Every three years, the US Copyright Office asks America about the problems with Section 1201 of the DMCA, which bans breaking DRM even for legal reasons, and America gets to answer with requests for exemptions to this rule.
Mur Lafferty, an amazing author and podcaster, had her mainstream publishing debt in 2013 with the wonderful Shambling Guide to New York City, about a travel writer who gets tapped to write a guidebook for spooks, haints, vampires and werewolves.
[Ed: Mur Lafferty's 2013 debut novel Shambling Guide to New York City was an outstanding work of urban fantasy and contributed to Mur's winning a much-deserved John W Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2013 Hugo Awards. Now, Mur's back with a sequel, Ghost Train to New Orleans, and she and her publishers, Orbit, were kind enough to give us an exclusive excerpt from the novel, along with Mur's introduction, below. — Read the rest
Podcast sf doyenne Mur Lafferty has recently launched her latest novel/podcast serial: "Marco and the Red Granny." It's part of a larger cycle of stories about Mollywood that I had the real pleasure of workshopping with Mur at the Viable Paradise workshop some years ago. — Read the rest
Podcasting pioneer Mur Lafferty's debut novel, Playing for Keeps, has just shipped. Mur's delightful superhero comedy tells the story of a plucky band of second-rate heroes who become outlaws when they out the Big Guys for their nefarious power-grabbing deeds. It's clear that Mur had a lot of fun writing this — the second-rate powers (shooting streams of excrement, being able to tell a person's secrets by sniffing them) are straight out of The Tick. — Read the rest
PG sez, "Mur Lafferty has just released Wasteland, Book Four of her Heaven podcast novel series. As always, Mur is doing something special with her podcast novel (Mur's last, Playing for Keeps, was a multimedia event which included audio chapters, the text of each chapter released in .pdf — Read the rest
Cmdln sez, "Podcaster and author Mur Lafferty launches her first full length novel today. 'It tells the story of Keepsie Branson, a bar owner in the shining metropolis of Seventh City: birthplace of super powers. Keepsie and her friends live among egotistical heroes and manipulative villains, and manage to fall directly in the middle as people with powers, but who just aren't strong enough to make a difference. — Read the rest
Last night, I finished listening to Mur Lafferty's podiobook "Heaven," an existential comedy about "adventure in the afterlife." Heaven is the story of Kate and Daniel, two friends who die in a car crash and find themselves in Christian heaven, but who go adventuring to the other heavens of different faiths and even species (dog heaven totally rocks, it seems). — Read the rest
Last week, the Escape Pod podcast published part one of a reading of my YA novella "Martian Chronicles," which I wrote for Jonathan Strahan's Life on Mars anthology: it's a story about libertarian spacesteaders who move to Mars to escape "whiners" and other undesirables, only to discover that the colonists that preceded them expect them to clean the toilets when they arrive.
Last night's Hugo Awards ceremony featured a significant first: Nora Jemisin became the first novelist in science fiction history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugos, once for each volume in her Broken Earth trilogy (the concluding volume, The Stone Sky, won last night's prize); in addition to the unprecedented honor, Jemisin had another first, with her acceptance speech, which may just be the best such speech in the field's history.
Every three years, the US Copyright Office undertakes an odd ritual: they allow members of the public to come before their officials and ask for the right to use their own property in ways that have nothing to do with copyright law. — Read the rest
Every three years, the US Copyright Office lets the public beg for limited exemptions to Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which bans bypassing DRM, even in your own property, even for strictly legal reasons.
The 2017 Hugo nominees were announced yesterday; attendees at this year's World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California will choose from among them to pick this year's Hugo Award winners.
On Sunday, I'll be appearing at Chicago's Volumes Books with Max "Cards Against Humanity" Temkin, as part of the Walkaway tour (which includes stops tonight in Chapel Hill at Flyleaf Books with Mur Lafferty; tomorrow in Cincinnati at Joseph Beth; and more dates in Winnipeg, Denver, Austin, Houston, Scottsdale/Phoenix, San Diego, Portland, Seattle, Bellingham, Vancouver and Burbank, before I head to the UK).
My latest Locus Magazine column is Weaponized Narrative, about the pulp fiction convention of mashing up "man against nature" stories with "man against man" stories to tell "man against nature stories" (first the tornado smashes your house, then your neighbors come over to eat you).
I'm in New York City today for the Walkaway tour and the event — an onstage conversation with Edward Snowden — is sold out (you can watch the livestream free, starting 7PM eastern), but there's still space at my upcoming events.
The Freemasons. Fight Club. The Bilderberg Group. The Illuminati. The Watcher's Council. The Knights Templar. The Order of the Phoenix.
Bookburners, out now from Saga Press, is about a team of experts trying to keep magic from breaking out all over the world. — Read the rest
Readers of Boing Boing have joined me in chronicling the variegated science fiction career of Mur Lafferty: novelist, podcast pioneer, editor -- today, she publishes her latest novel, a hard sf murder mystery called Six Wakes, in which the crew of a generation ship awake in a blood-drenched shipboard cloning bay, in fresh bodies to replace their murdered selves floating in the alarming null-gee, memories restored to the backup they made just before launch, a quarter-century before.
The Campbell Award for best new writer is voted on and presented with the Hugo Awards — to be eligible, you must have made your first professional sale in the previous two years.
Mur Lafferty writes, "Mothership Zeta is the first ezine project to come out of Escape Artists (publisher of podcast magazines Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Podcastle). We are an ebook-only zine that focuses on new fiction with a fun theme, along with nonfiction from experts in science fiction, science, and more!" — Read the rest
