Items Tag › Josh Cooper LifeStream

Cory Doctorow Talks About the Future of the Novel, Including His Own [Interview]

http://io9.com/5371362/cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-future-of-the-novel-including-his-own

Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, releases his new novel Makers in a few weeks. It's about amusement park ride hackers, and most of it is already online. We talked to Doctorow about Makers and the future of novel-writing. io9: How did you do research for Makers? CD: Most of the stuff I write I haven't set out to research. I live the life I live, and out of it comes the books I write. I hang out in hacker spaces and that inspired me to write this book. Were you thinking about MAKE: magazine when you worked on the novel? Makers predates MAKE. I had an idea about doing a book on amusement parks and merchandising. I was revisiting some of my fanboy stuff in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Because of that book, I have a sizable audience of people who work in Disney theme parks. So I'd hang out with them. I'd hang out with imagineers. I got to see the inside of the Disney culture, and that was part of the inspiration for this novel. In terms of research, I'm doing a book now called For The Win and I knew a lot of action would be in the Pacific Rim in the subcontinent. So I went to China and India. I tend to get super obsessively geeky about stuff I'm interested in just as a matter of course. The stuff I'm chasing for BoingBoing I get deep on anyway. Facts are cheap. The zeitgeist is hard to absorb, and that's what you get from reporting and dropping in on people's spaces. What is your opinion about the future of books? Is print dying? I'm the contrarian – I don't think print is dying out at all. I'm a Kindle skeptic and ebook reader skeptic. My hypothesis is that it's harder to do one thing at a time with a computer. It's hard to consume a novel in 5 minute snippets punctuated by RSS checking. And ebook readers will have those functions. I don't think that supports novel reading. We won't have custom-tailored electronics for novels, so no I don't think ebook will rise. We'll read books with things like Android, mobiles that are general purpose computers. I do pleasure reading in places where it's not practical to bring out an ebook reader anyway. I look forward to the rise of the device untethered to the phone company. The mobile continues to be uninteresting because the entrenched players don't want truly disruptive, generative devices in their chain. Do you think that the move toward reading on mobiles will mean that the novel dies out as an art form? What will be the next form? Think of it this way. You start with a single textual medium, and then somebody invents newspapers. Then you have another new medium, and it's peeled off into magazines and zines. There are stories lurking in potentia that are sui generis to networked devices. We know that they don't require protracted attention. They have to be designed to be copied and they probably don't require that you consume all of them. Maybe they're like ARGs and soaps. ARGs have the economics of films and the audiences of novels. They require a deep level of engagement. That's great for some audiences, but like Lost they lose their way. One of the things about mystery series: they have to get weirder. At the end of the season they have to hit a cliffhanger where a secret will be revealed. But if they get renewed they can't reveal it. So the audience gets smaller and weirder. And it's harder to join that audience. You can't reboot the complexity. Novels are competing for attention with other media that can be peeled off from them. At the same time, novels are social objects and the web is social technology. My novels diffuse through the web in what tends to be a social context. I get new downloads because a bunch of Livejournal people are discussing it. The web makes it easier for people who love books to turn those books into part of their identities. That makes people buy books more. And it's cheaper to make them, as well as easier to get direct compensation. So as for the future of the novel - it's both dying and not dying. You win some new readers, and you lose some. You can pre-order Makers via Amazon, or read it for free online. Tor.com is serializing the whole novel, posting a new free chapter every week. Check it out here. Image by Idiots' Books.

September 30 2009, 5:14pm | Comments »

I posted to kwippy.com

We Be Clubbin’ with the Kwippy Book Club

http://blog.kwippy.com/2009/01/16/we-be-clubbin%E2%80%99-with-the-kwippy-book-club/

By NikitaScene

The month of January ushers in the promise of better things to come in the form of New Years resolutions; they flood throughout our collective consciousness and give us new found hope for the future. Crowning most lists are the old stanbys: save more money, lose weight, exercise more, spend more time with the family, get organized. Sadly, all but four out of five people who make these resolutions will break them before the end of January. (My list was shattered by January 1st!) But don’t let these dismal statistics worry your beautiful self; Kwippy has the answer to all that ails and this time it’s in the form of a new book club at Kwippy. Hey now! A book a month is a resolution we can all get behind; besides, literacy is sexy and helps build strong bones and teeth. The first work is the celebrated novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera. Set in 1968, Kundera’s work explores “…a world in which lives are shaped by irrevocable choices and by fortuitous events, a world in which everything occurs but once, existence seems to lose its substance, its weight. Hence, we feel ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ not only as the consequence of our pristine actions but also in the public sphere, and the two inevitably intertwine.” Life, love, choices made, and the resulting consequences? Join us as we read and discuss…. To join the Kwippy Book Club, add a comment in the following thread: http://www.kwippy.com/mayank/kwips/2008/dec/20/122259/

January 16 2009, 12:09am | Comments »

I posted to blippr.com

I loved "Snow Crash (Bantam Spectra Book)" (book)

http://www.blippr.com/books/6823-Snow-Crash-Bantam-Spectra-Book/blips/23007

Great book, I really don't know how many times I've even read it, may every 2 years since it came out. =D

Tags:
Books

August 20 2008, 9:32pm | Comments »

I posted to blippr.com

I loved "Cryptonomicon" (book)

http://www.blippr.com/books/8817-Cryptonomicon/blips/23005

I'm reading it again for the second time, first was 5 years ago. Great read and re-read. =D

Tags:
Books

August 20 2008, 9:23pm | Comments »

I posted to google.com

Neal Stephenson Says His New Novel Has Parallels with Bush Era in U.S. [Neal Stephenson]

http://io9.com/5039727/neal-stephenson-says-his-new-novel-has-parallels-with-bush-era-in-us

Neal Stephenson's new novel Anathem hits bookstores early next month, and stoking the fires of our anticipation is a meaty article about Stephenson in this month's Wired magazine. Writer Steven "Hackers" Levy profiles the author, who apparently divides his time between writing longhand in his basement, and consulting with Nathan Myhrvold's company Intellectual Ventures, a prototyping think tank and patent farm. It makes sense that the author of a novel about science monks from another planet is both monkish and technical in his personal life. One of the interesting observations that Stephenson makes in the article is that Anathem is in some ways a commentary on the war between religion and science in the United States under George W. Bush. In Anathem, the monkish "avout" remain locked in their cloisters studying science and math for years on end, while the outside world obsesses over evangelical religion and attention-shortening consumer electronics. Writes Levy: Stephenson sees a parallel to the George W. Bush-era wars between science and religion, made possible because the general population is either indifferent or hostile to extended rational thought. "I could never get that idea, the notion that society in general is becoming aliterate, out of my head," he says. "People who write books, people who work in universities, who work on big projects for a long time, are on a diverging course from the rest of society. Slowly, the two cultures just get further and further apart." Stephenson also comments on the length of his novel, which at over 900 pages is fairly epic though quite fast-paced: It's really about the difference between people who can sit down and focus their attention for a long period of time on something complicated in a patient and steady way—versus people who never read anything longer than a sentence or paragraph and who get very impatient if you try to go on at any length. Like the young avout in their science cloisters, readers of Anathem need to learn reasoning and patience. Though I have to say, having read most of the novel at this point, it's actually pretty zippy and fun. Yes, there are philosophical conversations but they never go on for too long and are often spiced with humor and flirtation. And just when things seem to be quieting down, a very intense or moving scene will suck you back in profoundly. Plus, there are aliens. Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves That He's King of the Worlds [Wired] Illustration by Nate Van Dyke via Wired.