Victhor The Viking

Mur Lafferty [I should be Writing],  interviewing  Cory Doctorow at Tor.com at Worldcon 2009.

ML: All right, this is Mur Lafferty, here at Worldcon 2009, with Cory Doctorow. How are you, Cory?

CD: I’m a little tired, but I’m definitely having a great time. This is your classic Worldcon Sunday, where you haven’t slept much because of the parties, and it’s slightly compounded by the jet lag, and then compounded yet again by the fact that my wife took ill early on, I’ve been up with her while she threw up for the first couple of nights, which is fun. She’s feeling a lot better. She got strep throat on the way down, and they put her on an antibiotic that made her very sick, and she switched off of that onto a much nicer antibiotic that she’s now up in good sorts and off shopping in town, so…

ML: Oh, my goodness.

CD: Bit of a bummer, yeah.

ML: Yeah, no kidding, but I’m glad she’s doing better.

CD: She’s doing better, we’re catching up on our sleep. All is good.

ML: Good. Well, first I want to discuss your awesomeness last night, you had Neil Gaiman reading your story “The Right Book”?

CD: “The Right Book,” yes.

ML: And then you announced your new self-publishing venture. I’d like to talk to you a little bit about that.

CD: Yeah, I’d like to think of it more as a stunt than a venture, but…

ML: Okay.

CD: I don’t know what I’m going to call it, a project. So, with a little help, the idea is to kind of explore how you can take information, which has no inherent cost or weight, and create a bunch of services around it that have prices that range from zero to infinity, depending on what people are willing to part with, and so at the zero level, there’s the free electronic text and a free audiobook. You’re actually going to be recording some of the audiobook for me, as I understand?

Read the Rest of the Interview at  Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Cory Doctorow On With A Little Help, For the Win, the Hugos and More.

Little Brother is one of the most thought provoking books I have read in a while.  I think kids should read this book.  I believe we sometimes take freedom for granted.  Read Little Brother and you will think differently.

Content is a collection of essays on expounding upon the issues of free speech and universal access to information.  I am a proponent to having owning the copyright to my own works but make it available to whoever wants it with some rights reserved  with the use of Creative Commons.   Creative Commons is a nonprofit corporation dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others, consistent with the rules of copyright.

Donate One of these books. See Cory’s website, Craphound.com, for more information.

In Canada, the US and the UK, kids will be going back to school in a short while, so now’s a good time to remind you of the donation program for my books. Here’s how it works: teachers, librarians and others, like people who work in family shelters, halfway houses, prisons, etc indicate that they’d like copies of my books for their classes or collections. Then, people like you order copies and have them sent straight to the teachers. I pay someone who checks out each donation solicitation to make sure that it’s legit.

via Back to school donation drive for my books – Boing Boing.

If you get a chance to pick up and read The City and The City by China Mieville do it!  It is one of the best hard-boiled detective books I have a pleasure to read.  It is also one of the best Sci-Fi books I have had the pleasure to read too.  Powells.com posted an interview with China.  Here is an excerpt of it.

Doug: You seem to be touching on different genres with each book. Was that intentional, or just how the muse has struck?

China Miéville: I definitely wanted to write a book that was completely faithful to the crime paradigm, that obeyed all the rules of a crime novel, that was a police procedural. So, yes, it was deliberate. I knew perfectly well what it was going to be, and I was trying to bring something to that paradigm that was something of me. It had my kind of approach, so hopefully it remains faithful to all of those tropes and ideas, but it also tries to do something new with them. I like the idea of trying my hand at lots of different genres, and crime was one I’d wanted to try. I knew this was going to be the noir sort of thing.

Doug: What was the genesis of the idea for The City and the City?

Miéville: It was a triangulation of three things. One was, as I say, this desire to write a crime novel; one was an interest in the Eastern European aesthetic of literature and film — people like Kafka, Paul Leppin, Jan Svankmajer, and Alfred Kubin; and the third was the idea for the actual cities themselves. It was just an idea I’d been chewing over for some years, trying to work out how to do it most effectively, and I just fleshed it out and it took shape from there.

Doug: How present was Kafka’s ghost for you when you were writing The City and the City?

Miéville: Kafka’s a very big, very important figure, not just for me but for loads and loads of writers of the fantastic. In my case, Bruno Schulz was actually at least as powerful a presence. Bruno Schulz’s stories in Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass, The Street of Crocodiles, and so on, were very present. So, yes to Kafka, but I wouldn’t want to underestimate the power of Schulz, and various others as well. There’s no point or desire to escape these people.

Doug: Is it an overanalysis to say The City and the City is an allegorical version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” as the citizens of Beszel and Ul Qoma have learned to unsee what is right before them?

Miéville: I don’t think it would be an overanalysis. I’m a bit suspicious of the term “overanalysis,” because I think it’s always legitimate to analyze things. As I’ve said many times, I don’t think writers are necessarily the people who know what’s going on in their own works. It may very well be that things I hadn’t necessarily picked up on are still going on.

But I get slightly nervous about the idea of the book as an allegory. I think any decent fantasy/fantastic/unreal/dreamlike book has metaphoric resonance, and probably has quite a lot of metaphoric resonance, because that’s the way the human mind works, by processing and creating metaphors. I’m very strongly a believer that these resonances are there. But the difference between metaphor and allegory is that metaphor begats more metaphor — metaphor is intrinsically unstable — whereas allegory is designed to have a one-to-one reading. To that extent, allegories are really only interesting to me at the point at which they break down.

Tolkien has a line that he has a cordial dislike of allegory, and on that I agree with him firmly. I think if you want to write a book that is an allegory, where the narrative is subordinated to a point you want to make, then it is unlikely to be a particularly persuasive point and it is unlikely to work well as a narrative. For that reason I don’t want to subordinate the idea of this as a crime novel, or as a description of imaginary cities, to the idea of the political allegory. None of which is to say that those readings are not legitimate — that’s what I mean about metaphor. I think these are legitimate readings. It’s a question of cause and effect; if the book doesn’t believe itself as a story, then how can it possibly get on with the job of meaning anything else?

via Powells.com Interviews – China Mieville.

I am currently reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and is very eye opening.  It has been marketed as a young adult book, but it does not matter how old you are it is intense!  It is making me really think about the so called “Patriot Act” .

I wish I could have been at WorldCon just to see Neil and Cory together!  I know I am a nerd.  Not metal at all…what can say…

On Saturday at WorldCon, Guest of Honor Neil Gaiman read Cory Doctorow’s short story “The Right Book” to a full house for later audio release with an upcoming self-published project. During the question and answer session afterward, the subject of giving digital work away for free came up.

via Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / Gaiman and Doctorow Discuss Giving It Away.

The 2009 Hugo awards were announced.  I was a little disappointed that Anathem did not win for best novel but, hey, Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book is a great book!   Congratulations to Neil and all other winners!

# Best Novel: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)

# Best Novella: “The Erdmann Nexus”, Nancy Kress (Asimov’s Oct/Nov 2008)

# Best Novelette: “Shoggoths in Bloom”, Elizabeth Bear (Asimov’s Mar 2008)

# Best Short Story: “Exhalation”, Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)

# Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, John Scalzi (Subterranean Press)

# Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, Written by Kaja & Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)

# Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: WALL-E Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter, story; Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon, screenplay; Andrew Stanton, director (Pixar/Walt Disney)

# Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon, & Zack Whedon, & Jed Whedon, & Maurissa Tancharoen, writers; Joss Whedon, director (Mutant Enemy)

# Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow

# Best Editor Long Form: David G. Hartwell

# Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola

# Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu

# Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal

# Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan

# Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede edited by John Klima

via The Hugo Awards.

A great review of one of my all time favorite books Anathem.  I hope this wins the Hugo Award.

Anathem is a hugely ambitious book that does indeed fail in some of what it’s trying to do. Where it succeeds it succeeds so brilliantly that I don’t care whether the physics makes sense or even whether there are any female characters. What Anathem is attempting is to write about the whole development of science and philosophy in a world similar but different from ours, and then extend it forward from here to cover four thousand more years of future. He does this in a way that’s utterly immersive and absorbing—in the first person point-of-view of an appealingly obsessive geeky young man. Stephenson sets up the world of the Maths, closed communities of geek-minded people who take themselves out of the world in the manner of monasteries, but instead of worshipping God they’re withdrawing to study abstract science. He makes this absolutely fascinating and absorbing with detail piled on detail—the one year Maths, the ten year ones, the century ones, the mysterious Millenial ones that only open once a century, and did I mention that the monasteries are also giant clocks that have to be wound?—and then he tells a first contact story set in that world. But the main thing the book is doing is showing how science itself works, the scientific method, and how that is in itself exciting and engaging and fun. That’s a real achievement.

Read the rest of the Review at  Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / 2009 Hugo Best Novel Nominee Spotlight: Anathem, by Neal Stephenson.

Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors of all time.  When hearing of his early-onset Alzheimer’s it made me extremely sad.  I am not a people person at all but this guy writes books that make me laugh out loud when I am reading them.

If someone wants to die they should have a right to do so.  This idea of someone not being allowed to take their own laugh is based in a Judeo-Christian (a disease on the face of the earth) society and the thought that suicide is a sin.  Fuck that.  I would want to die if I am going to be burden on those around me.  And if someone II love is suffering and asks me to help them move beyond the veil I would do it in a heartbeat because I know deep down in my heart that there is no fucking hell, no judgment, and no god that is going to punish me.

By placing human qualities on god we are limiting the nature of death itself.  Who knows what happens after death.  Certainly not the douchingtons who wrote the bible, because they were not dead!  I only wish they were dead so they wouldn’t written the damn thing to begin with.  Only the dead know what happens after death and I think it is probably beyond our comprehension.

Many Hailz to Terry Pratchett, may he live the rest of days in happiness and die with iPod in hand.

We would not walk away from a man being attacked by a monster, and if we couldn’t get the ravening beast off him we might well conclude that some instant means of less painful death would be preferable before the monster ate him alive…

I am enjoying my life to the full, and hope to continue for quite some time. But I also intend, before the endgame looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Tallis on the iPod – the latter because Thomas’s music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to Heaven – and perhaps a second brandy if there is time.

(Image: Terry Pratchett, Powell’s, a Creative Commons Attribution licensed photo from Firepile’s Flickr stream)

via Terry Pratchett on the right to die – Boing Boing.

I bet that most of them are fat americans too.  I think I am going to go and startle fat americans in the middle of the night and see if they have heart attacks and take photos at the same time!  YA!

On the Croatian islands of Cres, Krk, Plavnik and Prvić, protected Eurasian Griffon Vultures (Gyps fulvus) nest just above the sea on vertical cliffs. Tourists flock to the area in boats, and upon reaching the areas below the nests, they clap and shout in order to startle the birds into taking flight – hoping to photograph these majestic raptors.

Tragically, many of the birds are young and do not yet know how to fly. Once they are frightened from their nests, they fall into the water and drown.

read the rest: Tourists Responsible for Deaths of Protected Griffon Vultures in Croatia : EcoWorldly.

Great review of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother.  I have a books store gift card so this one is definitely, my next purchase!

The thing about it though is that it’s such a compelling read. The first time I read it, I literally didn’t put it down. I started reading it in bed one night and kept on reading it until 2am. This time I did manage to put it down, just about, but I still zipped through it at top speed. (It’s not as much fun reading something in manuscript as you probably think. You have to wait months to talk to other people about it, which turns out to be just as bad as waiting to read it yourself.)

via Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / 2009 Hugo Best Novel Nominee Spotlight: Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow.

I can’t believe the birthers making a big stink about the President not presenting his birth certificate and why can’t just show us his birth certificate.  It because, even though he is President, he doesn’t have it.  It is not his to have.  It is his birth certificate, but he is not the keeper of that birth certificates, the Hawaii State Department of Health is.  In Hawaii, access to vital records is restricted by statute (HRS §338-18). There is nothing in there state statutes that says, “If the President comes to our office we will let him go into our library and get the actual birth record so he can satify some racist douchingtons.”  No, he, like everyone else in Hawaii,  has to be a qualified applicant to get a certified copy.  Even then he would not get the actual birth certificate, just a certified copy of it.

I am real familiar with birth and death record – I deal with them every day.  When ANYONE receives a birth certificate from the vital statistics office in the state they were born in, they never receive the actual birth certificate.  The original birth record stays with the keeper of records, generally the Vital Registration department as it is governed by that state’s laws.

Most states have 2 forms of certified copies:

• An Abstract: which is a computer generated form that contains minimal vital information such as Name, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Parents Names, and File Number. (This is generally what is issued because it is faster to generate and provide to the applicant.
• Full Copy:  A full facsimile of the original birth record filled out by the hospital at the time of birth and forwarded to the vital registration department after completion.

In most states the certified copies are issued on security paper that contains a variety of security features.  These features are suggested by the National Association for Public Health Statistics and Information Systems for cohesiveness between the state. Some states have it in their state rules (Example: Texas has it in Title 25 of the Texas Administrative Code in Chapter 181).

From what I have seen of the President’s birth certificate (see image below), it is appears to be an abstract.  According to Hawaii Law this is a certified copy of birth certificate.

HRS §338-13  Certified copies. (a)  Subject to the requirements of sections 338-16, 338-17, and 338-18, the department of health shall, upon request, furnish to any applicant a certified copy of any certificate, or the contents of any certificate, or any part thereof.

(b)  Copies of the contents of any certificate on file in the department, certified by the department shall be considered for all purposes the same as the original, subject to the requirements of sections 338-16, 338-17, and 338-18.

(c)  Copies may be made by photography, dry copy reproduction, typing, computer printout or other process approved by the director of health. [L 1949, c 327, §17; RL 1955, §57-16; am L Sp 1959 2d, c 1, §19; HRS §338-13; am L 1978, c 49, §1]

So this is my challenge to the Birthers: I would like to see any of you produce you original birth certificate.  I am not talking about a certified copy.  I want you to get the actual birth certificate.  The actual piece of paper.  Seriously.  I would like to see you try.  If you do produce a paper saying it is your original birth certificate I would stake my life that it isn’t the real actual birth record.

A Picture of a Certified Copy of The President's Birth Certificate