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Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn't.

Not (just) because I'm a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers -- hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You've got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn't.

Not (just) because I'm a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers -- hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You've got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn't.

Not (just) because I'm a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers -- hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You've got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn't.

Not (just) because I'm a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers -- hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You've got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

It's also used effectively in Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom." Wuffie!

Developer.

Pundit.

Hellraiser for the EFF.

SF author.

One of the administrators of BoingBoing.net.

Here is his home page:

http://www.craphound.com.

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

(X) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

(X) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(X) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
(X) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!


(Yes, it's pulled from here. The meta-point is, if we're going to progress in the war on spam we need to move past the solutions that have been proposed a million times with obvious holes in them. Either that, or face the possibility that the system we have now is already optimal.

Primary justification of the above snarky copy&paste job is that this patently obvious scheme has a patently obvious DDoS scheme built into it, left as an exercise for the reader.)

The machine is a 900Mhz Duron with 512MB RAM Running RHL. Nothing fancy, in fact most people have better desktops now.

The key seems to be a carefully configured Apache using in-memory caching where possible, generous "Expires" headers for caches, long keepalives, and having the server thrash as little as possible starting and stopping children. Even under the most extreme load the box tends to be responsive, and has impressed the hell out of me for doing so.

With cory moving from SSI-based pages to the DB-driven MT, it will be interesting to see exactly what happens to performance as his next /.-ing :)

The machine is a 900Mhz Duron with 512MB RAM Running RHL. Nothing fancy, in fact most people have better desktops now.

The key seems to be a carefully configured Apache using in-memory caching where possible, generous "Expires" headers for caches, long keepalives, and having the server thrash as little as possible starting and stopping children. Even under the most extreme load the box tends to be responsive, and has impressed the hell out of me for doing so.

With cory moving from SSI-based pages to the DB-driven MT, it will be interesting to see exactly what happens to performance as his next /.-ing :)

Yeah, do this. Speed everything up, chew less and swallow more. When someone is talking, encourage them to talk faster by making a fast winding motion with your hands. Leave cinemas as soon as the first credit appears (and slip the projectionist a sawski to crank the handle faster).

Actually, someone made a nice speed-reading version of Cory Doctorow's Creative Commons-released novel, Eastern Standard Tribe. The speedreader applet, with adjustable speed, is here. You could use this to gauge your aptitude for the compressed life - and your limits. It's surprising how fast you can comprehend, although at higher speeds you're a bit like a rocket-powered train that's easily derailed...

life hacks notes by cory doctorow (more at bottom)
"It's the 10-second rule: if you can't file something in 10 seconds, you won't do it. Todo.txt involves cut-and-paste, the simplest interface we can imagine."
"Power-users don't trust complicated apps. Every time power-geeks has had a crash, s/he moves away from it. You can't trust software unless you've written it -- and then you're just more forgiiving.
Text files are portable (except for CRLF issues) between mac and win and *nix.
Geeks will try the Brain, etc, but they want to stay in text."

His second book is now out, too - Eastern Standard Tribe.

The first was so successful, that he's releasing this one the same way - free to download, or buy the printed version.

1) Do what you can with Open Source
2) Use closed source for everything not covered by 1)
3) Over time, develop in-house open-source projects to replace the items covered by 2)
4) Release Open Source projects and gain 1000000 Whuffie points of credit.
4) Profit!

Could someone explain to me what the "uthor" mentioned on the cover of this new book is?

What can you say about a book that has a typo in its cover?

Eastern Standard Tribe

by the uthor of Down and out the Magic Kingdom

Nevertheless, I enjoyed his 1st book.

If you don't want to pay for it, you can also download it for free in a wide variety of formats, with the blessings of the author and publisher.

One more time, with a link this time.

Since it's no longer available on the site ...
http://www.boston-baden.com/hazel/Pix/p.cgi?2001+0 992-1+hwing01.jpg
http://craphound.com/images/hwingcivic.jpg

"Got it: so if the OS and the CPU and so on are all 'Honorable'" -- Liam described quote-marks with his index fingers -- "then you can be sure that the execution environment is what the software expects it to be, that it's not a brain in a vat. Hollywood movies are safe from Napsterization."

If they can do a good enough job recreating the rides, their Whuffie's going through the roof!

Anyone else see a strange correlation between a "voucher" and the wuffie points found in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?

Are we moving to a more meritocratic society?

'Scuse me I have to go work with my Ad-Hoc...

-Coach

--

If money/profit were not an issue there would be no power lines to put underground, no money to do so if you had the desire. You can't pay miners, engineers, and power comapny employees in goodwill to get ore out of the ground - that won't buy them groceries. It's all or nothing. You should read 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' by Cory Doctorow for an intruiging open-source look at the future of society.

You're looking for a Whuffie score. Dorks would not get high Whuffies if done right (until a hack is found, but hopefully it will be made solid, as it can be used as a method for identifying hacks/cracks). I'm not sure if this is the human equivalent to a "pagerank" and therefore subject to recursive raising of the score, but I'll let more awake /.ers debate this.

I keep finding this story to be more and more relevant as time goes by.

There will probably be two parts to this, one verbal, speak a question, and two visual, get an answer. In the book 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom' the concept is that everyone has a hud and headset built right in. So you speak "show me slashdot" and get the slashdot web site on the hud or a voice reading the latest articles. Given time it should eventually become a reality (the speak and see or hear part, not the built in part).

The way I see it is this: DRM is a no go, personalizing it is not really DRM, you can get that today already...

I just fear that the publishing industry would most likely go to the same lengths as the **AA right now and that would be a shame.

At the same time, I think eBooks are a great way for Authors to publish themselves, Cory Doctorow did it with his last book.

M.

How odd to see so many posts from the /. community railing against what is clearly a prototype technology.

Yes, ebooks are sucky. Yes, the nicest fonts on the most optically undemanding monitors are still no substitute for the feel of the dead-tree edition in our hands. But isn't this just a thinly disguised cousin to the decades-old analogue/digital debate? Am I the only one who is sick of vinyl die-hards and their "CDs have no warmth" rhetoric?

The current problems with ebooks, as Cory Doctorow says, is the ever-present spectre of DRM.

"I believe that the electronic publishing models that have been tried -- especially those that rely on restricting readers' freedom with "Digital Rights Management" software -- are dead ends. There are lots of ways that electronic texts are inferior to paper (every discussion of "e-books" has to involve at least one paen to the smell of old books and another to the wonder of reading a book in the tub), but there are also lots of ways in which they are superior. You can carry a lot of them around in a small device. You can back them up. You can email them to friends. You can convert them to your favorite file-formats, you can search them, you can copy-and-paste them. When we turn to use-restriction technology, we foreclose the possibilities that make electronic text superior to printed text." (source)

Some journalistic follow-ups from this article:

"Demand for e-books has been growing quickly, but remains relatively tiny. According to the Open eBook Forum, a trade organization, e-book sales totaled about $5 million in the first half of 2003, compared to $3.8 million in the first half of 2002.

"One bookseller dropping out will have no impact on Random House's commitment to e-books," said Random House Inc. spokesman Stuart Appelbaum.

Open eBook Forum executive director Nick Bogaty said he has no individual corporate statistics, but believes Barnes & Noble.com had just a small percentage of sales. Palm Digital Media, OverDrive, Inc., and Amazon.com are among the leading e-book competitors, Bogaty says.

Barnes & Noble.com had been quite active in the market, even starting its own digital imprint in 2001 and releasing an original work by Dean Koontz.

"We all believe there is a future for e-books," Goldman said. "It's just not here yet."

For two downloadable examples, check out this moving short story about a week in the life of an immortal. Note how we can still empathize with the losses immortals must have. (And note that unlike this story, immortality is usually just background in Egan's stories (just like contemporary writing doesn't focus on how our average age is 70).) Or for a great read, download or buy Cory Doctorow's novel 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.' Day to day struggles of people who just happen to be in the starting centuries of immortality.

But what really interests me are the motivations of people who hate the idea of immortality or longevity. Now, if these people were like the Amish ("go on ahead with your tech, but we're going to hang out here for a while") that'd be one thing. But George Bush's chief bioethicist is one of them. Geoge Bush's decisions will be made^hhhInfluenced by someone who has been said to think:

'According to Kass, it is a deeply fundamental aspect of life to suffer and die. When we try to fix this natural order, we lose our soul, our essential humanity.'

I think that given the opportunity for longevity treatments (antibiotics, heart transplants) he'd take them, saying that the particular treatment isn't terrible (like Bennett on gambling). But meanwhile he causes lots of damage, because as treatments are introduced, you cannot easily separate longevity treatments from quality of life treatments. If Kass thinks one of these (longevity /immortality) is ultimately evil, then he might well be willing to sacrifice the other (q of l) in order to prevent the former. To stop reproductive cloning (because delayed twinning is evil, you know?) we also have to stop theraputic cloning, for example.

Me, I want both longevity and quality of life. Of course I'd like to try for 160, just like a person who could only expect to make 40 would love to try for 80. But if not, I'd love to have a much better time in my last decades. I don't see the necessity or beauty of strokes, dementia, arthritis... I don't see this virtue of suffering that Kass sees, and I doubt that he voluntarily skips anti-suffering treatments as they become available. However, I think he will work hard to delay when they become available. That's scary.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where all arts- books, symphonies, photos, movies, plays, scuptures- had an average lifespan of 70 years, then they start to crumble away, 99% gone by 100, all gone by 120 years. So all we knew about Murasaki Shikibu, Michelangelo, W. Shakespeare, and Beethoven were that they existed; and jazz fans were already losing Louis Armstrong's works. Imagine people in that world saying "Its great we lose these works: unless they disappear no new works will be created. It is unethical to try to extend these creations to survive to 140 or 500 years..." Humanity survived our average lifespan going from 25 to 40 and 40 to 75: I think we're perfectly capable of working out the logistics of 120 or 160 or 300.

For two downloadable examples, check out this moving short story about a week in the life of an immortal. Note how we can still empathize with the losses immortals must have. (And note that unlike this story, immortality is usually just background in Egan's stories (just like contemporary writing doesn't focus on how our average age is 70).) Or for a great read, download or buy Cory Doctorow's novel 'Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.' Day to day struggles of people who just happen to be in the starting centuries of immortality.

But what really interests me are the motivations of people who hate the idea of immortality or longevity. Now, if these people were like the Amish ("go on ahead with your tech, but we're going to hang out here for a while") that'd be one thing. But George Bush's chief bioethicist is one of them. Geoge Bush's decisions will be made^hhhInfluenced by someone who has been said to think:

'According to Kass, it is a deeply fundamental aspect of life to suffer and die. When we try to fix this natural order, we lose our soul, our essential humanity.'

I think that given the opportunity for longevity treatments (antibiotics, heart transplants) he'd take them, saying that the particular treatment isn't terrible (like Bennett on gambling). But meanwhile he causes lots of damage, because as treatments are introduced, you cannot easily separate longevity treatments from quality of life treatments. If Kass thinks one of these (longevity /immortality) is ultimately evil, then he might well be willing to sacrifice the other (q of l) in order to prevent the former. To stop reproductive cloning (because delayed twinning is evil, you know?) we also have to stop theraputic cloning, for example.

Me, I want both longevity and quality of life. Of course I'd like to try for 160, just like a person who could only expect to make 40 would love to try for 80. But if not, I'd love to have a much better time in my last decades. I don't see the necessity or beauty of strokes, dementia, arthritis... I don't see this virtue of suffering that Kass sees, and I doubt that he voluntarily skips anti-suffering treatments as they become available. However, I think he will work hard to delay when they become available. That's scary.

As a thought experiment, imagine a world where all arts- books, symphonies, photos, movies, plays, scuptures- had an average lifespan of 70 years, then they start to crumble away, 99% gone by 100, all gone by 120 years. So all we knew about Murasaki Shikibu, Michelangelo, W. Shakespeare, and Beethoven were that they existed; and jazz fans were already losing Louis Armstrong's works. Imagine people in that world saying "Its great we lose these works: unless they disappear no new works will be created. It is unethical to try to extend these creations to survive to 140 or 500 years..." Humanity survived our average lifespan going from 25 to 40 and 40 to 75: I think we're perfectly capable of working out the logistics of 120 or 160 or 300.

Cameron finally wound up paying Ellison $144,000 and adding Ellison to the credits.

From Sci-Fi Wars:

Harlan Ellison, notorious and prolific author, critic, reviewer, screenwriter and revenge artist is probably the last guy in the world you want to piss off. No, I mean, really. This is the guy who mailed a dead gopher to New American Library when they refused to release copyright on his books after they breached their contract by binding cigarette ads into them. One wonders, then, what was going through James Cameron's head when he casually quipped on-set that he got the idea for Terminator "by ripping off a couple old Outer Limits episodes." Specifically, Soldier and Demon With a Glass Hand, both written by Ellison (others have pointed out marked similarities with still more Ellison stories, including A Boy and His Dog and I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream). Ellison called Cameron on this, and Cameron denied it, and Ellison responded with both a lawsuit and a series of full-page ads in Variety that lambasted Cameron as a plagiarist. Eventually, Cameron settled for a reported $72,000, and Ellison's name was appended to the credits in the home-video edition. But Cameron still hadn't learned his lesson! In 1991, a new video-release of Terminator dropped Ellison's credit, prompting yet another lawsuit and yet another $72,000. To this day, mentions of Ellison's name reportedly throw Cameron into a white-hot rage.

Try Cory Doctorow's novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom". It's even available online at craphound It's technical, it's satire, it's black comedy, it's totally relevant and very entertaining. For best effect, download the ebook version and read it on a handheld.

If you haven't already read them, find something by Cory Doctorow (he's made his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom freely available if you don't want to buy it, but it's worth it) or Charles Stross. Another good author more hyperpunk than cyberpunk is Eric Nylund; his two novels Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered are great. I find picking up an anthology like The Year's Best Science Fiction helps me find authors whose work might interest me; that's how I found Charles Stross's work, at any rate. There are plenty of others out there, go digging around and you'll find tons of pointers on the Web for what to read.

If you haven't already read them, find something by Cory Doctorow (he's made his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom freely available if you don't want to buy it, but it's worth it) or Charles Stross. Another good author more hyperpunk than cyberpunk is Eric Nylund; his two novels Signal to Noise and A Signal Shattered are great. I find picking up an anthology like The Year's Best Science Fiction helps me find authors whose work might interest me; that's how I found Charles Stross's work, at any rate. There are plenty of others out there, go digging around and you'll find tons of pointers on the Web for what to read.

I've been meaning to read Metamorphasis of Prime Intellect - I hear much of it is sick and twisted. Though, I wonder what's preventing people from effectively killing themselves by "deadheading" (from Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom) for forever minus a day?

--

Smacks more of an author trying to cash in on the current albeit dying fad of blogging to help promote his new book.

Nobody's ever done that before...

One can blog just to get stuff out to the public, and get a bit of a response. Gibson said during a reading that he felt that blogging was too fun; it didn't feel like work. Even interracting to two or three dozen people in a blog struck him as a time sink.

Neil Gaiman is writing very conversationally, responding to questions. (In verifying the address, I noticed he has written about this topic already.)

Elsewhere, Warren Ellis & Bruce Sterling are just commenting on stuff that comes up as they research their upcoming work. Cory Doctorow (and co.) & Charlie Stross just have more varied interests than Gibson, I guess. And hell, the way they're working on a new story is in a blog.

Um. I feel weird that I'm pointing out so many examples. I read all these regularly, though.

Read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It's a little (OK, a lot) further out than 10 years, but an excellent picture of a truly interconnected wireless society.
I want my whuffie!

You apparently didn't follow the link. The link didn't lead to the story,

I just clicked it again, and it certainly leads to the homepage of the story. There are many related news articles there, but they change constantly. If you had wanted to focus on a specific item, you should've done something like this. Also, you should've labeled it with text like "this story about D&OitMK", not just "Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".

he demonstrates that the premise is faulty.

It's still not a strong demonstration that traditional publishers' business models are not the most profitable ones.

For one thing, the story refers to 50,000 downloads. 50,000 free downloads, not paid ones. If he's a true artist, who just wants to get his vision out, that's fine. But unfortunately, most "artistic" work today is to satisfy commercial motives. Unpaid distribution doesn't help them.

For a second thing, he got "word of mouth" publicity because what he did was different and strange. Being unique always has publicity value- "Ben & Jerry" ice cream corporation, for instance, spins their charitable stance into major advertising leverage. But that only works because few other corporations take such a stance. It's not a scalable business technique; it only works for a few people.

For a third thing, if Doctorow did earn any money from the publicity (increased sales for the slender, dead-tree version), then that effect cannot be expected to keep working in the future. Today, paper books are more convenient reading for most people. As technology marches on, we'll all get PDAs with 600x800 screens and 15 hour battery lives. Or Kinko's will offer to print a bound paperback for $4.50. Any effects based on "the free version is like advertising for the paid one" will only last until technology improves so that digital copies are easier to use than physical ones.

Now, backing away from this specific example: alternative business models (less reliant on copyrights) for publishers are viable, but they won't be as profitable as the current ones. Average publishers won't have an incentive to switch over unless they're forced to (prehaps by a legislative weakening of copyright laws, or a refusal to punish violators)

Janis Ian's experiences
Advice for the aspiring musician
Baen Free Library

From the article:

What to make of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom , the first novel by Cory Doctorow, dot-com survivor, inveterate blogger, and now, outreach coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation? Part organizational-intrigue novel, part post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and part Swiftian satire of the tech mentality, revolutionary impulses, and Disney itself, the book has acquired quite a bit of notice, at least in part for its bold use of the Net.

Having just finished the book, I can tell you what to make of it: A poor ripoff of John Varley's The Phantom of Kansas with karma added. Oh, and whereas Varley managed to pack his ideas into a well-paced short story, this one dragged out for 208 pages as it subjected us to Disney technical minutiae on the way to a disappointing resolution.

At least I found out how the ghost hall works in the Haunted Mansion.

--sex

I might like technical consistence & cluefulness more than most people. The following list of writers reflects that.

Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing just released Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Cory and his work have been mentioned here a time or five before. He just co-wrote Jury Service with Charlie Stross, another loopy fun writer. Stross' Lobsters is online; Stross' interview and appearance on Slashdot made me seek out more. Stross' list of published fiction includes a dozen online versions of stories. Both Doctorow & Stross are entertainingly loopy, and technically consistent & clueful.

John Brunner's "The Sheep Look Up" and "The Shockwave Rider" are good dystopian lit.

Bruce Sterling is still around; he just wrote "Tomorrow Now," a non-fiction futurist book. Zeitgeist, Distraction, and Holy Fire were all enjoyable and insightful.

Vernor Vinge coined the term "singularity." "A Deepness in the Sky" and "A Fire Upon the Deep" have a joining character pre- and post-Singularity, and both won Hugos. He just released some short stories, but I haven't read it yet.

Matt Ruff wrote the science fiction "Sewer Gas & Electric" and fantasy "Fool on the Hill." The first is funny and fast-paced.

I've enjoyed K. W. Jeter, Rudy Rucker, Roger Williams (The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect) a bit...

Technical accuracy isn't his forte, but Jim Monroe, a former managing editor of Adbusters, wrote Angry Young Spaceman and Living in Silico. I downloaded AYS ages ago, but bought a copy during his tour so I can loan it to friends. Oh, and checking now, he's put his 1999 book Flyboy Action Figure Comes with Gasmask up.

These have been mentioned on Slashdot before, but worth mentioning again here:

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a fun read. Besides, the "true" first edition seems to be the online one available for free download. The print edition is still unavailable on amazon.

You might check out salon for his stories Ownz0red and Liberation spectrum. Both are somewhat didactic, but they contain messages that most of this crowd will appreciate.

Cory Doctorow comes to mind. And you can check out his latest novel for free. I haven't been this excited about an author since I discovered Vernor Vinge or Neal Stephenson.

Writers always ask if I'm related to Pulitzer-prize winning novelist E.L. Doctorow. The answer is "probably." Family legend has it that my paternal grandfather's uncle is E.L.'s grandfather. My folks met E.L. in 1998 and tried this theory out on him, and he said that it sounded about right, but didn't seem very excited by it.

If you want immediate gratification, download the book and send him some money. His email address is on his site. He'll get a heck of a lot more out of that than he will from his publisher, I'll bet.

He's enjoyed a few brief jumps up the best seller lists at Amazon. He's been up to the triple digits. It'd be cool to see him pushed into the double digits.

From the Front Page :

Q: Where does the word Whuffie come from?

A: It's just a made-up word we used interchangably with "Brownie Points" in high-school. Some people have suggested that it might have come from the Arsenio Hall show's "woof woof woof" noises.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a super-keen new book just released under creative commons.

I work for a nonprofit, so my science fiction writing income actually accounts for a substantial chunk of my living.

I have never written an "original" word in my life. Every idea I've had has been inspired by those who came before me. I just released my first novel, both as a hardcover book and an ebook under the terms of a Creative Commons license. The novel is set in Walt Disney World, and revolves around the efforts of preservationists in a transhuman future who strive to keep the rides true to the original Imagineers' intent.

I take a lot of flak for my genuine admiration for the Disney Parks and films -- people want to know why I've thrown my lot in with the corporate crooks who've stolen the public domain out from under us. The fact of the matter is that Walt Disney is the poster child for the public domain. Walt's greatest works were built by taking off-the-shelf parts and stories and remixing them in novel and useful ways. Lessig notes that Steamboat Willie, the first Mickey cartoon, was a remix of a popular film called "Steamboat Bill." Exploring the bonus material on the latest DVD release of the cartoon shows that not only did Walt thrive on the public domain, but that the Disney Company's interest is in closing off that domain to everyone else:

"Orchestra starts playing opening verses of 'Steamboat Bill.' Try doing a cartoon take-off of one of Disney, Inc.'s latest films with an opening that copies the music, and see how far your Walt Empire gets."

Any artist who claims that her work is 100% original is lying or self-deluded. Art is embedded in culture. Art is a web, and it is enmeshed with the art that came before it and comes after it. Deriding the public domain as the refuge of the unimaginative makes about as much sense as pissing on coders who don't write their own OSes (or invent their own non-Turing, non-Von Neumann, non-non-Von Neumann computing engines, for that matter).