By Cory Doctorow at 9:14 am Sunday, May 20
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Congratulations to the winners of the 2011 Nebula Awards, especially to Jo Walton, who won for her magnificent novel, Among Others (see my review, here). Also congrats to Delia Sherman for her best YA book prize for The Freedom Maze (my review).
* Novel Winner: Among Others, Jo Walton (Tor)
* Novella Winner: ”The Man Who Bridged the Mist,” Kij Johnson (Asimov’s Science Fiction, October/November 2011)
* Novelette Winner: ”What We Found,” Geoff Ryman (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September/October 2011)
* Short Story Winner: ”The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, March/April 2011)
* Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation Winner: Doctor Who: “The Doctor’s Wife,” Neil Gaiman (writer), Richard Clark (director) (BBC Wales)
* Andre Norton Award for Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy Book Winner: The Freedom Maze, Delia Sherman (Big Mouth House)
* 2011 DAMON KNIGHT GRAND MASTER AWARD: Connie Willis
* SOLSTICE AWARD: Octavia Butler (posthumous) and John Clute
* SERVICE TO SFWA AWARD: Bud Webster
2011 Nebula Awards Announced
(via IO9)
By Cory Doctorow at 1:00 pm Monday, May 14
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My next YA novel is Pirate Cinema, which hits stands on Oct 2. The book has been complete for a long time, and now is the part in its lifecycle where it is in ballistic flight, having been launched from my device with all the skill and concentration that I can muster, with nothing else for me to do until it arrives at its destination. It's a bit of a nailbiting interlude in the lifecycle of a writer, and that's why it was such a treat to read Daniel Kraus's starred review of it in the next Booklist. I don't think I'm supposed to quote the whole thing, so here are some highlights:
...Doctorow’s series starter is his most cogent, energizing call-to-arms to date, an old-fashioned (but forward-thinking) counter-culture rabble rouser that will have dissidents of all ages dying to stick it to the Man...
It’s generally accepted that fussing with computers is a narrative buzzkill, yet Doctorow’s unrivaled verisimilitude makes every click as exciting as a band of underdog warriors storming a castle. It’s not exactly Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book (1971), but with its delirious insights into everything from street art to urban exploring to dumpster diving to experimental cinema, it feels damn close.
Color me delighted! I'll be on tour with Pirate Cinema in October, and Charlie Stross and I will also be touring our novel-for-adults, Rapture of the Nerds, in early September.
By Xeni Jardin at 5:39 pm Tuesday, May 8
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"Childhood is cannibals and psychotics vomiting in your mouth!" Art Spiegelman drew his experience of hanging out with Maurice Sendak in 1993 for the New Yorker, and the magazine has "unlocked" the archival link in honor of Sendak's passing today.
(via Neil Gaiman)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:59 am Tuesday, May 8
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Beloved children's author Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, is dead at 83. Here's some of what The Guardian's Michelle Pauli has to say about him.
The wild things of Max's imagination were based on Sendak's own relatives. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Polish Jewish immigrant parents and was aware, in his early teens, of the death of much of his extended family in the Holocaust. The terrors of his childhood specifically, and childhood more generally, flow through his work. "I refuse to lie to children," he said in an interview with the Guardian last year. "I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."
Sendak also said that the term "children's illustrator" annoyed him, since it seems to belittle his talent. "I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person," he said.
"I refuse to lie to children," is probably the best kids'-author manifesto statement ever.
Maurice Sendak, father of the Wild Things, dies at 83
(Image: Wild Things, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from maxbraun's photostream)
By Cory Doctorow at 8:00 am Friday, May 4
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Ellen Kushner, co-editor of the multiple-award-nominated new Borderlands anthology Welcome to Bordertown, writes, "Have you dreamed of a Danceland T-shirt? Some Dancing Ferret beer mugs? A Khandroma (Tibetan girl skater gang) charm? Thanks to the many Bordertown authors who gave their kind permission to allow us to create logos for B-town places they invented! Designer Tara O'Shea has come up with some fabulous designs now up on CafePress for sale to the general public. Click on each design & scroll down to see not only T-shirts in many styles, but coffeemugs, sippy cups, postcards, tote bags, puzzles & more! With luck, high school students all over the country will be baffling their classmates with geekish glee."
traders' heaven
(Thanks, Ellen!)
Kate Milford, author of the wonderful YA novel
Boneshaker, sez, "
This is the link to my Kickstarter campaign, in which I'm raising funds to self-publish a novella companion to my second traditionally-published YA fantasy, The Broken Lands. This is the first installment in what I hope will be an ongoing project with two goals: to combine traditional and self-publishing by releasing companion content alongside my hardcover books; and to use indie bookstore-friendly resources for the self-pub end of things. The first novella, The Kairos Mechanism, also acts as a bridge between the stories told in The Broken Lands and my first book, The Boneshaker. It will be released in three editions: paperback (via McNally Jackson's self-pub services and Espresso Book Machine); digital (via Google Play); and a Super-Special Digital edition, free or pay-what-you-like, which will be illustrated by young reader artists. The funds raised will finance the costs of publication as well as paying the young artists."
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 5:21 pm Wednesday, Apr 11
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The paperback for Welcome to Bordertown is out, this being the most excellent, long-awaited volume of short stories set in the Bordertown shared world, where Faerie has returned to Earth, and the Bordertown is the place where magic and technology meet and mix. To celebrate, the editors are holding a contest:
So you've already found your way to Bordertown. It wasn't easy, but you did it. You've found a place to live, and maybe a friend or two. Maybe you're in a band, or selling your sketches on the street, or just looking for work.... And now you'd like your friend (from the World or from the Realm, depending on your own origins) to come and join you.
Write them a letter, or send them a postcard (a photo or a drawing + a short note) telling them why they should come.
Then post it on your blog, Tumblr, Facebook notes, DeviantArt account... anywhere your friends* can read it. And then, to enter it in the contest (and make sure we know it's there!), put the URL for your post in the Comments on this page. The contest runs from now through Tuesday, April 17th at 11:59 p.m. EST (U.S.A. Eastern Time).
My story Shannon's Law appears in the collection.
WELCOME TO BORDERTOWN paperback
By Cory Doctorow at 8:56 am Saturday, Apr 7
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Kyle sez, "My friend Jordan Stratford has launched his first Kickstarter (currently funded, yay!) but the idea is simply too lovely not to share. From Kickstarter:"
This is a pro-math, pro-science, pro-history and pro-literature adventure novel for and about girls, who use their education to solve problems. This is the made up story about two very real people -- Ada, the world's first computer programmer, and Mary, the world's first science fiction author. If Jane Austen wrote about zeppelins and brass goggles, this would be the book. Why "Wollstonecraft"? Mary names the detective agency after her mother, the famous feminist writer. If this is the kind of book you'd like to see, please support this project.
Wollstonecraft (Thanks, Kyle!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:00 am Friday, Mar 9
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I've written several times here about Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series, a collection of outstanding dystopian YA science fiction novels about a world where everyone is forced to undergo cosmetic surgery at the age of 16. Westerfeld concluded the series in 2007, but now he is revisiting the world in manga form, co-creating a series of graphic novels with Devin Grayson and Steven Cummings.
The first of these volumes, Uglies: Shay's Story came out this week, and it's a fantastic, fast-paced addition to the Uglies canon. As the title implies, Shay's Story retells some of the key events in the series from the point-of-view of one of the minor characters from the novel, Shay, giving her her due (she was always one of my favorites). In so doing, Westerfeld and co illuminate more of the Uglies world -- and bring to it a set of visuals that flesh out and enhance the original novels.
You can certainly enjoy Shay's Story without reading the Uglies novels first, though each series (Shay's Story is the first of several volumes) contains a few spoilers for the other.
Uglies: Shay's Story
Read the rest
The StarShipSofa podcast has
the second installment of Jeff Lane's reading of my YA novella
The Martian Chronicles (
here's part one). Lane does a
great job with the reading.
MP3 link.
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 6:06 am Tuesday, Dec 6
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Ian McDonald has spent the past two decades blowing the lid off of science fiction with his poetic, dense, lavish novels that span the universe from Mars to Africa, from the future to the past, from Brazil to India to Turkey. Now McDonald has begun a second career as a young adult novelist with his Everness series, the first volume of which is Planesrunner, which goes on sale today.
Planesrunner is the story of Everett Singh, a moderately unhappy schoolboy in London whose divorced, quantum physicist dad is kidnapped before his eyes one night. Everett embarks on an epic quest to find out what happened to his dad, a quest that is complicated by his mother's hostility to her ex-husband, a police cover-up, sinister visits from the head of the Imperial College physics department, and mysterious, threatening strangers who tail him through the streets of London.
But Everett is convinced that he saw what he saw, and that his father is in peril -- not least because his Dad's server has emailed him a firmware update for his tablet that turns it into an n-dimensional directory of the multiverse, an insurance file on a dead man's switch that was sent to Everett when his dad was offline for a critical amount of time. Everett can't outwit the forces of evil forever -- but he can choose the way he is captured, and he does, and that's how he manages to escape through an interdimensional portal and penetrate a parallel electricpunk universe where there is no oil, but where coal-fired manufactories turn out the carbon nanofiber necessary to support a global industry of freewheeling electrified airships.
On the run in another London, Everett gets embroiled in the politics of international airship traffic, living in the autonomous zone around Hackney where the airships dock, spying on the interdimensional ministry where he believes his father is being held, joining a ragtag airship crew and making their fights his own -- even as he tries to solve the seemingly impossible problem of liberating his father.
Planesrunner is smashing adventure fiction that spans the multiverse without ever losing its cool or its sense of style. Ian McDonald is one of the greats of science fiction and his young adult debut is everything you could hope for: romantic, action-packed, wildly imaginative and full of heart.
Planesrunner
By Cory Doctorow at 6:09 am Friday, Oct 28
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Beloved kids' book The Phantom Tollbooth turns 50 this year (commemorated by a new edition introduced by Michael Chabon) and an oversubscribed Kickstarter campaign has been funded to produce a documentary about the extraordinary book and the impact it's had over its half-century.
With conversations - and banter - from Norton and Jules, this documentary explores the educational, political and linguistic back-story and lasting impact of “one of the great works of fantasy in American Literature” (Leonard S Marcus, author of The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth).
We follow Norton and Jules as they return to the house in Brooklyn Heights where Norton began writing a little story "to get his mind off of what he had to do." Working as an architect, Norton was awarded a grant for a book on Urban Perception, which he promptly didn't write. Instead, he created Milo. When he showed his notes to his neighbor, a young political cartoonist bent on overthrowing the government, Jules began sketching – and The Phantom Tollbooth was born.
Through the lens of Milo and his adventures, we get to know Norton Juster – an incorrigible punster with a "delight in glorious lunatic linguistic acrobatics" (Maurice Sendak, in his appreciation to the 35th Anniversary of The Phantom Tollbooth). Bored as a kid, wondering why he had to learn so many useless facts, Norton is Milo. And we get taken into Norton’s personal Phantom Tollbooth: where his imagination gets him in trouble for demoralizing the Navy battalion with his drawings of elves; where his friendship with Jane Jacobs and her critique of American cities shows up in Digitopolis and Dictionopolis; where “beyond expectations” takes on a personal meaning for Norton’s daughter and granddaughter as they confront their learning disabilities.
The Phantom Tollbooth Turns 50 - A Documentary
(via IO9)
By Cory Doctorow at 9:49 am Tuesday, Oct 25
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Today marks the publication of The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, an anthology of short stories inspired by The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a much-loved book of illustrations and titles for short stories that never existed. For decades, writers young and old have produced their own stories to accompany the illustrations.
Houghton Mifflin commissioned a variety of writers to write "official" young adult stories to go with these evocative images. The roster of contributors includes Sherman Alexie, M.T. Anderson, Kate DiCamillo, Jules Feiffer, Stephen King, Tabitha King, Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Walter Dean Myers, Linda Sue Park, Louis Sachar, Jon Scieszka, Lemony Snicket, and Chris Van Allsburg -- and me! (I wrote a story about interdimensional travel to go with "Another Time, Another Place").
Who is Harris Burdick?
The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Amazon)
Two bits of glad tidings: first,
Charlie Stross announces that we've turned in the manuscript for our collaborative, post-Singularity comic novel
Rapture of the Nerds; second, my agent Russ Galen has sold
Homeland, the sequel to my 2008 novel
Little Brother, to Tor, in "a significant deal."
— Cory
By Cory Doctorow at 5:46 am Tuesday, Sep 20
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Scott Westerfeld's
Goliath ships today, concluding his fabulous steampunk YA trilogy that began with
Leviathan and continued in
Behemoth. This alternate history of WWI is set in a world divided into two technological camps. On the Darwinist side, scientists manipulate the "life threads" of animals to create useful synthetic animals ranging from little "message lizards" that can parrot brief phrases up to enormous organic zeppelins that are part whale, part hydrogen-breather. Clankers -- the Austro-Germanic camp, mostly -- create huge, steam-driven mecha and work-horses that do useful and deadly work. When Archduke Ferdinand is assassinated, his son, Aleks, is smuggled away to neutral Switzerland before his uncle can have him killed to get him out of the chain of succession. There, he ends up joining forces with the
Leviathan, a British airship whose crew includes the intrepid Dylan, a plucky girl who has dressed as a boy in order to secure a spot in the ship's crew. Once Aleks and Dylan have joined forces, Westerfeld begins to retell the history of WWI with ingenious variations drawing on his notional Darwinist/Clanker split, a tale of air-battles, naval warfare, diplomacy, skullduggery and sneakery.
Goliath picks up where Behemoth let off, after a spot of bother and a revolution in Constantinople, and takes the Leviathan to Tunguska, Siberia, where Nikola Tesla is secretly investigating the progress of his death ray, which may end the war -- or life as we know it. Goliath hurdles on from there in the classic Westerfeld style, a cracking adventure story that revolves around science and engineering in equal measures with love, jealousy and honor. Soon, Aleks and Dylan are embroiled in the machinations of William Randolph Hearst and his feud with Joseph Pulitzer, Pancho Villa and his cinematographic civil war, and an impossible romance.
Westerfeld's best trick is to mix adventure and fact, and he is as adept at working history into his stories as he is biology (see his brilliant Peeps for a more biological tale), and the Leviathan trilogy is full of great, sneaky discourses on engineering, history, science, and war.
Even better, the Leviathan books are ably illustrated in vintage style by Keith Thompson, recalling the illustrated adventures of the Victorian and Edwardian eras -- the chimerical, Dr Moreauvian creations of Westerfeld's imagination are particularly suited to this kind of drawing, as, of course, are the cross-hatched mechaniks of the Clankers.
Goliath
Read the rest
