True Names

Benjamin Rosenbaum (my collaborator on Anthroptic and on a work-in-progress) and Boing Boing's Cory Doctorow (who I coincidentally quoted in Wednesday's blog posting) have just announced the release (via Creative Commons) of a novella: Link, Podcast feed

Cory says about it:

I've just posted the first installment of a podcast reading of a new novella that I co-wrote with Hugo- and Nebula-nominee Benjamin Rosenbaum. The story's a big, 32,000-word piece called "True Names" (in homage to Vernor Vinge's famous story of the same name), and it involves the galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences that are competing to corner the universe's supply of computation before the heat-death of the universe.

Ben and I will be reading the story in weekly installments, taking turns as our schedules allow. The reading is Creative Commons licensed -- Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial -- and the story itself will be published this fall in Fast Forward 2, Lou Anders' followup to his knockout 2007 anthology, Fast Forward (regular Boing Boing readers will remember Paul Di Filippo's Wikiworld story from that volume). Lou's given us permission to post the story's text simultaneous with the book's publication, under the same Creative Commons license.

I had a nearly illegal amount of fun working on this story with Ben, who is a gonzo comp-sci geek with a real flair for phrasing, and I hope you'll enjoy hearing it as much as we enjoyed writing it! Link, Podcast feed

Ben's announcement:

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).