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This week on my podcast, it’s our annual Daddy-Daughter Podcast, a tradition since 2012! The kid’s sixteen now, a senior in high school and getting ready to head off to university next year, so this may well be the final installment in the series.
Here are the previous year’s installments: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.
This week on my podcast, I read the sixth and final installment of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original. Spill will be reprinted in Allen Kaster’s 2025 Year’s Best SF on Earth.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
This week on my podcast, I read part five of “Spill“, a new Little Brother story commissioned by Clay F Carlson and published on Reactor, the online publication of Tor Books. Also available in DRM-free ebook form as a Tor Original.
I didn’t plan to go to Oklahoma, but I went to Oklahoma.
My day job is providing phone tech support to people in offices who use my boss’s customer-relationship management software. In theory, I can do that job from anywhere I can sit quietly on a good Internet connection for a few hours a day while I’m on shift. It’s a good job for an organizer, because it means I can go out in the field and still pay my rent, so long as I can park a rental car outside of a Starbucks, camp on their WiFi, and put on a noise-canceling headset. It’s also good organizer training because most of the people who call me are angry and confused and need to have something difficult and technical explained to them.
My comrades started leaving for Oklahoma the day the Water Protector camp got set up. A lot of them—especially my Indigenous friends—were veterans of the Line 3 Pipeline, the Dakota Access Pipeline, and other pipeline fights, and they were plugged right into that network.
The worse things got, the more people I knew in OK. My weekly affinity group meeting normally had twenty people at it. One week there were only ten of us. The next week, three. The next week, we did it on Zoom (ugh) and most of the people on the line were in OK, up on “Facebook Hill,” the one place in the camp with reliable cellular data signals.
My multi-award-winning short story collection Overclocked is now a DRM-free audiobook, courtesy of Downpour.com. more
Mikael Vejdemo-Johansson converted my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (from the collection Overclocked) into .mobi and .epub for easy viewing on an e-reader or mobile device. I probably get more fan mail for Sysadmins than for any other story, and it won the Locus Award the year it came out (it was later adapted to comics by JC Vaughn for the IDW book Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now). Give it a read!
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This is pretty cool: Berlin’s C-base hackerspace has spawned a theatre troupe called C-artre. They’ve produced a theatrical adaptation of my short story “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth” (from my collection Overclocked) and they’re staging it later this month at Berlin’s Transmediale festival.
Josh Swinehart made this cute procedural movie using my story Printcrime as a script. Cool!
Fernando Orbis, a reader in Spain, was inspired to translate my story I, Robot (from my collection Overclocked) into European Spanish. He says he did it to practice, and “because when I tried to find a translation in your website to share it with some friends that do not know enough English I did not find any and neither I found your book ‘Overclocked’ edited in Spanish.” Gracias, Fernando!
Arturo Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, Detective de Policía de Tercer Grado, Esfera NorteAmericana de Comercio, Tercer Distrito, Cuarta Prefectura, Segunda División (Parkdale) había tenido muchas aventuras en su distinguida carrera, atrapando a sinvergüenzas con una imbatible combinación de instinto y devoción al deber sin restricciones. Había sido condecorado en tres ocasiones distintas por su comandante y por el Gerente Regional de Armonía Social, y su madre mantenía un altar dedicado a sus recortes de prensa y menciones que ocupaba la mayoría de la atiborrada sala de estar de su apartamento en Steeles Avenue.
Aunque ninguna cantidad de técnica o devoción policial le era de utilidad en la tarea de de preparar a su hija de doce años para ir al colegio.
—Mueve el culo, jovencita, fuera de la cama, en pie, cagar-ducharse-afeitarse, o juro por dios que te sacudo hasta ponerte como un tomate y te saco por la puerta completamente desnuda, ¿capichi?
El montículo bajo las mantas gruñó y siseó.
—Eres un padre terrible—dijo—. Y nunca te he querido.
La voz sonaba indistinta, amortigüada por la almohada.
—Buah buah—dijo Arturo, examinando sus uñas—. Lamentarás haber dicho eso cuando haya muerto de cáncer.
El montículo, cuyo nombre era Ada Trouble Icaza de Arana-Goldberg, echó a un lado las sábanas y se incorporó de un salto.
—¿Te estás muriendo de cáncer? ¿Es cáncer de testículos?—Ada aplaudía y daba grititos de alegría—¿Me puedo quedar con tus cosas?
Over the weekend, two educators wrote to me to tell me about blogs that contain curricular material based on my books.
The first, from Donald Riggs at Drexel College in Philadelphia, contains links and supplementary material for students reading my second short story collection, Overclocked. Donald put the material together because Overclocked was Drexel’s book of the year, given to the entire freshman class (I visited campus in November and met with students, taught a writing program, and gave a lecture). He’s got a ton of good supplementary links and glossaries explaining the technical and genre terms for a lay audience.
The second, from Deborah Menkart at the Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People ’s History project is a recommendation for teachers whose students are working with Howard Zinn’s brilliant “Peoples’ History” books to include Little Brother in their works.
Coming from a family of teachers (both parents, brother) and serving on faculty at two universities at present (Open University, UK and University of Waterloo, Canada), I’m always intensely gratified when educators use my material with their students.
John did a wicked-cool set of data-visualizations of the text of my story Anda’s Game: “I picked terms for the trees that were relevant to the themes of the story – gold, for in-game items and Fahrenheit, which is a clan in the story.”
