Great review of Cory Doctorow‘s new book For the Win at Tor.com, a blog from Tor books.  Cory also talks about Economics which plays a big part in the story.  Cory Sez:

“Economics is a game. Even economists look at game theory. It’s all about people agreeing to play by a set of rules, and pretending game tokens have intrinsic value. A lot of people have written a lot of ink about whether money is worth something, whether gold is worth something. Whatever value it has comes out of a consensus, and that consensus is not so different from the consensus that virtual gold is worth something or that Monopoly money is worth something.”

Cory also goes on to talk about how sci-fi is more about the present than the future:

“Science fiction uses changes in the world to illustrate what’s going on in the world today. It uses a kind of warped futuristic mirror to tell a story about the present day. I think even when a writer doesn’t know they’re doing it, they often end up doing it.

“[Isaac] Asimov, for example, clearly was reflecting on things like the New Deal when he started writing about rational technocratic governments that sit down and plan out thousands of years of future history in order to ensure maximum benefit. He really was talking about his present-day technology but coating it in futuristic clothes. He may not have known it, but in hindsight we can see that’s what he was doing.”

Read the Rest of the Review: Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / The digital revolution hits the slums of India and China. Cory Doctorow’s For the Win.

The language has changed, and continues to change. Within the lifetime of most of us, the meaning of the word ‘gay’; has changed fundamentally; so much so, indeed, that the work of writers of the 1920s may well require an explanatory gloss by the 2020s. At the same time, new words are entering the language at an exponential rate. A dictionary of new words published, say, in 1990, would be hopelessly out of date by now; such is the rate at which new coinages are entering the language that we could probably support one such dictionary a year, if not more.

continue reading: How can a scifi story’s language reflect its far-flung setting?.

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester’s. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it.

Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.com bomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work’s glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester’s 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s.

Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry’s friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the ‘fatkins’ treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo.

Then things get really interesting.

Makers was an incredible book. Cory Doctorowdid a really great job in character building to where I felt I knew the attitude and look of each character. Even characters with relatively small parts to play in the book were interesting to me.  The book has a minor dystopian feel to it but not as drastic as some books describe but it seems realistic. 

It was hard to see an overall theme to this book but I feel that, even though it is a sci-fi book, the underlying theme to the book is friendship. I could feel the connection that each character has for the other. But also I believe that there was a “political” (for lack of a better word) message too in sort of the same way, but not as overtly as, say Fahrenheit 451. I do feel that Doctorow does impart some of his personal views on the business environment and if you read BoingBoing you will know what I mean. But I did not feel he was “pushing his agenda” even though I dig his agenda.

The book is definitely a geeky book but I feel that even a non-geek or a shade-tree geek like myself could enjoy the book overall. Makers is witty and heartwarming too. I love a book that can make me feel the emotions of each character. There were definitely times where I actually laughed out loud as well as wept for the characters.

It is also a great book for those who are interested in economics and the power struggles with the corporate machine and the mom and pop store.  I felt for the struggles that Lester and Perry have throughout the book to be themselves and enjoy life but not get pushed around. 

The dialogue was very effective. Not too simple but not overly wordy. The only negative I can say is the publisher’s description of the book on the dust jacket. I think that it is a little misleading in that it is kinda a pseudo-spoiler. Pseudo in that I don’t think it was quite accurate and it gives you information that I feel either does not fit the overall feel of the book or just does not make since.

I highly recommend you read Makers. You will laugh, cry, get pissed and be thoroughly entertained.

Edition Reuss recently released Black Tattoo Art: Modern Expressions of the Tribal, a photographic homage to a particular genre of skin art. The book is curated by Marisa Kakoulas (lawyer, writer, circus lady, and blogger.) Above and after the jump, Boing Boing’s exclusive peek at some of the hundreds of striking, full-page images you'll find inside.

The 536-page hardcover includes work by tattoo artists from Borneo, Argentina, New Zealand, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, Europe and North America. The book weighs nearly ten pounds, and the binding is stitched with silver embossing. It's fat, heavy, and gorgeous.

“There has never before been a book on this style of tattooing in English,” Marisa told Boing Boing over email. “The style is called “blackwork,” where the artists are limited to one color and so they have to stretch their imagination in terms of design elements to create original works, rather than having a palette of colors and shading techniques to chose from as in other styles of tattooing.”

Some of the photos we selected to share on Boing Boing also include the use of a single additional color.

Black Tattoo Art examines how indigenous tattooing has evolved over the years, beginning with a history section, then each of the styles that originate in tribal arts.

Lots more photos from the book after the jump. NSFW-ish warning: one of them is a human hiney.

continue reading @ Black Tattoo Art: Modern Expressions of the Tribal Boing Boing.

My name is Alexander Gordon Smith, the author of the YA horror book Lockdown. I’m thrilled to be able to blog on Tor.com, and I’m going to use this opportunity to talk about writing, horror, books and hopefully loads more too. But I wanted to start by posting an exclusive bonus chapter!

Lockdown follows teenage criminal Alex Sawyer as he attempts to escape the hell on earth that is Furnace Penitentiary. Life inside Furnace is worse than your most terrifying nightmares—savage gangs, brutal guards, skinless dogs and the filthy Wheezers who drag you kicking and screaming into the blood-drenched tunnels below. Not to mention the warden, who may or may not be the devil himself.

But it isn’t all violence and heartbreak. There may not be good days inside, but there are okay days, days when you can almost forget you’ll never see daylight again, never talk to your parents, never eat macaroni and cheese, never kiss a girl. On those days, you can almost convince yourself you’re still free.

Almost.

Take a look below at this bonus chapter—not in the book—for a glimpse of humanity in the most inhuman place on the planet.

via Tor.com / Science fiction and fantasy / Blog posts / The incarceration has begun….

Posted via email from victhortheviking’s posterous

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.

# 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.

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.