putting out some really neat stuff. Case in point: readers can take one 'Wanted Dead' web poster that's supposedly created by the rebels in my story and add their own headshot. "

Finch (Thanks, Jeff!)

Lavie Tidhar's story "Spider's Moon" is up on Futurismic, and it's a very rewarding ten-minute read. Futurismic's short-short fiction department publishes some genuinely wonderful science fiction, bite-sized stories that contain actual characters and settings and plots in impossibly small packages.

"Spider's Moon" is no exception: a story about spacefaring South Seas Islanders who come to Earth seeking mass-produced Vietnamese technology, and of what transpires; told with an admirable lyricism and poesie.

Melkior felt a little lost at Hoi An. He had arrived three days before, taking a room in a small hotel just outside the old town. It was, in many ways, a disconcerting experience. Once, Hoi An had been a trade centre, the meeting place of Chinese and European merchants on the coast of Viet Nam, and the old town had been preserved just as it had been, full of charming little cobbled streets and charming little temples and charming old houses - "Charm," the brochure insisted, "is the defining characteristic of the town". The old town was a bubble out of time, and visiting it was a wilful act of time-travel, or so it seemed to Melkior. The Hoi An lanterns ("Famous for hundreds of years," boasted the brochure) still hung everywhere, and barges still travelled down the river, pushed on long poles - and yet it was a lie, too, for the past was not really there, only its semblance, and who could believe in the past (not less a gentle, charming past) under the full spider's moon?

Crossing from the old town into the new was a disorienting fast-forward into the future: here, beyond the bubble of preserved time, the future happened with every heartbeat, the sound of construction filling the days, houses and office towers rising higher and higher into the atmosphere, as if grasping for the moon. He was here for the new town, not the old; was here for the future, not the past. The juxtaposition of both unsettled him. It had occurred to him he should have stayed in Da Nang, a forty-five minute drive down the road, a busy, bustling, cheerful city that had nothing of the quaint or picturesque (as the brochure had put it). Hoi An was a tourist town, famed for its tailors and shoe-makers, and even Melkior had given in to that extent, having purchased a new, sombre black suit and two pairs of custom-made knock-off trainers, with the company logo hand-stitched into the thin leather. He wore them now, feeling the cobblestones beneath the thin soles.

Spider's Moon By Lavie Tidhar

Several months ago, I posted about a fascinating and fun new book titled "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more," by Arthur Goldwag. It led to a fun discussion, both in the comments thread and offline, so I was delighted when Arthur accepted my invitation to guestblog for two weeks! Welcome to the asylum, Arthur! And remember folks, just because you're paranoid, don't think They're not after you. From Arthur's bio:

After attending Kenyon College and Brown University, Arthur Goldwag worked in book publishing for more than twenty years, including stints at Random House, The New York Review of Books, and Book-of-the-Month Club. He now freelances full time.

The author of The Beliefnet Guide to Kaballah (Doubleday, 2005), Isms & Ologies (Vintage, 2007), and Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), Arthur Goldwag is also a contributing editor at Scholastic's Storyworks magazine, where he writes stories, plays, and essays for children. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two sons.

Arthur Goldwag's blog

Back in August, I gushed about the long-overdue reissue of Ariel, Steven R Boyett's classic post-apocalyptic sword-and-sorcery adventure novel about a world where technology stops working and magic returns. I mentioned then that there was a sequel coming in November, and today Elegy Beach, the sequel I've been waiting for for 26 years, hit the stands.

Elegy Beach is an odd kind of sequel. In Ariel, the world Changed sometime in the early 1980s, meaning that the post-apocalyptic adventurers in the tale were wandering through a society littered with the nonfunctional remnants of 1980s society. For Elegy Beach, Boyett has moved the Change forward, so that technology dies and magic takes over somewhere in the early 2010s. As Boyett notes, "to not update the pre-Change world would be even weirder. Do the characters just never talk about cell phones and the internet and relay towers and all of the pervasive evidence of such progress? To avoid the issue would be to risk losing the reader's identification with the world that has been lost, because that world would no longer be the one in which the reader lives."

More to the point, the premise of Elegy Beach requires that the Change take place after the rise of the Internet and widespread, civilian use of software. In Elegy Beach, we meet Fred, the adolescent son of Pete Garey (himself the adolescent hero of Ariel). It's been decades since Pete went adventuring and now he is a single parent settled in a coastal California town, a close-mouthed loner who is lethal with a sword and passionate about books. Fred and Pete don't get on very well. Fred is apprenticed to the local sorcerer, and he does scutwork for the old man, grinding herbs for potions, doing routine castings, though he yearns to do more.

What Fred wants to do -- along with Yan, his best friend -- is codify the rules of magic. As members of the first post-Change generation to come of age, Fred and Yan understand the non-technological, magic society as normal and approach magic without the reverence and mysticism of their generation-gapped elders. More specifically, Yan and Fred yearn to create "macros" for magic, software-like constructs that allow non-casters to make use of spells that have been bottled by a new kind of spell. These bottled enchantments could become a kind of renewable resource, a kind of technology -- a system that would give the remnant of humanity that remains a hope for out-competing the centaurs who hunt them for sport and the marauders who destroy their fragile settlements.

That's the plan, anyway. But Yan and Fred's partnership dissolves when it becomes apparent that Yan craves power for its own sake, and betrays Fred's trust. Enter Ariel, Pete's unicorn familiar who has not seen Pete in 25 years, and once again Pete is on the road, this time with Fred and Yan's father, the four of them set on stopping Yan before he unmakes the world.

It's as good a setup as Ariel, and the story is every bit the cracking yarn that Ariel was, but I admit that I was distracted by the discontinuities between the two books -- Elegy Beach amounts to a kind of contra-factual future-history of a world I've been in love with since I was just a boy, and it was hard to keep the two straight.

Considered as a variation on the themes in Ariel, Elegy Beach is fantastic, a nonstop adventure that you can easily swallow in a couple of intense, white-knuckle readings. As a sequel, though, it's a little odd and distracting. Kudos to Boyett for trying something different, and what a wonderful thing that he's turned his hand back to novel-writing again after a long hiatus.

Elegy Beach

Welcome to the third serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' SF thriller 7th Son: Descent (part 1, 2), a novel set in present day featuring human cloning, dangerous technologies, and "beyond Top Secret" government conspiracies .

THE STORY SO FAR: Two weeks after the bizarre murder of the U.S. president, seven strangers were torn from their "normal" lives and brought to a secret government science facility. Despite minor differences in appearance, it was clear they were the same man, with identical childhood memories.

These seven "John Michael Smiths" were unwitting participants in a human cloning experiment. Each man -- carpenter John, demented hacker Kilroy2.0, marine Michael and the others -- were brought here because their creators identified the man behind the president's assassination. It's the man they were cloned from -- the man whose childhood memories they all share -- a ruthless psychopath code-named "John Alpha."

Part 3-1, Part 3-2

Last week's story on Escape Pod, the excellent weekly science fiction short story podcast was "Infestation" by Garth Nix. It's a vampire story with a twist (in a genre where not many twists are left) and it kept me guessing right up to the end. A delightful piece of speculative and wicked science fiction.

They were the usual motley collection of freelance vampire hunters. Two men, wearing combinations of jungle camouflage and leather. Two women, one almost indistinguishable from the men though with a little more style in her leather armour accessories, and the other looking like she was about to assault the south covered by balaclava, mirror shades, climbing helmet and hood. face of a serious mountain. Only her mouth was visible, a small oval of flesh not

They had the usual weapons: four or five short wooden stakes in belt loops; snap-holstered handguns of various calibers, all doubtless chambered with Wood-N-Death® low-velocity timber-tipped rounds; big silver-edged bowie or other hunting knife, worn on the hip or strapped to a boot; and crystal vials of holy water hung like small grenades on pocket loops.

Protection, likewise, tick the usual boxes. Leather neck and wrist guards; leather and woven-wire reinforced chaps and shoulder pauldrons over the camo; leather gloves with metal knuckle plates; Army or climbing helmets.

EP222: Infestation

MP3 link

Subscribe to Escape Pod podast feed

"Scenting the Dark," Mary Robinette Kowal's debut short story collection is slim and spare and eminently satisfying. Kowal writes science fiction that uses our relationship to technology to expose our relationships to one another. Kowal is one of science fiction's most celebrated new writers, a winner of the Campbell Award for best new writer and a current Hugo nominee, all on the strength of her short fiction (she has two novels forthcoming from Tor), and it's easy to see why.

For me, the standout story here was Jaiden's Weaver, a tale that combines the astronomical reality of life on a ringed planet with a subtle and moving coming-of-age story. Like the other stories in this volume, it epitomizes Kowal's gift for using rigorous science fiction as a lever for prying open the subjective reality of the people who inhabit the futuristic world of now.

"Scenting the Dark" is a slim, handsomely made hardcover volume from the specialist house Subterranean Press, a great gift and a great treasure for yourself.

Be sure to check out Kowal's website for readings of her work (she's a talented and accomplished voice actor and puppeteer -- she read my story After the Siege for Subterranean's podcast), free downloads (she's a copyfighter, too!), and other supplementary material.

Scenting the Dark and Other Stories

As promised, here's the details on the short Canada/US tour for my novel Makers in November:

November 12, 7PM
Toronto, ON, Canada
The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy
239 College Street, 3rd Floor, +1 416 393-7748
Books by Bakka Phoenix
(you can pre-order signed copies from them if you can't make it).

November 16, 7PM
Cambridge, Mass
Harvard Bookstore
1256 Massachusetts Avenue

November 17, 7PM
New York City, NY
Borders Columbus Circle
10 Columbus Circle (@59th St and Central Park West)

November 20, 11AM and 1PM
Philadelphia, PA
Free Library of Philadelphia
1901 Vine Street

November 20-22
Philcon, Cherry Hill, NJ

If you're with the press and you'd like to arrange an interview, please contact Justin Golenbock (USA) (Justin.Golenbock@tor.com/646.307.5413) or Katherine Wilson (Canada) (Katherine.Wilson@hbfenn.com/905.951.6600 x271).

Kevin Haw writes in to tell us about World of Warcraft and Philosophy, a new collection of essays and stories:

Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, Adam Smith... Sure, they were all great thinkers, but how long would they have lasted in Ulduar?

Continuing with the ongoing Popular Culture and Philosophy series, World of Warcraft and Philosophy, (Wrath of the Philosopher King) will be hitting bookshelves on November 1st. This collection of essays and short fiction addresses the ethics, economics, and metaphysics of Azeroth and its inhabitants. Along the way, the collection takes quick excursions on issues of gender identity, leadership, hate speech, and the likelihood of the IRS auditing a troll. Add in shoutouts to Machiavelli, Gary Gygax, and Thomas Jefferson (and, yes, even Cory Doctorow) and you've you might find yourself leveling up in intellect as well as your combat skills.

World of Warcraft and Philosophy (Popular Culture and Philosophy) (Thanks, Kevin!)

Dark Horse just sent me a review copy of The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century, a gigantic, slipcased hardcover containing the full run of the Give Me Liberty comics and associated titles.

I have Frank Miller's Give Me Liberty graphic novels to thank for getting me interested in graphic novels as a literary form. I read the first Give Me Liberty collection when I was seventeen, after having it thrust insistently into my hands by my roommate Erik Stewart. Erik judged -- correctly -- that I'd find in Miller's groundbreaking tale the same satisfaction I got from reading the best sf novels. He was so right.

Give Me Liberty is the story of Martha Washington, a kid from a futuristic version of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green projects, simply called "The Green," who joins the US Army in order to escape from poverty. Martha finds herself serving in the army of a country locked in a death-spiral, plagued by political assassination, partisan division, secessionists, cynical corporatism... Her military education becomes a political education and on the way, Miller and Gibbons impart a raging, angry story about corruption and injustice, paced so relentlessly that I found myself buying the single issues between the collections and re-reading them looking for clues as to what might come next.

Miller created Give Me Liberty for Dark Horse after he jumped ship from DC, for whom he had made a fortune with his noir Batman: Dark Knight books, which changed the field forever. DC loved what Miller had done, but they wanted to impose restrictions on his creativity intended to assuage blue-noses who were worried that comics might corrupt the kiddees. Miller told them to pound sand and went to Dark Horse and created this remarkable story, which prefigures some of the best sf comics written since, including Ellis's brilliant Transmetropolitan and Brian Wood's fantastic DMZ.

The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century is the perfect way to revisit that remarkable story or to discover it for the first time. A giant, heavy, high-quality book, it is made for a lazy afternoon on the sofa or the carpet, devouring the whole Martha Washington canon (along with sketches, notes and other assorted nice bits). It'd be a fine (and potentially life-changing -- see above) gift, and makes for a very satisfying indulgence, too.

The Life And Times Of Martha Washington In The Twenty-First Century

Reminder! Tonight's the launch for my latest novel Makers at Forbidden Planet London from 6-7. Forbidden Planet's happy to take your pre-orders for inscribed copies if you can't make it, and they'll cheerfully ship 'em wherever you are.

Forbidden Planet Megastore: Cory Doctorow signing Makers

If you live in Canada or the US, click below for more info:

USC's "It's All in the Cards" feature is a Flash widget that celebrates a different card-catalog card every day. I remember the first time I was exposed to my school library's subject index and practically falling over at the thought that there was a way to find all the books in the school (which I assumed were all the books in the world) on any subject that mattered to me. I could look at these things all day.

Maybe I should find a surplus mountain of these things and tile a room with them.

It's All in the Cards (via Resource Shelf)

Today is the launch of my new novel, Makers, a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet. Weirdly, I wrote it years before the current econopocalypse, as a parable about the amazing blossoming of creativity and energy that I saw in Silicon Valley after the dotcom crash, after all the money dried up.

As with all my previous novels, the whole book is available as a free, Creative Commons download, under a NonCommercial-ShareAlike license that allows you to remix it to your heart's content and share the book and your mixes noncommercially. And as with my last two books, I've created a unique donations program that connects generous people with schools, universities, libraries, shelters, prisons and other cash-strapped institutions.

Here's how it works: this page has instructions for profs, librarians and similar worthies to list themselves as potential recipients for Makers (please pass this URL around to people who might want a copy!). If you've read the electronic text of Makers and want to reimburse me, but don't want a copy of the print book for yourself, you can buy a copy for the institution of your choice. Everybody wins: you get to settle your karma while supporting your favorite bookseller, a library or university gets a copy of the book without having to divert its budget, my publisher gets the sale and I get the royalty and the sales-figure. I've facilitated the donation of hundreds of books this way, and it works great.

I'm launching Makers in the UK at Forbidden Planet in London tomorrow (Thursday) night at 6PM, and I'll be having the Toronto launch with Bakka Books at the Merril Collection on November 12. You can pre-order inscribed copies from either event, and they'll be shipped after I sign. (There's also a great indie bookseller near my office in London, Clerkenwell Tales, which will take your inscription mail-orders; I'll stop in a couple times a week to sign them for the duration).

There's also a US east-coast tour with stops in NYC, New Jersey, Boston and Philly, but the details are still being finalized. If you think you can make it to any of those places and want to get an email once the details are fixed, drop me an email and I'll send you a note once I have them in hand.

Let's see, what else? Oh yeah, this kick-ass Publishers Weekly starred review:

In this tour de force, Doctorow (Little Brother) uses the contradictions of two overused SF themes--the decline and fall of America and the boundless optimism of open source/hacker culture--to draw one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future since cyberpunk wore out its mirror shades. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, typical brilliant geeks in a garage, are trash-hackers who find inspiration in the growing pile of technical junk. Attracting the attention of suits and smart reporter Suzanne Church, the duo soon get involved with cheap and easy 3D printing, a cure for obesity and crowd-sourced theme parks. The result is bitingly realistic and miraculously avoids cliché or predictability. While dates and details occasionally contradict one another, Doctorow's combination of business strategy, brilliant product ideas and laugh-out-loud moments of insight will keep readers powering through this quick-moving tale.

Mighty is my w00t!

Makers

Here's a video for a new book that I received from the publisher a couple of days ago called Rules for My Unborn Son, by Walker Lamond, based on his entertaining blog 1,001 Rules for my Unborn Son.

The Lamond's rules are good advice for sons, as well as anyone else, really. I wish my wife would remember the rule, "Never under any circumstances ask a woman if she is pregnant," which she has broken several times with embarrassing consequences.

More of Lamond's rules:

After writing an angry email, read it carefully. Then delete it.

Stand up to bullies. You'll only have to do it once.

If you trip in public, don't blame the sidewalk. Pick yourself up and pretend nothing happened.

Your best chance of being a rockstar is learning the bass.

Thank the bus driver

Don't gloat. A good friend will do it for you.

Don't spit

A few of the rules on his blog I don't recommend (e.g., "All drinking challenges must be accepted") but most of his rules offer specific tips for living a life of kindness, politeness, and preparedness.

Rules for My Unborn Son

As part of our serialization of JC Hutchins' thriller 7th Son Descent, we're delighted to bring you this ten-chapter special-edition PDF!

7th Son Descent Special Edition PDF