Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Here’s a podcast of my last Locus column, A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future: Science fiction writers and fans are prone to lauding the predictive value of the genre, prompting weird questions like ‘‘How can you write science fiction today? Aren’t you worried that real science will overtake your novel before it’s published?’’ This question has a drooling idiot of a half-brother, the strange assertion that ‘‘science fiction is dead because the future is here.’’ Now, I will stipulate that science fiction writers often think that they’re predicting the future. The field lays claim to various successes, from flip-phones to the Web, waterbeds to rocket-ships, robots to polyamory. Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

The Starship Sofa podcast has produced an excellent reading of my novella “The Martian Chronicles,” which was originally published in Jonathan Strahan’s YA anthology Life on Mars. The reading is by jeff Lane, who’s really talented. Here’s the MP3 (the reading starts around 1:50).

Here’s a transcript of my keynote at the 28th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin over Christmas week, “The Coming War on General Purpose Computation.” Here’re the relevant links: * Video * Transcript (Joshua Wise) * German translation (Christian Wöhrl) * Subtitles in German, French, Spanish and Italian (you can add more!) Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

No reading this time — I’m too hard at work on finishing the sequel to Little Brother — but a Christmas wish from me to you: fight SOPA and save the Internet before the year is out! Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

This week on The Command Line podcast, a recording of a live chat between host Thomas Gideon and myself at the New America Foundation, discussing (among other things), my new essay collection Context. (MP3)

Here’s a reading of my story “Another Place, Another Time,” which was my contribution to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick, a companion volume to Chris Van Allsburg’s classic Mysteries of Harris Burdick, a collection of illustrations and titles from a lost (imaginary) short story collection. I was commissioned to produce a story for the collection along with 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. Gilbert hated time. What a tyrant it was! The hours that crawled by when his father was at sea, the seconds that whipped past when he was playing a brilliant game in the garden with the Limburgher children. The eternity it took for summer to arrive at the beach at the bottom of the cliffs, the flashing instant before the winter stole over them again and father took to the sea once more. “You can’t hate *time*,” Emmy said. The oldest of the three Limburghers, and the only girl, she was used to talking younger boys out of their foolishness. “It’s just *time*.” Gilbert stopped pacing the treehouse floor and pointed a finger at her. “That’s where you’re wrong!” He thumped the book he’d taken out of his father’s bookcase, a book fetched home from London, heavy and well-made and swollen with the damp air of the sea-crossing home to America. He hadn’t read the book, but his tutor, sour Senor Uriarte, had explained it to him the day before while he was penned up inside watching the summer moments whiz past the study’s windows. “Time isn’t just time! Time is space! It’s just a dimension.” He thumped the book again for emphasis, then opened it to the page he’d marked with a wide blade of sawgrass he’d uprooted before, and chewed while Senor Uriarte explained time and space to him. “See this? This is a point. That’s one dimension. It doesn’t have length or depth. It’s just a dot. When you add another dimension, you get *lines*.” He pointed at the next diagram with a chewed and dirty fingernail. “You can go back and you can go forward, you can move around on the surface, as though the world was a page. But you can’t go up and down, not until you add another dimension.” He pointed to the diagram of the cube, stabbing at it so hard his finger dented the page. “That’s three dimensions, up and down, side to side and in and out.” Emmy rolled her eyes with the eloquence of a 13 year old girl whose tutor had already explained all this to her. Gilbert smiled. Em would always be a year older than him, but that didn’t mean he would always be dumber than her. “And Mr Einstein, who is the smartest man in the whole history of the world, he has proved — absolutely *proved* — that time is just *another dimension*, just like space. Time is what happens when you can go up and down, side to side, in and out, and *before and after*.” Em opened her mouth and closed it. Her twin brothers, Erwin and Neils, snickered at the sight of their sister struck dumb. She glared at them, then at Gilbert. “That’s stupid,” she said. Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

Jan Rubak has once again set out to create a fan-audiobook of my essays, reading aloud from my book Context as he did with my earlier collection, Content. He’s a great reader, and he’s uploaded half the book so far, with the rest promised soon. Here’s an MP3 of his reading of “Think Like a Dandelion.” “Context” by Cory Doctorow : Jan Rubak : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive (Thanks, Jan!)

Here’s an interview I did last week with the SF-Fantasy.de podcast in Berlin MP3 Link

Here’s a reading of my short-short story “Authorised Domain,” commissioned as part of a package on “the future of the living room.” The judge said I have to write this note and so I am, but I want to put it right at the top that I don’t think it’s fair. It begins with Mum and Dad having rows all the time. At first, they tried to hide it from me, but come on, the flat’s not that big. When they put on their mean, angry voices, well, I’m not thick. Then they didn’t even bother to hide it. Mum’d get at Dad about something, it didn’t matter what — taking out the rubbish or leaving his shoes in the hall or money (money was always good for an hour’s moaning). Or Dad would storm into the house and not say a single word to anyone, just sit himself in front of the telly and enter a vegetative state that lasted until everyone had gone to bed. Mum’d make dinner for us two, and I’d go to my room and watch the stuff I’d saved up from the week, my shows, you know, the stuff everyone at school were talking about. Footie, of course, and Celeb Kendo. Had to, yeah? Before it expired, I mean. It was better when they split, and even better when they divorced. Kids aren’t supposed to be happy about their parents’ divorce, so call me a bastard, but my parents’d tell you I was right. Some people aren’t meant to live together, I guess. Dad had me at the weekends, Mum had me during the weeks. Both of them were much nicer to live with, too. Plus, Divorce Dad was much cooler about things like going to the footy or Alton Towers, and then he’d buy me a takeaway and leave me at home while he went down to the pub. Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

My steampunk YA short story, “Clockwork Fagin” (about the children who are mangled by the machinery of the industrial-information revolution, who murder the orphanage’s cruel master and replace him with a taxidermied automaton that they use to fool the nuns who oversee the place), has been turned into a podcast by the good folks at Escape Pod, with musical accompaniment by Clockwork Quarter. It’s a great reading, and the anthology the story appears in, Steampunk!, has just hit stands. Monty Goldfarb walked into St Agatha’s like he owned the place, a superior look on the half of his face that was still intact, a spring in his step despite his steel left leg. And it wasn’t long before he *did* own the place, taken it over by simple murder and cunning artifice. It wasn’t long before he was my best friend and my master, too, and the master of all St Agatha’s, and didn’t he preside over a *golden* era in the history of that miserable place? I’ve lived in St Agatha’s for six years, since I was 11 years old, when a reciprocating gear in the Muddy York Hall of Computing took off my right arm at the elbow. My Da had sent me off to Muddy York when Ma died of the consumption. He’d sold me into service of the Computers and I’d thrived in the big city, hadn’t cried, not even once, not even when Master Saunders beat me for playing kick-the-can with the other boys when I was meant to be polishing the brass. I didn’t cry when I lost my arm, nor when the barber-surgeon clamped me off and burned my stump with his medicinal tar. I’ve seen every kind of boy and girl come to St Aggie’s — swaggering, scared, tough, meek. The burned ones are often the hardest to read, inscrutable beneath their scars. Old Grinder don’t care, though, not one bit. Angry or scared, burned and hobbling or swaggering and full of beans, the first thing he does when new meat turns up on his doorstep is tenderize it a little. That means a good long session with the belt — and Grinder doesn’t care where the strap lands, whole skin or fresh scars, it’s all the same to him — and then a night or two down the hole, where there’s no light and no warmth and nothing for company except for the big hairy Muddy York rats who’ll come and nibble at whatever’s left of you if you manage to fall asleep. It’s the blood, see, it draws them out. MP3 Link