I'd love to like this book. Unfortunately, it has some huge, glaring issues that have been examined in detail by reviewers who are much cleverer with the wordy-talk than I am. I'm a huge proponent of Net Neutrality, libraries for the arts, creative commons, and the liberation of our culture from ...
It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why I didn’t like Eastern Standard Tribe. The writing is engaging and clever, the editing is spot on, the topic is interesting, but something about the book is just ... off. Maybe I’m not hip enough, not a proud enough member of the target technorati audience...
Marcus aka “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.But his whole worl...
Anda's Game is a sterling example of this approach. I ripped a story from the headlines — reports on blogs about a stunning presentation at a video-games conference about "gold farmers" in latinamerica who were being paid a pittance "grind" (undertake boring, repetitive wealth-creating tasks in a...
It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, about which you'll find more at the end of this file. LINK This story and the other stories in the volume are available at: http://craphound.com/overclocked You can buy Overclocked at finer bookstores everyw...
The mecha was a relic of the Mecha Wars, when the nation tore itself to shreds with lethal robots, and it had the weird, swirling lines of all evolutionary tech, channeled and chopped and counterweighted like some freak dinosaur or a racecar. I loved the mecha. It wasn’t f...
Is formed on this day, Saturday the fifth of March, 2012 2. Consists of: a) Amir, AKA Glort, the Massive and Auspicious Dwarf of Extremely Powerful Axe-Hurling and Ankle-Biting b) Chris, AKA HRH Prince Mishkin, Supreme and Undefeated Barbarian Lord of the Pickle Creatures of ...
"You're not a fucking doctor," she said, kicking him as he sat on the bed's edge, pulling on the pants he'd left on the floor before turning in. "You're a goddamned systems administrator." "It's my job," he said. "They work you like a government mule," she said. "You know I'm right. For Christ's ...
Huw finds that she doesn’t give a shit for this tiresome emo nonsense. It’s transparently clear that it’s not Bonnie talking anyway—it’s the rootkit, using Bonnie’s personality as a sock puppet to manipulate her. Well, that’s okay by Huw. Huw doesn’t feel anything, but she remembers how she ought...
Mom and Dad were grey-faced when I knocked on the door. I tried to make a joke of it. "I'd have thought that you guys'd be used to this by now." My voice cracked a little on the last couple words, and they gave me enormous hugs. They'd figured out where I was, and confirmed it by calling my phone...
The turnpike tolls went up every year and the road surface quality declined, and the gas prices at the clip-joints were heart-attack-inducing. When Sammy started at Disney Imagineering a decade before, the company had covered your actual expenses—just collect the receipts and turn them in for cas...
I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it. The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the...
I read dozens of Asimov novels, and my writing career began in earnest when I started to sell stories to Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, which I had read for so long as I'd had the pocket money to buy it on the stands. When Wired Magazine asked me to interview the director of the film I, Robot...
See http://craphound.com/place for more. Originally Published in Science Fiction Age, March 1998 Reprinted in: Northern Suns (Tor, 1999, David Hartwell and Glenn Grant, editors) Year's Best Science Fiction XVI (Morrow, 1999, Gardner Dozois, editor) Hayakawa Science Fiction Magazine (Japan) S...
Here's what I think of it, in a nutshell: a little goes a long way, and more than that is too much. I like the fact that copyright lets me sell rights to my publishers and film studios and so on. It's nice that they can't just take my stuff without permission and get rich on it without cutting me...
She scared him, but she also made him feel good. Like she was the guide he'd been searching for all his life. At this point, he would have settled for Brautigan. Anyone who could help him make sense of what felt like the biggest, scariest opportunity of his entire career.He must have dozed, becau...