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Thursday, March 13, 2008

"True Names" podcast

Cory Doctorow and I just turned in our big, sprawling galactic-scale posthuman novella, "True Names", to Lou Anders of Pyr Books, who is going to publish it in the original anthology Fast Forward 2 this fall.

This story came out of a conversation at the Hugo Loser's party at Worldcon 2002 -- the part about "the second law of thermodynamics as the ultimate party-spoiler in a transhuman utopia of self-spawning consciousness"; it acquired shades of Jane Austen, Voltaire, megamillion year ideological warfare, gender theory, coming-of-age story, and musical theater along the way.

We've pretty much been working on it for the past six years. It's been a delight to work on, and it's surprisingly exciting to have it done and ready for readers -- or first, in this case, listeners.

See, Cory, inexhaustible font of energy that he is (for those who don't know Cory and who think of me as energetic, talkative, and full of enthusiasm for various projects -- Cory is me cubed; he makes me look like a laconic hermit), has declared that we are podcasting it.

And so we are! I just have to hunt down a decent microphone so I can record the next installment....

(It's also under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license -- so feel free to reproduce, remix, and create your own Alonzo My Love! tchotchkes).

Posted by benrosen at March 13, 2008 07:30 PM | Up to blog
Comments

"for those who don't know Cory and who think of me as energetic, talkative, and full of enthusiasm for various projects -- Cory is me cubed; he makes me look like a laconic hermit"

Extremely funny!

Posted by: Jamie at March 17, 2008 08:58 PM

I've gotten behind on my reading again, thanks for the heads up on the podcast. As far as being a laconic hermit, I'm guessing that from my frame of reference Cory would just be like one of those beings on TOS that appeared to the crew like buzzing insects. It's a good thing he actually writes stuff down ;)

Posted by: Levi Wallach at March 23, 2008 03:57 AM

A timely article on Wired: https://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzweil

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity

Posted by: Mike Musson at March 27, 2008 09:00 PM

Cory is me cubed; he makes me look like a laconic hermit

I don't believe you.

Posted by: Jackie M. at March 28, 2008 04:12 PM

Having met Doctorow once, briefly, I have to concur with Jackie -- I would laugh off anything more than 1.7 Rosenbaums per Doctorow. Unless you're assigning yourself a value close to one, in which case you^3 should be within the margin of error of my estimate.

Remind us when a text version comes out so I can go look for it, yes? Podcasts, to me, represent for radio and the internet something much like the attempts to hybridize tomato and potato plants -- rather than tasty fruit *and* nutritious tubers, the two members of the nightshade family produced offspring that were disagreeable from root to tip.

Posted by: Dan Percival at April 2, 2008 07:36 PM

In terms of pure verbal output per unit time, sure, I can accept 1.7 RpD. However, in terms of general activity, projects afoot at any one time, connective power in unifying small world networks, multitasking capacity, and total creative and communicative output, you're looking at a range of 3 to 7 RpD, and that's not weighting for size of audience (which would bump the figure north of 100 RpD).

The text version will be in Pyr's Fast Forward 2. I am sure to remind -- here and on my announcements mailing list, which y'all should join in case you forget to browse the blog that week. :-)

Posted by: Benjamin Rosenbaum at April 2, 2008 11:48 PM

I am loving these!

Posted by: Haddayr at April 7, 2008 03:20 AM
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