Podcast – Cory Doctorow's craphound.com

Here’s part two of “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.” Lots of good news about this story: first of all, I’ve finished writing it, last week on the plane between London and NYC. Secondly, the story has been sold to Eric Flint for Baen’s Universe, a pay-for-download, DRM-free electronic magazine, and will appear in the second issue. I’ll be podcasting the rest of this over the next couple weeks.

I’ve started my next podcasting series of fiction-in-progress. This time I’m reading “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” a new story about an apocalypse that arrives on the heels of a catastrophic Internet worm. When the trump sounds, the world’s systems administrators are all in their sealed data-centers, and so they survive the carnage. He piloted the car into the data-center lot, badging in and peeling up a bleary eyelid to let the retinal scanner get a good look at his sleep-depped eyeball. He stopped at the machine to get himself a guarana/modafinil power-bar and a cup of lethal robot-coffee in a spill-proof clean-room sippy-cup. He wolfed down the bar and sipped the coffee, then let the inner door read his hand-geometry and size him up for a moment. It sighed open and gusted the airlock’s load of positively pressurized air over him as he passed finally to the inner sanctum. It was bedlam. The cages were designed to let two or three sysadmins maneuver around them at a time. Every other inch of cubic space was given over to humming racks of servers and routers and drives. Jammed among them were no fewer than twenty other sysadmins. It was a regular convention of black tee-shirts with inexplicable slogans, bellies overlapping belts with phones and multitools. Normally it was practically freezing in the cage, but all those bodies were overheating the small, enclosed space. Five or six looked up and grimaced when he came through. Two greeted him by name. He threaded his belly through the press and the cages, toward the Ardent racks in the back of the room. Here’s the part 1 MP3

Here is the ninth and concluding installment of After the Siege, the story I’ve been podcasting since September. I wrote the ending last week in a hotel room in Geneva, but didn’t get the chance to record it until I got back to London today — forgot to pack my mic! Next up is my story-in-progress “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” which I’ll start reading later this week.

Here’s the MP3 for installment 8 of “After the Siege.” I’ve read right to the end of the writing to date and will be back with the next installment once I’ve written it!

Here’s installment number seven (MP3) of After the Siege. I’m into the home stretch, both writing and reading this. I got a couple thousand words written this afternoon — home sick with killer flu — and am hopeful that I’ll finish the whole first draft this week…

I’ve just uploaded the sixth of my podcasts (MP3) of After the Siege. I’ve caved to popular demand and bought a nice Sennheiser USB headset and the audio quality is about 10 million times higher than before. BTW, if you’re into getting these at other bitrates or in OGG format, you can get them from the this bookmarked search on the amazing Internet Archive, where these are hosted.

Here’s the MP3 of me reading installment five of After the Siege — back in London, with a slight sniffle. Argh. Got lots of the story written on the plane last night, though. Update: This recording cuts off mid-sentence! Whups! I’ll pick it up where I left off the next time I record. I believe that the reason the hiss cuts out midway on this recording is that’s where my laptop’s fan switched itself off. If I can figure out how to keep it from switching itself on in future, I’ll do so.

Here’s the fourth installment of me reading my story After the Siege — get the MP3.

Here’s part three of “After the Siege” as an MP3, 12+ minutes recorded at 5:21 AM in a friend’s guestroom in Portland before driving to HP to give a talk on DRM.

I’ve just recorded and uploaded part two of “After the Siege” in MP3 form (there will be a couple days’ delay while I wait for the Internet Archive to clear the recording). For what it’s worth, the story was recorded with my Powerbook while sitting up in bed in a friend’s spare room in Portland, moments before showering and heading out.