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

Joel Stickley's "How To Write Badly Well" blog lavishly illustrates some of the rules for good/bad writing. I usually give my writing students a copy of the excellent Turkey City Lexicon, but this makes a nice (and hilarious) adjunct:

Joe Stockley paced the floor of his office and cursed under his breath. Dammit, he thought, why am I such a brilliant writer that no-one ever understands the depth and complexity of my work? It's almost as if I'm the only real person in the world and all the other people are just automatons! No, that can't be (he thought). Can it...?

Just then, he was interrupted by the ringing of his top of the range iPhone 3GS (32GB).

'Hello?' he said, his voice booming with a timbre which was capable of simultaneously charming his many admirers and intimidating any who dared oppose him.

'Hello Joe,' a mellifluous voice came floating back. 'It's your loving wife here.'

'Hello, my beautiful-beyond-compare, talented and intelligent wife,' said Joe, his laughter reverberating around the expensive fixtures and fittings of his luxurious house.

How To Write Badly Well

This 1962 high-school textbook, "When You Marry," is a long, mind-bendingly awful manual for marriage, including sticking to traditional gender roles, staying away from race-mixing, resisting communism and saving yourself for your wedding night.

Love, 1962 American High School Style (via Making Light)

Tony sez, "The Sofanauts hosted a fascinating discussion, centered on the SF magazine, Asimov's. Guests included both Editor and Managing Editor, Sheila Williams and Brian Bieniowski. Writers, Jeff VanderMeer and Jeremy Tolbert also joined host Tony C Smith. Contrary to growing opinion in the SF community, things are not all doom and gloom for the magazine. Digital sales are up and new methods of delivery are being explored. Yet some things, like website and digital submissions continue to be touchy subjects. Don't miss this frank and engaging roundtable focusing on one of the most established magazines in SF!"

The Sofanauts No 30 The State of Asimov's Special (Thanks, Tony!)

I'm a great fan of Bill Willingham's Fables comics and its numerous spinoffs (nutshell description: all fictional characters, legends, and fables are actually alive, always have been, and are living in secret exile in New York, having been chased out of Fableland by "The Adversary," a rapacious conqueror).

One of the most fun of these is the Jack books, which feature a set of parallel adventures of Jack -- as in "Spratt" and "and the Beanstalk" and many other tales. Jack is handsome, womanizing, preternaturally lucky and cheerfully amoral doofus of a fable who is forever incurring the wrath of the Fable establishment by violating their rules by, say, pursuing a career as a Hollywood executive (he fits right in in Tinseltown, naturally).

In Jack of Fables Vol. 6: The Big Book of War , Jack finds himself heading the Fable/Librarian army against the vicious Bookburner, who would destroy all of fabledom for his own reasons. Jack takes this command with the help of his sidekick and pal The Pathetic Fallacy (AKA "Gary"), an immortal "Literal" who changes the world to suit his moods.

Jack is a terrible commander, but a very funny one, and he doesn't distinguish himself much as a general, but he does an admirable job of evincing yuks from the reader; and Willingham uses the story to make some really thought-provoking points about the dark and primal nature of stories and the danger and blood that lurks in their hearts.

The Big Book of War would probably stand alone reasonably well, but if you just read this volume, you're really missing out. The whole Fables canon deserves your attention (and will reward it handsomely). It is both gripping and thought-provoking; philosophically substantial and sparklingly funny. Jack of Fables Vol. 6: The Big Book of War

Update: Please note correct date -- Thu, Oct 29! Sorry!

My latest novel Makers comes out next week, and I'll be launching it in the UK with a signing on Friday night, Oct 30 Thu, Oct 29!, 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

I'll also be coming to Canada and the US next month for a quick book-tour, kicking off with a signing and reading at the Merril Collection in Toronto (Nov 12, 7pm, The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, 239 College Street, 3rd Floor, Toronto, Ontario M5T 1R5, +1 416 393-7748), and Bakka Books, the bookseller, is also glad to take orders for inscribed copies beforehand. I'll sign them all for shipping on the day.

After that, I'll be coming through NYC, NJ, Boston and Philadelphia -- details are still a little shaky, but if you drop me an email, I'll send you a mailout once I have them in hand.

Here's a little more about Makers, courtesy of Publishers Weekly: "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. (starred review)"

And, of course, I'll have a site up in a couple of days with free, CC-licensed downloads of the whole text.

Ellen Kushner sez, "The Interstitial Arts Foundation is presenting 8 new original online stories - er, pieces of interstitial writing, a new one each week for the 8 weeks leading up to the November 3 publication of our new anthology, _Interfictions 2_ . So far we've ranged from F. Brett Cox's 'Nylon Seam,' Brett's 'tribute to Bettie Page fandom'complete with soundtrack (vocals & guitar, F. Brett Cox) to Ron Pasquariello's 'Chipper Dialogues' - a man & his mutt converse in haiku. This week, it's Kelly Cogswell's story-and-poem combo, 'For the Love of Carrots' and 'The Luxembourg Gardener.' Check out the Annex Page for a complete list of stories and authors. Interstitial art is found in the interstices of recognized category and genre. "

Annex (Thanks, Ellen!)

Avi Solomon says: "If you search Google Images for "Google  books fingers" you get poignant images (to my lights) of scanner worker bee hands. Makes me value the massive,  anonymous and underpaid effort that goes into maintaining the 'digital' economy." Here an example.

Google Books fingers

I often get email from writers who are starting out asking for career advice for "breaking in" to the field. I'm somewhat helpless to answer these queries -- my first professional sale was more than a decade ago, that sale itself represented a further decade of hard work on both my craft and my career. I can tell you a lot about how to break in from a standing start in 1988, when I sold my first story, but not nearly as much about how to break in today.

Enter Jeff VanderMeer's Book Life: Strategies and Survival Tips for the 21st-Century Writer. Jeff and I were classmates at the Clarion workshop in 1992, and he is both a talented, prolific writer and a shrewd and successful trailblazer in 21st-century publishing and promotion.

Talking about arts careers can be a little icky, because, well, there's a fine line between career-management and self-obsessed personal promotion. Likewise, it's hard to talk about what you do in the realm of imagination without sounding a little like someone droning on about his absolutely fascinating dreams of the night before.

Here's the second serialized installment of J.C. Hutchins' SF thriller novel 7th Son: Descent. To celebrate the Oct. 27 release of the book, J.C. is releasing Descent in several free serialized formats: PDF, blog text, and audio. We're distributing the text version of the novel in ten weekly installments.

In the last serialized episode, U.S. president Hank "Gator" Griffin was assassinated by a four-year-old boy during a stumping rally in Kentucky. The child died not long after, offering no clues for his murderous motives.

Two weeks later, seven strangers were ripped from their normal lives on the same day, kidnapped by mysterious government agents, and brought to a "beyond Top Secret" facility. Locked in the same room, these seven men realized that, despite slight variations in their appearance, they all appeared to be the same man. Are they brothers? Each remembers being an only child.

Check out the second serialized installment of 7th Son below. If you've enjoyed the experience so far, you can support the book by purchasing a copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders, or printing this PDF order form and presenting it at your favorite bookstore. You can learn more about the book at J.C.'s site.

Read "7TH SON" Part 2

Ape Lad sez, "Dresden Codak, a very funny webcomic, has this handy chart of '42 Essential Third-Act Twists' for writers."

42 Essential 3rd Act Twists (Thanks, Ape Lad!)

The Freakonomics guys have apparently either really dropped the ball when it comes to understanding science, or they're willfully ignoring it. Either way, I'm pretty disappointed.

The sequel's contrarian take on climate change--and the bad science it's steeped in--have been analyzed in exquisite detail by everybody from Paul Krugman, Berkeley economist J. Bradford DeLong, to the Union of Concerned Scientists, to various climate scientists spread hither and non about the Web.

That's a lot of links, but they're there so you can go back and read page-by-page breakdowns of the mistakes and inaccuracies, by experts, if you want. I think that's important, because I know at least some of you are going to assume that any criticism of this book and its contents is all about some violation of pseudo-religious orthodoxy. I want you to be able to go see that this is about science. If you just want a quick summary, though, read on...

Lev Grossman's novel The Magicians may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I've read this century. Quentin Coldwater is a nerdy, depressed, high-achieving Brooklyn kid who finds himself hijacked from his Princeton interview and whisked away to Brakebills Academy, a school of magic upstate on the Hudson. He passes the entrance exam and begins his education as a wizard.

This is a familiar-sounding setup, but Grossman's extremely clever hack on the fantasy novel is in his complete lack of sentimentality about magic. Quentin has lived his whole life waiting to be taken to an imaginary magic kingdom ("Fillory," a thinly veiled version of Narnia) but he quickly discovers that real magic -- like stage magic -- is about an endless grind of numbing practice in the hopes of impressing someone -- anyone. All of Brakebills, from the faculty to the student body, is broken in some important way, and Quentin is no exception. In a place of scintillating minds and bottomless commitment to craft, Quentin's life is not substantially better than it is in Brooklyn. Brakebills isn't Hogwarts (at one point, the narrator notes that magic wands aren't used at Brakebills, being regarded as a kind of embarrassing prosthesis -- like a sex toy for magic).

Quentin's cycle -- mundane, magic student, magician in the world, questing adventurer -- serves as a scalpel that slices open the soft, sentimental belly of the fantasy canon, from Tolkien to Lewis to Baum, but still (and this is the fantastic part), it manages to be full of wonder. Wonder without sentimentality. Wonder without awe.

Grossman is a hell of a pacer, and the book rips along, whole seasons tossed out in a single sentence, all the boring mortar ground off the bricks, so that the book comes across as a sheer, seamless face that you can't stop yourself from tumbling down once you launch yourself off the first page. This isn't just an exercise in exploring what we love about fantasy and the lies we tell ourselves about it -- it's a shit-kicking, gripping, tightly plotted novel that makes you want to take the afternoon off work to finish it.

It must run in the family; Lev is the identical twin brother of Austin "Soon I Will Be Invincible" Grossman, another one-of-a-kind novelist.

I read the paper edition of The Magicians, but I'm delighted to see that there's an unabridged audio edition on DRM-free CDs. This is the kind of fairy story I could seriously dig having read aloud to me the second time around (and I don't think I'll be able to read this one just once).

The Magicians: A Novel

Publisher's Weekly just announced (on the cover, no less!) my forthcoming DIY short-story collection, With a Little Help, a print-on-demand book that explores pretty much every "freemium" model for turning a free, well-known digital object into a bunch of highly sought and profitable physical objects. There's four different covers on the print book, a hand-bound limited hardcover whose end-papers come from the paper ephemera of various writer-friends; a free audiobook read aloud by voice actor/writers and a for-pay CD-on-demand of the same thing; a donation campaign, and even a one-of-a-kind super-premium chance to commission a new story for the book for $10,000. All the financials for the book will be disclosed online and bound into the books on a monthly basis.

Here's the pitch: the book is called With a Little Help. It's a short story collection, and like my last two collections, it's a book of reprints from various magazines and other places (with one exception, more about which later). Like my other collections, it will be available for free on the day it is released. And like my last collection, Overclocked, it won't have a traditional publisher.

Let me explain that last part: Overclocked was published in January 2007, just weeks after Advanced Marketing Services, the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed Thunder's Mouth, the publisher for Overclocked--went bankrupt. You remember Advanced Marketing Services. What a mess. First, a senior executive was arrested and convicted of fraud for falsifying the company's earnings, then the company tanked, and the resulting whirlpool threatened to suck half of New York publishing down with it. As a result, Thunder's Mouth went though a series of mergers and acquisitions. My editor and then his replacement both left or were let go (I never found out which). By spring, no one was communicating with me.

Later that year, I did a kind of self-financed minitour, piggybacking on speaking gigs, and every time I went into a bookstore it seemed like I was seeing another edition of the book with a different publisher's name on the spine. The book's currently listed in Perseus's catalogue, for which I am glad. The royalty checks keep coming, and the book continues to do well, but I could no longer be said to have any particular relationship with this publisher. As far as I can tell, it is listing the book in its catalogue and filling orders, but not much else.

This makes Overclocked into a fine control for my little experiment. It is a good book. It sold well and was critically acclaimed. But it is solidly a midlist title, a short story collection published by a house turned upside down by bankruptcy. It will be the baseline against which I compare the earnings from With a Little Help. And those earnings will be diverse--like the musicians who've successfully self-produced albums in a variety of packages at a variety of price points (Radiohead, Trent Reznor, David Byrne and Brian Eno, Jonathan Coulton), I have set out to produce a book that can be had in a range of packages and at a range of price points from $0.00 to $10,000.

Doctorow's Project: With a Little Help

Book-design legend John Coulthart has a superb new psychedelic Alice in Wonderland calendar: "Everyone is familiar with Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit but, as I've noted before, themes from, and allusions to, the Alice books run through British psychedelia to an even greater degree. The Beatles put Lewis Carroll in their pantheon of influences on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, and Wonderland's atmosphere of Victorian surrealism chimed perfectly with a resurgence of interest in Victorian art and design. So at the end of September, mulling over ideas, I picked up one of my Lewis Carroll volumes and looked at the chapter list: 12 chapters...12 months...I could do a psychedelic Alice in Wonderland!"

Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar (Thanks, Jeff!)

Chris sez, "Mercedes Lackey's agent, who also represents a 'persuasive little gnome' named Cory Doctorow, has been talked around to the Creative Commons point of view. Hence, Misty has announced she is going to permit fanfic as long as it is released under a Creative Commons license (presumably a noncommercial one, though she does not explicitly spell this out on the site)."

Misty Lackey's work is well-loved by fanfic writers; this allows them to come in from the cold and produce their work (which celebrates her work) without fear of legal reprisals. Good move all around (and my agent, Russ Galen, is a smart cookie!).

What this means is: NO, you cannot make money on it. NO, you cannot self-publish a fanfiction novel of Valdemar (or any of my other stuff) and try and sell it on Amazon. And NO, I still am not going to read it, because I am already so far behind on my research reading I barely have time to read that.

But YES, you may write and post away, folks, so long as you license it as derivative and under Creative Commons. If it is anything other than PG-13, please take all the proper precautions to stick it somewhere that innocent souls won't be corrupted. Do not scare the children or the horses. Have fun!

News: Concerning Fanfiction: (Thanks, Chris!)

IO9's excellent "Where To Start With Young Adult Science Fiction" booklist won me over as soon as I saw Pinkwater's Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars on it, and then I saw that they'd been kind enough to include my novel Little Brother, and I was over the moon!

Where To Start With Young Adult Science Fiction

Adrienne from the Henrico County, Virginia Public Library sez, "Every year we participate in National Banned Book Week, a week that celebrates the written word and the free exchange of ideas, as outlined in the First Amendment to our Constitution. We invite you to volunteer as a reader of a banned or challenged book. This is our way of celebrating that our community has the right to read freely. The Banned Book Reading Room will be open for three weeks (September 26--October 17, 2009), longer than the National Banned Book Week, because last year's Room was so popular! Ever since the written word has existed there have been those who would prevent others from reading material considered "objectionable" -- everything from the Harry Potter series to the American Heritage Dictionary. Join us as a volunteer reader! Call 364-1400 x5 for more information."

The Banned Book Reading Room at Twin Hickory Library! (Thanks, Adrienne!)

Monte Schulz's This Side of Jordan is the first volume of a jazz-age trilogy that was twelve years in the writing, produced in tribute to Schulz's father, the cartoonist Charles M Schulz. It is beautifully written and thoroughly researched, a veritable time-machine that whirled me through time to the dirty back roads of the American midwest in the year before the Depression.

This Side of Jordan is the story of Alvin Pendergast, a selfish, ignorant, bitter consumptive farm-boy who lights out across America with Chester Burke, a vicious gangster and serial killer. On their first job, they pick up Rascal, a mad dwarf who's been imprisoned by his aunt who hopes to steal his inheritance. The three set out on a series of violent, picaresque adventures as Chester drags them from one act of bloody, senseless criminality to the next.

Did I mention how good the writing is? The writing is excellent. The characters -- the unlikable, passive Alvin; the unlikable, psychotic Chester; the unlikable, compulsive liar Rascal -- are extremely well drawn. The setting is so vivid I felt like I could fall into the book and lose myself there, landing on some dusty road in a tourist camp where the hicks waited to be fleeced or killed by Chester.

In case you missed it, though, I should reiterate that I didn't like any of these characters. The most active character was a sociopath. The secondmost active character was a hopeless, compulsive liar. The point of view character never does a thing off his own bat, and is, instead, led through the action by the people around him.

But I kept reading. I couldn't stop. This book is a masterpiece of setting and storytelling, even if most of the dramatic tension came from waiting for someone who wasn't an utter fool or villain to do something, anything, to change the situation.

This Side of Jordan

Tor has updated the tile game that accompanies the ongoing serial of my forthcoming novel Makers, which comes out at the end of the month (and boy am I excited! Publishers Weekly called it "Brilliant" and a "Tour de force" and Library Journal called it "Enthusiastically recommended").

Each installment in the serial has been accompanied by a CC-licensed image from Idiots' Books, and the images tile, lining up with one another on all four sides. Tor is tossing these images into a Flash-toy that allows you to arrange and rotate these to your heart's content.

The serial is up to 44 parts now, and the first 36 illos have been combined into a new, expanded, 6X6 version of the tile game (we'll do the 7x7 soon, then the 8x8 and finish up with a 9x9 incorporating all 81!).

Makers Tile Game 6x6

Index of Makers installments

The mission of the Read-Along Adventures site is to assemble the audio and scanned pages from every Read-Along book ever created -- these were the short picture books that came with a 45RPM record that narrated them, with cues to turn the page as necessary. Where possible, the curator has recreated the Read-Alongs as Flash apps. There's even audio for the Haunted Mansion record. How lovely!

Read-Along Adventures (Thanks, TimK!)

Rina from the excellent, free SF in SF reading series sez,

Eric Simons is the author of the wonderfully quirky "Darwin Slept Here" based on his own journey to see the people, places, and legends that interested Darwin, and what they're like now.

Saturday, Oct. 17/Doors and Cash Bar open 6:00pm/Readings start 7:00pm

Readings will be followed by Q & A moderated by author Terry Bisson.

The Variety Preview Room Theatre
The Hobart Bldg., 1st Floor/582 Market St. @ 2nd & Montgomery San Francisco, CA

Don't drive! Take BART or Muni to Montgomery St. Station; we're right outside the exit.

Bar proceeds go to Variety Children's Charity of Northern California; learn more at www.varietync.org

Kim Stanley Robinson & Eric Simons (Thanks, Rina!)

In Art Forum, our pal Andrew Hultkrans wrote about a Process Church event held in New York. Several former members of the strange and defunct religion were in attendance, as were our friends, Feral House book publishers Adam Parfrey and Jodi Wille, who have a book about the history of the Process Church, called Love, Sex, Fear, Death: The Inside Story of The Process Church of the Final Judgment.

Andrew's article includes a nice brief history of the creepy organization:

Formed in 1963 in London by two disenchanted Scientologists--Mary Ann MacLean, a former call girl from Glasgow, and Robert DeGrimston, a well-educated Englishman of more noble birth--the group made unauthorized use of Hubbard's "E-meter" to identify and exorcise compulsions and complexes. By 1966, the tightly knit group began to believe they were in touch with "Higher Beings" and decamped to an abandoned salt mine in Xtul, Mexico, where the last-minute diversion of a powerful hurricane confirmed to the couple's followers that they were indeed connected to divine forces.

Returning to England, the Processeans (named after their "processing" of one another during their encounter-group days) quickly attracted the attention of the hipoisie of Swinging London, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull most famously. (It's likely that the Rolling Stones' Their Satanic Majesties Request and "Sympathy for the Devil" were inspired by Jagger's flirtation with the Process.) As with any successful cult or totalitarian state, aesthetics were key to their appeal. The Process Church regularly published a truly bizarre, groundbreaking magazine--full of lurid, hand-cut four-color collage graphics and baffling yet seductive apocalypse-theology writings by DeGrimston--with blunt issue titles like "Sex," "Fear," "Love," and "Death."

A Processean "Sabbath Assembly Ritual and Salon"

Access Copyright, the Canadian organisation that collects library royalties for writers, filed a jaw-droppingly dumb set of comments in the Canadian Copyright consultation. Access Copyright came out as opposing the right to record TV shows at home, and the right to "format shift" your media (e.g., load a CD on your MP3 player, or put an old ebook on a new reader or phone). They also say that almost all commercial use, no matter how trivial, should require a license and not fall under fair dealing. They come out against the interlibrary loan system, because it is digital.

Man, if these yahoos set out to destroy the public's faith in copyright, they could not do a better job than they're doing now. Yeesh.

The so-called format and time shifting exceptions, also known as personal use exceptions, were apparently included in Bill C-61 to address a practice that has become common among the public. Access Copyright submits that good public policy should not be dictated by legalizing common public practices.

It is worth mentioning here that Article 5(2)(b) of the EU Directive 2001/29/EC allows member states to introduce exceptions and limitations to the reproduction right for private use (which includes format and time shifting) "on the condition that rightsholders receive fair compensation". The requirement for fair compensation is to ensure that the private use exception complies with the three-step test.

Access Copyright believes that copyright owners should be given the opportunity to address these "common practices" through market-based solutions. We caution against the assumption that uses made by individuals for their personal use are inconsequential on the existing or potential market for a work. Format shifting for example is relatively new to printed works. Copyright owners should be given time to develop and test new services and business models for the delivery of content in the digital environment. The introduction of a format shifting exception for books could undermine the development of emerging business models. At the very least, the government should ensure that any restriction of the copyright owner's reproduction right be accompanied by fair compensation.

Access Copyright: Reduce Fair Dealing, No Taping TV Shows or Format Shifting

J.C. Hutchins' sci-fi thriller novel 7th Son: Descent will be released in North American bookstores on Oct. 27.

When dozens of publishing houses rejected 7th Son in 2005, J.C. reckoned the book would never be published. But convinced the story he'd told was worth sharing, he took to the "podwaves" in 2006 and released 7th Son: Descent as a free serialized podcast novel.

The story -- a modern-day tale about human cloning, memory recording, government conspiracies and a villain bent on global chaos -- captured the imagination of tens of thousands of listeners. Thanks to the quality of the story and the evangelism of these fans, an editor at St. Martin's Press took notice of 7th Son: Descent. The company offered to publish it. Hutchins is one of a few "podnovelists" who have landed such a deal with a major publisher.

To celebrate the Oct. 27 release of the book, J.C. is releasing the "print edition" of 7th Son: Descent in several serialized formats: PDF, blog text, and audio. We think J.C.'s personal story -- and the 7th Son novel -- is worthy of support, and are helping distribute the text version of the novel at Boing Boing for the next ten weeks.

What's the book about? Here's the jacket copy: As America reels from the bizarre presidential assassination committed by a child, seven men are abducted from their normal lives and delivered to a secret government facility. Each man has his own career, his own specialty. All are identical in appearance. The seven strangers were grown -- unwitting human clones -- as part of a project called 7th Son.

Intrigued? Check out the first serialized installment of 7th Son at the link below. You can support the book by purchasing a copy at Amazon, Barnes & Noble or Borders, or printing this PDF order form and presenting it at your favorite bookstore. You can learn more about the book at J.C.'s site.

Read "7TH SON" Part 1