Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Roy Trumbull (who previously recorded a free podcast of my story The Super Man and the Bugout) has just recorded another podcast, this time of my story Craphound, my first-ever professional publication. It’s a nostalgic story about aliens who come to earth for our yardsales and the humans whom they befriend. It’s the third audio adaptation so far, and it sounds great. Roy’s a terrific reader. Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him — respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months’ rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound. So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth. Craphound spotted the sign — his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC’s summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: “The Shadow,” “Quiet Please,” “Tom Mix,” “The Crypt-Keeper” with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound’s breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said “Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!” Craphound on Internet Archive, MP3 download See also: Super Man and the Bugout reading: what if Superman had been a nice Jewish boy from Toronto

Tor.com has just published a new story of mine, “The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away” (the title is from “The Future Soon,” a Jonathan Coulton song), which is about geek monasteries that house smart people who can’t get along in the world and put them to work as coders. The story is the first Tor.com piece to be Creative Commons licensed and you’re encouraged to remix it, translate it, whatever. There’s already a podcast of me reading the story (also CC licensed) and PDF, Mobipocket and Sony reader files are already available. Lawrence’s cubicle was just the right place to chew on a thorny logfile problem: decorated with the votive fetishes of his monastic order, a thousand calming, clarifying mandalas and saints devoted to helping him think clearly. From the nearby cubicles, Lawrence heard the ritualized muttering of a thousand brothers and sisters in the Order of Reflective Analytics, a susurration of harmonized, concentrated thought. On his display, he watched an instrument widget track the decibel level over time, the graph overlaid on a 3D curve of normal activity over time and space. He noted that the level was a little high, the room a little more anxious than usual. He clicked and tapped and thought some more, massaging the logfile to see if he could make it snap into focus and make sense, but it stubbornly refused to be sensible. The data tracked the custody chain of the bitstream the Order munged for the Securitat, and somewhere in there, a file had grown by 68 bytes, blowing its checksum and becoming An Anomaly. Order lore was filled with Anomalies, loose threads in the fabric of reality—bugs to be squashed in the data-set that was the Order’s universe. Starting with the pre-Order sysadmin who’d tracked a $0.75 billing anomaly back to foreign spy-ring that was using his systems to hack his military, these morality tales were object lessons to the Order’s monks: pick at the seams and the world will unravel in useful and interesting ways. The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away, MP3 link

Roy Trumbull has performed an excellent reading of my short story The Super Man and the Bugout — a story about Superman as a Jewish boy raised in Toronto’s suburbs, put out of work by the arrival of benevolent aliens who welcome Earth to the Galactic Federation. MP3 Link

I recorded an interview with the libertarian podcast Free Talk Live earlier this week and they’ve just popped it on the air. I’ve never really done an interview where I ended up debating socialized medicine. MP3 Link

Craphound, the first short story I ever published in a professional market, has been turned into a fine little audio reading by Literal Systems (using the Creative Commons license), read by Rosalia Triana. Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him — respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months’ rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound. So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth. Craphound spotted the sign — his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC’s summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: “The Shadow,” “Quiet Please,” “Tom Mix,” “The Crypt-Keeper” with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound’s breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said “Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!” Link, MP3 Link (Thanks, Bri!)

I recorded this interview last year when I was the Guest of Honor at Orycon in Portland, but it didn’t go live until today. It’s a little different from my normal interview. MP3 Link

Here’s part five of Subterranean Press’s free podcast of my story After the Siege, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novella of 2008 last night in Seattle, read by the wonderful sf writer (and talented voice actor) Mary Robinette Kowal. MP3 Link

Here’s part four of Subterranean Press’s free podcast of my story After the Siege, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novella of 2008 last night in Seattle, read by the wonderful sf writer (and talented voice actor) Mary Robinette Kowal. MP3 Link

Here’s part three of Subterranean Press’s free podcast of my story After the Siege, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novella of 2008 last night in Seattle, read by the wonderful sf writer (and talented voice actor) Mary Robinette Kowal. MP3 Link

Here’s part two of Subterranean Press’s free podcast of my story After the Siege, which won the Locus Award for best science fiction novella of 2008 last night in Seattle, read by the wonderful sf writer (and talented voice actor) Mary Robinette Kowal. MP3 Link