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.
Blackstone has adapted my 2005 urban fantasy novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town for audiobook, narrated by Bronson Pinchot, who does a stunning job.
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HarperVoyager, my UK publisher, have just published British editions of the three novels they didn’t already have in print: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. There’s also a UK paperback edition of Makers out this week.
I’m going to be celebrating all these UK launches at Clerkenwell Tales in London on July 20, in an event with China Mieville, chaired by English PEN’s Robert Sharp. The event’s set for 7PM and space is limited (though attendance is free). Email Clerkenwell Tales to RSVP.
Dave Holowiski sez, “I used my Mac’s text to speech to turn your book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town into 43 MP3s. Then I put them up on a WordPress site set to post a new one every three days. Then I submitted the RSS feed to iTunes. So I turned your book into a computer-read podcast. The web site is here, the RSS feed is here.
36 weeks ago — give or take — I set out to read my 2005 novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town aloud, in installments, in my podcast. And now I am done.
Someone Comes to Town is my weirdest book by far, a fantasy novel about a man whose father is a mountain and whose mother is a washing machine, who moves from small-town Ontario to Toronto to help build a citywide meshing wireless network with a crustypunk dumpster-diver.
Reading the book aloud was enormously satisfying. I hadn’t read it through since I finished the final draft in 2004, and in many ways it was like coming back to it for the first time.
But even more satisfying was the participation from my readers. First there was John Taylor Williams, of DC’s Wryneck Studios, who volunteered to master the audio for me, adding bed-music, editing out the gonks, and making it sound really good — he started this around week 27, and it seriously improved the final 9 episodes.
Then Glenn Jones, a reader in the UK, decided to create a dedicated podcast feed for the book, with all 36 episodes, to make it easy to fetch and play in one gulp.
Im not sure what I’ll podcast next — I have a little more than a week to think about it — but I’m really looking forward to it.
Podcast feed for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
David Wallace Jackson wrote a script that randomly changes the names of the characters in my 2005 Tor Books novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town — a book in which the characters’ names fluctuate, with only their first initials remaining constant. It’s an absolutely delightful idea!
Web Webster writes, “Enjoying the podcast of Someone Comes To Town Someone Leaves Town. Excellent hearing it read by the author and I’m amazed at how much I didn’t pick up the first time I read it. Wanted to share a link to a Flickr set I shot this weekend. We went to Smithville, Tennessee to The Joe C. Evins Center for Craft and its annual Celebration. In wandering through the Ceramics building I ran across a set of pieces that immediately recalled the Golems from Someone.”
Pavol Hvizdos just finished translating two of my works into Slovak, releasing the translations under Creative Commons licenses and putting them on the Internet Archive. Pavol chose my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and my short story Truncat (a sequel, of sorts, to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom). This is way too cool.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Slovakian,
