Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 74
January 27, 2014
Makers review from high-school senior Rebecca Nguyen
Rebecca Nguyen is a high-school senior who is a fan of my young adult novels. Recently, she read my book Makers and liked it so much that she wrote a great review of it, which she placed with the Poughkeepsie Journal. It's an incisive review, and I'm very grateful to Rebecca for it. Thank you, Rebecca! I hope the Journal gives you more reviewing work in the future -- you're very good at it!
January 24, 2014
Announcing “In Real Life”: graphic novel about gold farming, kids and games
Yesterday, FirstSecond formally announced the publication of In Real Life, a graphic novel about gaming and gold farming for young adults based on my award-winning story Anda's Game, adapted by Jen Wang, creator of the amazing graphic novel Koko Be Good. Jen did an incredible job with the adaptation.
Kotaku conducted a Q&A with Jen and me about the book and its themes, and lavishly illustrated it with art and panels from the book:
The book touches on points that some people who play video games...
January 23, 2014
Pirate Cinema and Homeland covers shortlisted for the Kitschie for best cover
The Kitschies are a British award for science fiction and fantasy; every year they choose some marvellous books to honour. This year, I'm proud and pleased announce that they've shortlisted the UK editions of my novels Pirate Cinema and Homeland for the "Inky Tentacle" award for best cover. Both covers were designed by the studio Amazing15 for my British publishers, Titan Books. I'm indebted to the judging panel and the Kitchie volunteers -- thank you!
January 21, 2014
Speaking at SXSW with Barton Gellman about Edward Snowden and NSA surveillance
I'll be returning to SXSW Interactive this March for the first time in more than five years, to interview Pulitzer-winning journalist Barton Gellman, who is one of the journalists who's been entrusted with some of the Snowden NSA leaks. We're doing a presentation called "Snowden 2.0: A Field Report From the NSA Archives," which follows an address by Glenn Greenwald. We're speaking on March 10 -- I hope to see you!
Today we reveal the addition of another session focused on this topic, “Snowden...
January 20, 2014
Podcast: Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful
Here's a reading of my latest Guardian column, Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful, about the social and political factors that make all the difference when choosing technologies.
Banshee fails gracefully because its authors don't attempt any lock-in. When I find myself diverging from the design philosophy of Banshee to the extent that I want to use a rival system to manage my music, Banshee is designed to assist me in switching. Unlike Apple, Microsoft, and others...
January 16, 2014
How to have a healthy relationship with technology
My latest Guardian column, "Digital failures are inevitable, but we need them to be graceful," talks about evaluating technology based on more than its features -- rather, on how you relate to it, and how it relates to you. In particular, I try to make the case for giving especial care to what happens when your technology fails:
Graceful failure is so much more important than fleeting success, but it's not a feature or a design spec. Rather, it's a relationship that I have with the technology...
January 14, 2014
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth: .mobi and .epub
Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson converted my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (from the collection Overclocked) into .mobi and .epub for easy viewing on an e-reader or mobile device. I probably get more fan mail for Sysadmins than for any other story, and it won the Locus Award the year it came out (it was later adapted to comics by JC Vaughn for the IDW book Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now). Give it a read!
He piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling...
January 13, 2014
Flowers From Al 02
Here's the second, concluding part of my reading of my 2003 short story "Flowers From Al," written with Charlie Stross for New Voices in Science Fiction, a Mike Resnick anthology (Here's part one). It's a pervy, weird story of transhuman romance.
Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com
John Taylor Williams is a audiovisual and multimedia producer based in Washington, DC and the co-host of the Living Proof Brew Cast. Hear him wax poetic over a pint or two of beer by visiting...
Why fiction works
In my latest Locus column, "Cheap Writing Tricks," I ruminate on what makes fiction work -- why we perceive stories as stories, why we care about characters, and how the construction of stories interacts with the human mind (and why How to Win Friends and Influence People is a great writing tool).
There are lots of classes of problems you can throw at your character, from bombs to defuse to tricky parallel parking problems, but the stickiest, most nosiness-evoking problems are the ones that in...
January 8, 2014
Great Firewall of Cameron: the worst of all worlds for British parents
In my latest Guardian column, I explain how UK prime minister David Cameron's plan to opt the entire nation into a programme of Internet censorship is the worst of all worlds for kids and their parents. Cameron's version of the Iranian "Halal Internet" can't possibly filter out all the bad stuff, nor can it avoid falsely catching good stuff we want our kids to see (already the filters are blocking websites about sexual health and dealing with "porn addiction"). That means that our kids will s...
