Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

I have a short story called “Shannon’s Law” in the new Welcome to Bordertown anthology, the first Bordertown book in decades. I was absolutely delighted to be invited to contribute a story, and had a fun time writing my piece, which is about the application of information theory to the problem of bridging the lands of Faerie with the mundane world. Escape Pod will be podcasting the story shortly as well: The Net’s secret weapon is that it doesn’t care what kind of medium it runs over. It wants to send a packet from A to B, and if parts of the route travel by pigeon, flashing mirrors, or scraps of paper cranked over an alleyway on a clothesline, that’s okay with the Net. All that stuff is slower than firing a laser down a piece of fiber-optic, but it gets the job done. At BINGO, we do all of the above, whatever it takes to drop a node in where a customer will pay for it. Our tendrils wend their way out into the Borderlands. At the extreme edge, I’ve got a manticore trapper on contract to peer into the eyepiece of a fey telescope every evening for an hour. He’s the relay for a kitchen witch near Gryphon Park whose privy has some magick entanglement with the hill where he sits. When we can’t get traffic over Danceland in Soho because the spellboxes that run the amps and the beer fridges are fritzing out our routers, our kitchen witch begins to make mystic passes over her toilet, which show up as purple splotches through the trapper’s eyepiece. He transcribes these—round splotches are zeroes, triangular splotches are ones—in 8-bit bytes, calculates their checksum manually, and sends it back to the witch by means of a spelled lanthorn that he operates with a telegraph key affixed to it with the braided hair of a halfie virgin (Tikigod’s little sister, to be precise). The kitchen witch confirms the checksum, and then he sends it to another relay near the Promenade, where a wharf rat who has been paid handsomely to lay off the river water for the night counts the number of times a tame cricket sings and hits a key on a peecee in time with it. The peecee pops those packets back into the Net, where they are swirled and minced and diced and routed and transformed into coffee, purchase orders, dirty texts, desperate pleas from parents to runaways to come home, desperate pleas from runaways to their parents to send money, and a million Facebook status updates. Mostly, this stuff runs. On average. I mean, in particular, it’s always falling apart for some reason or another. Watch me knock some heads and you’ll get the picture. The heliographer’s tower is high atop The Dancing Ferret. Everyone told me that if Farrel Din could be persuaded to get involved with BINGO, all of Soho would follow, so I did some homework, spread some money around, and then I showed up one day with a wheelbarrow filled with clothbound books that I’d had run up by the kids who put out Stick Wizard. Shannon’s Law Update: The Escape Pod podcast is live! (here’s the MP3)

Here’s part one of my reading of my story-in-progress, Knights of the Rainbow Table, a story commissioned by Intel’s Chief Futurist, Brian David Johnson. Brian oversees Intel’s Tomorrow project, which uses science fiction to spark conversations about product design and use among Intel’s engineers, and he was kind enough to invite me to write a story of my choosing for the project. Intel gets first dibs on putting it online, but that’s it — I retain full creative control and the right to re-use it as I see fit. Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

This week, I’ve read another of my favorite Mark Twain stories, A Petition to the Queen of England, a tax-time gem. Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

Yesterday, I recorded a fun, hour-long chat with Leo Laporte and Tom Merritt on the Triangulation podcast — the audio is linked below, but there’s also video if you’d prefer. MP3 Link

This week, I’ve read another of my favorite Mark Twain stories, The Petrified Man, a perfect April Fool’s season tale of a prank gone wrong. Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

The Beam Me Up podcast (a production of WRFR in Rockland, Maine) has recorded a great reading of my short story Ghosts in My Head. MP3 Link

The BookLending.com podcast did a quick interview with me and Seth Godin for the current episode. MP3 Link

I’m back podcasting after a long post-surgical hiatus. I don’t have any new material to read, so instead, I’ve read one of my favorite comedic Mark Twain stories, Punch, Brothers, Punch. It’s a great little essay about a earworming mind-virus, prefiguring Snow Crash by a century and more! There’s more administrivia than usual in this one as I get caught up. Conductor, when you receive a fare, Punch in the presence of the passenjare! A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare, A pink trip slip for a three-cent fare, Punch in the presence of the passenjare! CHORUS Punch, brothers! punch with care! Punch in the presence of the passenjare! Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link

Socrates from the Singularity Weblog attended my University of Toronto iSchool talk (“A Little Bit Pregnant: Why it’s a Bad Idea to Regulate Computers the Way We Regulate Radios, Guns, Uranium and Other Special-Purpose Tools”) yesterday and was kind enough to record and podcast it with a great write up. Here’s the MP3, too!

I’m taking a hiatus from podcasting while I recuperate from hip surgery; instead, I’ll be posting a couple stories a week from the podcast edition of my DIY short story collection, With a Little Help. I hope you enjoy ’em — I love how these readings came out. You can buy the whole audio on CD in Ogg or MP3 form, buy it in one of four paperback editions, get a limited edition hardcover, donate a copy to a school or library, make a cash donation, and, of course, get the free ebook and free audio download. This installment’s story is Epoch, read by Jesse Brown. Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook. MP3 Link Mastering by John Taylor Williams: wryneckstudio@gmail.com John Taylor Williams is a full-time self-employed audio engineer, producer, composer, and sound designer. In his free time, he makes beer, jewelry, odd musical instruments and furniture. He likes to meditate, to read and to cook.