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Last weekend, I was one of the guests of honor at 3PiCon in Springfield, MA, along with Randall “XKCD” Munroe, who once infamously depicted me as blogging from a hot-air balloon in cape and goggles. This has become a motif for me, so that wherever I go, people give me capes and/or goggles. I brought along a set and wore them to our final panel together on Sunday, and Dan Noe, the Pi-Con photographer, got some nice shots of the event.
3Pi-Con
(Thanks, Dan!)
The fan-translations of my short-short story Printcrime keep on rolling in: today there’s one in Hiligaynon (an Austronesian language spoken in Western Visayas in the Philippines) and another in Romanian, contributed, respectively, by Lorna Belviz-Pajo and Alex Brie. It’s just so wicked-cool to see your work take on a life of its own — I didn’t even know that Hiligaynon existed until a few minutes ago!
Krimen nga pang-imprenta (Hiligaynon), Crima Printării (Romanian)
In the run-up to last week’s benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, Brian Heater of the Daily Crosshatch blog conducted a two part interview with me; he’s just posted part two.
Do you have this extended universe of fan fiction in mind when you work on these books?
No, not at all. It’s actually kind of interesting, I think. The way I approach the creative element of what I do and the critical element are almost completely separate. I sit down and write almost as a therapeutic exercise. When I’m finished writing for the day, I often don’t remember what I’ve written. I go back and review it, and I’m often surprised by it. I’ve written stories and novels and things that have taken me years and years to write and when I got to the ending, I didn’t like it and rethought it entirely and then rewrote the ending and then turned back to the first page, only to realize that I’d foreshadowed that ending, four years before, but hadn’t known until that day.
I have almost no premeditation on cultural-political things when I write. Even on a political book like Little Brother, it was actually an emotional reaction to a bunch of things that I was feeling in regard to the “war on terror.” I didn’t sit down and say, “what’s the best way to alarm children about surveillance?” I sat down and thought, “how can I artistically approach this subject in a way that I find the most aesthetically pleasing?”
But you are hoping that, once it’s out there, readers will adopt the work in creative ways.
Yeah, well, in the same way that there’s a compositional and editorial process, when you do anything creative, when I finish with the story, look at it, edit it, and prepare it for publication, and show it to my agent, and so on, I certainly do think of that at that stage. But the creative process, for me, is all about getting into a nice space and doing something totally creative that has almost no agenda aside from a creative one.
Part 1, Part 2
Friday’s post announcing that a fan named Eduardo Mercer had translated my story Printcrime into Brazilian Portuguese sparked two more translations; Luis Filipe Silva translated the story into European Portuguese and Paul Pajo translated it into Filipino. I’m particularly excited about the Filipino translation; I think it might be the first story of mine to be translated into Filipino!
Filipino fan-translation
European Portuguese fan-translation
See also: Printcrime in Portuguese
Eduardo Mercer’s just produced a Brazilian Portuguese fan-translation of my story Printcrime — making five translations in total (as well as two audio adaptations, a mini-comic and some wicked 3D fan-art). For a 700 word story, it’s sure attracted a lot of attention and fan activity!
Os tiras destruiram a impressora do meu pai quando eu tinha oito anos. Eu me lembro do cheiro quente de rolopack no microondas, do olhar de concentração furiosa do papi enquanto ele a enchia de geleca fresca e da sensação de recém tirado do forno dos objetos que saíam dela.
Os tiras entraram brandindo os cacetetes, um deles lendo o mandato através de um megafone. Um dos clientes do papi tinha vendido ele. A polícia pagou em drogas de alto nível - anabolizantes, suplementos de memória, aceleradores metabólicos. O tipo de coisa que custa uma fortuna na farmácia; o tipo de coisa que você pode imprimir em casa, se não se importar com o risco da sua cozinha se encher de corpos grandes e musculosos com cacetetes balançando no ar acertando tudo e todos em seu caminho.
Printcrime - Copie esta história
Greg Young sez, “Had some time on my hands recently which I’ve filled by transcribing the Cambridge business lecture you gave recently. (Having found it interesting, but being a rather ‘auditory’ thinker who finds it difficult to indulge my own mental flights from the taking-off point of your speech while the speech itself is actually playing.)”
Back when I posted this the first time around, many of you asked for a transcript. Many thanks to Greg for this yeoman service!
Cory Doctorow’s Cambridge Business Lecture, given 22nd July, 2008
See also: My Cambridge Business Lectures talk on “Life in the Information Economy”
Back in May, we had to cancel a planned benefit for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund in NYC due to illness striking one of the organizers. I promised then that I’d be rescheduling it for some time in August and now, here it is!
I’m really proud to have the chance to serve the CBLDF, which is a model for how an imaginative, vibrant civil liberties organization operates. They raise money to bail out comic creators and sellers (and others in the trade) who face legal persecution for making comic books.
Even better: this event includes DJ Spooky, whom I’ve wanted to meet since I wrote the intro to his new collection of essays on music, and afterwards, Spooky’s spinning a small-venue set, also to benefit the CBLDF.
I really hope to see you there — I’m coming into New York a day early (I’m on my way to 3Pi Con in Springfield, Mass, where I’m one of the guests of honor, along with Randall “XKCD” Munroe) and spending a bunch of dough out of pocket just to have the chance to do this for CBLDF. Tickets are limited — act now!
On August 21, Cory Doctorow, award-winning author and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing and experimental writer / artist / musician Paul Miller, a.k.a. D.J. Spooky That Subliminal Kid team up for a multimedia speaking event benefiting the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. Following their respective presentations, Doctorow and DJ Spooky will take the stage together for an open forum discussion about their work and the futurepresent each eloquently addresses across different media.
Cory Doctorow will read and discuss the issues behind his bestselling young adult novel, Little Brother. Addressing internet and government security, censorship, and civil liberties in a post-9/11 near-future atmosphere, Little Brother tackles timely issues while telling a story that’s smart, funny, and jam-packed-with-pop culture nuggets. Doctorow “hopes it’ll inspire you to use technology to make yourself more free.” Doctorow is the former European Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group that works to keep cyberspace free. IDW recently published Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now a collection of comics based on his cyberpunkiest Sci-fi short stories.
DJ Spooky joins Doctorow to present concepts from Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture, his new book / literary mixtape collecting writing by artists and thinkers including Brian Eno, Jonathan Lethem, Saul Williams, Steve Reich, Moby, Chuck D, and more.
Cory Doctorow Meets DJ Spooky: A CBLDF Benefit Mashup!
Last spring I sat down for an interview with Steve Johnson at the Chicago Tribune to talk about Little Brother, copyright, civil liberties, blogging and pretty much everything else. We covered some different territory to the usual interview and it turned out well (I think!).
There’s this broad consensus that the Virginia Tech murders had something to do with violent video games. When you actually read the coroner’s inquest report, video games are mentioned twice. The first is his mother saying he never wanted to play those video games. The second is his roommate saying, “We always thought he was weird because he never wanted to play video games.” Yet it’s still a truism that violent video games must be responsible for Virginia Tech.
We have the capacity to surveil and control adolescents ion a way we’ve never done before. We chase them indoors and then we tell them that all the virtual places they might gather, we need to surveil them because of the ever-present threat of pedophiles and because of the ever-present need to market to them. We’ve really hemmed in adolescence in a way we never have before.
Link
Tor.com has just published a new story of mine, “The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away” (the title is from “The Future Soon,” a Jonathan Coulton song), which is about geek monasteries that house smart people who can’t get along in the world and put them to work as coders. The story is the first Tor.com piece to be Creative Commons licensed and you’re encouraged to remix it, translate it, whatever. There’s already a podcast of me reading the story (also CC licensed) and PDF, Mobipocket and Sony reader files are already available.
Lawrence’s cubicle was just the right place to chew on a thorny logfile problem: decorated with the votive fetishes of his monastic order, a thousand calming, clarifying mandalas and saints devoted to helping him think clearly.
From the nearby cubicles, Lawrence heard the ritualized muttering of a thousand brothers and sisters in the Order of Reflective Analytics, a susurration of harmonized, concentrated thought. On his display, he watched an instrument widget track the decibel level over time, the graph overlaid on a 3D curve of normal activity over time and space. He noted that the level was a little high, the room a little more anxious than usual.
He clicked and tapped and thought some more, massaging the logfile to see if he could make it snap into focus and make sense, but it stubbornly refused to be sensible. The data tracked the custody chain of the bitstream the Order munged for the Securitat, and somewhere in there, a file had grown by 68 bytes, blowing its checksum and becoming An Anomaly.
Order lore was filled with Anomalies, loose threads in the fabric of reality—bugs to be squashed in the data-set that was the Order’s universe. Starting with the pre-Order sysadmin who’d tracked a $0.75 billing anomaly back to foreign spy-ring that was using his systems to hack his military, these morality tales were object lessons to the Order’s monks: pick at the seams and the world will unravel in useful and interesting ways.
The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away,
MP3 link
I gave a talk a couple weeks ago in Cambridge, UK, as part of the Cambridge Business Lectures, entitled, “Life in the Information Economy.” Lots of folks asked about video for the talk — and here it is! The (free) lecture series goes on — the next speaker is John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue, on Sept 12.
Life in the Information Economy
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