My novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, has made the Amazon and Chapters/Indigo editors' picks lists for best science fiction novels of 2003. Also, it's only three recommendations short of making the preliminary Nebula ballot (any SFWA members out there who dug the book?). Oh yah, and the Livejournal people are considering adding Whuffie to their system. Killer news, all 'round. (Thanks, Amanda and Bo and Micah!)

"Left Behind" is an immensely popular science fiction series about the sinners left behind on earth after good Christians are swept up in the rapture. Over at Slacktivist, a blogger has been dissecting the book in two- and three-page chunks, tearing apart the assumptions, fallacies and curiously compelling heresies in the story.

Charlie Stross and I just finished "Appeals Court," the sequel to Jury Service, which Argosy magazine will publish bound together in January, in a fix-up novel called "Rapture of the Nerds." "Appeals Court" is, in part, a response to "Left Behind": a story about a world where the only hominids who haven't ascended to the post-human cloudmind are reactionaries, missionaries, and religious fundamentalists.

Here's a little chunk of "Appeals Court," so you can see what I mean:

The ant-colony has taken the entire Atlantic coast of the US, has marched on Georgia and west to the Mississippi. It is an anarchist colony, whose females lay eggs without regard for any notional Queen, and it has entered its eighth year of life, which is middle-aged for a normal colony, but may be just the beginning for the Hypercolony.

The God-botherers have no treaty with the ants, but have come to view them as another proof of the impending end of the world. Anything that is not contained in chink-free, seamless plastic and rock is riddled in ant-tunnels within hours. They've learned to establish airtight seals around their homes and workplaces, to subject themselves to stinging insecticide showers before clearing a vestibule, to listen for the tupperware burp whenever they seal their children in their space-suits and send them off to Bible classes.

The ants have eaten their way through most of the nematode species beneath the soil, compromised all but the most plasticized root-systems of the sickening flora (the gasoline refining forests are curiously symbiotic with the colony -- anarchist supercolonies like living cheek-by-mouth-part with a lot of hydocarbons). They've eaten the bee-hives and wasp-nests, and they've laid waste to any comestible not tinned and sealed, leaving the limping Americans with naught but a few billion tons of processed food to eat before their supply bottoms out.

The American continent is a fairy tale that the cloudmind tells itself whenever it doubts its collective decision to abandon humanity. The left-behinds there spent their lives waiting for an opportunity to pick up a megaphone and organize crews with long poles to go digging through the ruins of civilization for tinned goods. Presented with their opportunity in the aftermath of the Geek Rapture, they are happy as evangelical pigs in shit -- plenty to rail against, plenty of fossil fuel, plenty of firearms.

What more could they possibly need?

and here's Slacktivist on "Left Behind":

The first words of Left Behind are "Rayford Steele," the protagonist's name.

It sounds like a porn star's name -- and in a sense it is. The Left Behind series is dispensational porno, but it's more than that. One of the most disturbing things about this book is the way LaHaye and Jenkins portray men, women and the relationships between them.

Note that Tim LaHaye's wife is something of a professional misogynist. She runs the 500,000-member "Concerned Women for America" -- jokingly referred to by its critics as "Ladies Against Women." For years, while Beverly LaHaye's husband pastored a church in San Diego, Mrs. L. spent most of her time 3,000 miles away, in Washington, D.C., running a large organization committed to, among other things, telling women they should stay at home and sacrifice their careers for their husbands. She is not an ironic woman and doesn't seem to find any of this inconsistent. (Nor, as I found out firsthand, does she appreciate jokes about the Freudian implications of the view from her L'Enfante Plaza office window. Sometimes the Washington Monument is just a cigar.)

Link (Thanks, Kathryn!)

Voting By Design is a "Knowledge Map" and report on how design affects the voting process. Link

Aaron Swartz has started a blog to record and discuss "alternative compensation schemes" -- business models for music in the era of P2P nets.

Here's the proposal in a nutshell: Some group of people pay a small fee (like a couple dollars a month). In return, they can download whatever they want, however they want. We track what is downloaded and then distribute the money received, in proportion, to the people responsible for the songs. Everybody wins: users get all the music they want, software developers can continue innovating, and the industry gets paid.

Link

The Walgreens-branded PureDigital camera is a "disposable" digital cam, requiring that you bring the device to a Walgreens to have your pix "developed" (printed and/or exported). A hacker has cracked the device, so that you can add Smartmedia memory and export pictures to your PC at home, reusing the camera.

you will see there is a daughter board on there with the nand flash for picture storage .. if you remove that board you can add a smartmedia socket and using smartmedia card you will be able to get the pics with a smartmedia reader standard jpg's but it will not do more that 25 pics still (think its using fat12)..

Slashdotted Link, Mirror Link, Another Mirror (via /.)

Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wikis, is taking a job at Microsoft: he's put up a wiki page to solicit advice for surviving there.

You can have a huge impact on Microsoft's culture. Push yourself to the max. Prepare the family -- working at Microsoft is fun and I went overboard. Sometimes the family doesn't understand. Take days to yourself. Try to build friendships and get a mentor or two. That'll help.

Link (via Many2Many)

Killer gallery of geeky tattoos. Link (via Geisha Asobi)

Kevin Werbach points out that social networking sites like LinkedIn and Tribe and so forth have very little to offer highly connected people like Esther Dyson, who would nevertheless be a real asset to the network:

Esther and Pierre don't need LinkedIn to reach pretty much anyone they want to contact. Yet there are a whole lot of folks who want to reach them, and don't have a personal connection to do so. So the service worsens their email overload with little corresponding benefit.

Link

The T-Cube is a new tiny, orange, cubic PC intended for sale in China. It runs some whacky OS called T-Engine. Link (via Gizmodo)

Everquest has added a virtual casino to its gamespace:

The casino is a game of chance. To play you will need to buy a token from one of the wait staff in the casino. You can then take this token to one of the dealers and hand it in to him. There are four different dealers, each with prizes suitable for the different class types. When you turn the token in, he will deal you a hand of King's Court. Based on what your hand turned out to be, you will be awarded a prize. The chance to win a Gold Ticket exists on every hand you play. If you win the Gold Ticket you can turn it in to the manager of the casino and he will spin a grand prize wheel. The number the wheel lands on will determine the item you receive. There are many prestigious items that you can obtain from the ticket turn-in. Some of them are the Guise of the Deceiver, Fungus Covered Great Staff, and Holgresh Elder Beads. There are many more, and we also have intentions of adding more prizes in later patches if the games are popular.

Link (via Terra Nova)

A conversation this weekend got me to thinking about this old Wired article from March 2000, "It's Good to Be King." The piece is about obsessives who create "countries" by declaring their bedrooms or homes to be sovereign states, and then start issuing passports, attracting adherents, and generally ruling. Just re-read it, and it's as striking as it was when I first found it three years ago:

Some claim physical territory - the family farm, a square foot of Scottish fen, the bottom of the ocean, or, in Talossa's case, the east side of Milwaukee plus a chunk of Antarctica and a small island off the coast of France - but none would actually take power even if it were offered to them. Most feature a founder with the requisite lofty title, and almost all make their home, in one form or another, on the Web...

An entire subcategory of micronations owes its existence to adolescent alienation. These empires of angst betray themselves in one of two ways - either with hackneyed origin myths, usually involving benevolent sultans and distant tropical seas, or with paranoid rants against authority punctuated by proclamations of universal domination and reprinted Rage Against the Machine lyrics. Though almost all teen kingdoms claim legions of subjects, more often than not, populace, ruler, and disaffected youth are one and the same. The Kingdom of Triparia (www.triparia.cx), founded in 1998, is a classic of the genre: 17 citizens, with fancy titles and a penchant for posting overintellectualized bulletin-board messages, united in an act of collective imagination.

Link

Hyaku Yen, a Japanese dollar-store, has begun to open shops in North America.

At its Aberdeen store, at Hazelbridge and Cambie Road, 45,000 items will initially be sold at $2 Cdn each. These are to include cosmetics, gardening tools, household goods, soft drinks, snack food and stationery.

"A public survey in Japan showed Daiso-Sangyo as being the second most recognizable brand-name retailer after Disney World in Tokyo," Fairchild chairman and CEO Thomas Fung said Tuesday. "They ranked ahead of famous brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Sony, Toyota and Starbucks."

Link (Thanks, [sorry, deleted your name]!)

Here's a creepily magnificent gallery of portraits of Michael Jackson, painted by an obsessive fan who sends her work to MJ and sells prints on the Interweb. Link (Thanks, Johannes!)