Smithology

I don’t get to listen to podcasts as much as I used to. When I worked full time and drove forty minutes to work, I used to actually plug my macbook into an iPod dock in the car and listen to them. (My colleagues used to joke that the Macbook was a giant iPod)

I’ve got a bit of a new routine now where I can listen to podcasts while I do a bit of housework and also while I put Flossy to sleep. In the latter case, we retreat to her bedroom where we have a comfy chair and I put the headphones in while she has her milk and then drifts off with her head on my chest.

I recently went back to Cory Doctorow’s podcast where he has been reading a short story called Martian Chronicles. It is worth a listen if you also find some time in your day for podcasts and enjoy science fiction. It’s about a teenager going to Mars to be a colonist but also acts as a launching pad (good pun eh?) for a discussion of the nature of success and failure with a focus on economics and society.

I like the way Cory is able to weave his political ideals and thinking into his stories and still keep them entertaining without the feeling that you’re being lectured to too much. It’s something I also admire in Ken Macleod.

At this stage I haven’t finished listening to the story but there has been an interesting twist which is going to force our main character to decide which side of the fence he sits on and how he’s going to live with that.

If anyone else has a listen, I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on it. To listen, you have to get it from his podcast

Uncategorized cory doctorow, scifi

I’m basking in the glory of having read the second half of Little Brother last night despite the knowledge that I would be sorry today. I’m in a sleep deprived, coffee driven euphoria and joyfully letting my mind digest the book.

So what is Little Brother all about then? Little Brother is a young adults spy thriller set in the near future and like Macleod’s Execution Channel, it explores ways in which the war on terror could escalate. Set in San Francisco, a group of school kids end up in conflict with the Department of Homeland Security over their increasing surveillance and suppression of liberty. This conflict divides the community down lines of class, age and race. The book takes a libertarian stance and can almost read as an apologetics course as our protagonist is drawn into ideological debates with his teachers, parents, friends, police and the DHS itself.

Some truly shocking passages describe the psychological trauma of abduction, imprisonment, interrogation and torture used by the American Government already in the War on Terror.

The book is also a bit of a howto guide to beating electronic surveillance, how the internet can be used to connect dissidents and the dangers of online surveillance. As the book progresses, we are exposed to various techniques used to hide identity online in a kind of birds eye view of symetric key cryptography, onion routing and trust networks.

Mainstream media plays a big part in the story as we see how the news spins what really happened to suit the mainstream agenda. We also see the importance of alternative media (ie. blogs) for being able to provide eye-witness accounts and a sort of counter-surveillance (hence the title of the book).

Part of the intensity of the book is that it covers some quite dodgy territory: is it really ok to be encouraging teenagers (the audience for this book) to be skilling up in these areas? The book challenged my beliefs about that, I mean I know all the techniques used in the book, they’re not big secrets but I was left questioning how much privacy is healthy and when does it become an effective cover for those wishing to harm others?

However, I can commend how the book leads the reader to understand how non-violent dissidence can work and that sometimes just embarrassing your opponents by peacefully illustrating what you think are flaws in their ideology are better than dissident actions which can be mistaken for terrorism.

Finally, the book is a bit of a tour of some of the history of human rights struggles in America and San Francisco especially, from the writing of the constitution to gay rights to the legalisation of encryption in the nineties.

As I said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found it very convincing as well as challenging. You can read it online at Cory Doctorow’s Website if you like. Big Brother is watching you, are you watching back? Stay free!

[tags]book, cory doctorow, cryptography, fiction, liberty, little brother, terrorism, war on terror, young adult[/tags]

Uncategorized books, cory doctorow, scifi

Celebrated my third fathers day today with a cooked breakfast (and Merlo’s coffee yum!), a new electric shaver (because I’m too busy being a dad to shave more than once a week it seems) and some science fiction that my 3 month old daughter allegedly purchased for me from Pulp Fiction, Brisbane’s leading sci-fi, fantasy and crime / mystery bookshop.

So I now own a hardcover of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother and the paper back of Charles Stross’ Jennifer Morgue (which is a followup to The Atrocity Archives which I reviewed here previously)

Cory Doctorow is interesting. I may have mentioned that all of his books are available for download from his website, I’ve downloaded DRM free mp3 audio books of some of his short stories from there too. He compares his marketing strategy to that of a dandelion which spreads it’s seeds far and wide, caring not where they land yet the sheer volume of those seeds guarantees that some of them will germinate:

I don’t care about making sure that everyone who gets a copy of my books pays me for them — what I care about is ensuring that the everyone who would pay me decent money for a book has the opportunity to do so. I don’t want to hold 13-year-olds by the ankles and shake them until their allowance falls out of their pockets, but I do want to be sure that when their parents are thinking about a gift for them, the first thing that springs to mind is my latest $20-$25 hardcover. (Cory Doctorow Macropayments: Why I don’t have a tip jar)

And that’s exactly what happened this fathers day except it was my 15 week old daughter who knew I was a fan and bought the book for me and I am more thirty than thirteen.

[tags]charles stross, cory doctorow, fathers day, jennifer morgue, little brother[/tags]

Uncategorized books, cory doctorow, fatherhood, scifi

Last night I finished reading Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow. I had gone into Pulp Fiction last week to grab Little Brother but they had sold out so I thought I’d get an idea of Doctorow’s style in this book. (Actually if I had been so inclined, I could have just downloaded the book from his website for free as he seems to release all his books this way)

With this book I was expecting a fairly straightforward urban tech novel maybe similar to what William Gibson has been writing lately which is just a totally wrong assumption. Doctorow’s style in this novel is possibly more of an experimental partial post-modern deconstruction or something. Or maybe it’s allegorical, I don’t know. The book has a fairly straightforward plot if your exclude the main character. It’s about a share house and a neighbourhood wireless mesh starting up. Then this weird main character is dropped into it who seems to have stepped out of a badly remembered dream. As the story progresses, even more weirdness is revealed. But somehow the story is really compelling and I had to keep reading just to see if any of it was going to be explained. I was pretty happy with the ending and might have enjoyed the book more had I known beforehand that it was going to be pretty weird.

[tags]science fiction, cory doctorow, books[/tags]

books books, cory doctorow, scifi