Cory's novel is out!

By Cory Doctorow at 11:56 pm Sunday, Jun 19 • Comments • Share

Last week, my third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town started turning up in bookstores. It's another fine Tor hardcover, with jaw-droppingly beautiful cover art by genius Dave McKean to boot. This is a physical artifact worth owning. Hell, buy two.

As with my first and second novels, I've posted the entire text of this book online under a Creative Commons license that allows the unlimited, noncommercial redistribution of the text. You can send it around, paste it into a chat, beam it to a friend's PDA, or print out a chapter to hand out in the university common room. Like Woody Guthrie said, "Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do."

The whole point of giving away electronic books is to experiment with electronic text and spot where the new opportunities for earning a writer's living lie -- working with my audience, not against them. So with every release, I've tried some experimentation. This book is no exception.

This book is the first novel to employ the new Creative Commons Developing Nations License. That's a license that lets anyone living in a country that's not on the World Bank's list of high-income countries treat the book as if it were in the public domain. If you live in a developing nation, you can print your own editions of this book and sell them, you can make your own movies, radio plays, translations and whatever else you can think of, charge whatever the traffic will bear for them, and never give me a penny or ask my permission (though I hope you'll drop me a line and let me know what you're up to so I can keep up on the book's spread!). The only limitation on this right is that you may only export your works to other developing nations: the rich nations where my paying customers live are strictly off-limits.

I'm doing three signings for Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in the first two weeks of July. The first two are in the Detroit region (I'm spending July 4 week in East Lansing, Michigan teaching at the Clarion Writers' Workshop), and the third is in Toronto, at BakkaPhoenix books, the oldest sf bookstore in the country, where I once worked. I hope to see you at these!

July 5, 7PM: Archives Bookshop, 517 West Grand River, East Lansing, MI, 48823, (517)332-8444

July 7, 7:30PM: Schuler Books and Music, 1982 West Grand River Avenue, Okemos, MI, 48864, (517)349-8840

July 11, 7PM: BakkaPhoenix Books, 697 Queen St West, Toronto, ON, M6J 1E6, (416)963-9993

Also, Second Life players can attend an in-game signing on Sunday, July 24 at 2pm PDT/5pm EDT/10pm London time.

Here's the spanking-new website for the book. I hope you'll spare a moment to take a look. This is the longest thing I've ever written, and the early reviews have been stunning. I'm as proud of this as I could be, and I sincerely hope you enjoy it:

SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you've ever read.

- Gene Wolfe

Mauritius to be fully unwired island paradise

By Cory Doctorow at 11:51 pm Sunday, Jun 19 • Comments • Share

Manish sez, "The island paradise of Mauritius plans on being the first island with end-to-end WiFi coverage. They just flipped the switch on the first phase."

The government "wants to create a cyber-island but they haven't changed their regulation and infrastructure enough to create the climate," Rahim said. If Mauritius doesn't act quickly, he warned, it may well see its cyber-island idea stolen by competitor countries...

Still, Mauritius' courts have shown signs of holding the government to its competitiveness policies, which may ease the way for future investors.

"If any investor had called me three months ago and asked about investing, I would have told them to go somewhere else," Rahim said. Now, he said, "you have to come in with open eyes and an African mentality of patience, but if you persevere you can get results."

Link (Thanks, Manish!)

Rotting Soviet buildings

By Cory Doctorow at 11:30 pm Sunday, Jun 19 • Comments • Share

Abandoned.ru has galleries of explorations of rotting Soviet-era buildings, from educational institutes to radio telescopes to cement plants in the Moscow countryside. Link (via We Make Money Not Art)

Roy Lichtenstein's source material

By David Pescovitz at 11:15 pm Sunday, Jun 19 • Comments • Share

Here's a gallery of pop artist Roy Lichtenstein's paintings beside the original source images he culled from comics. Link (Thanks, Seth Benson!)

Priest crucifies nun

By David Pescovitz at 10:57 pm Sunday, Jun 19 • Comments • Share

Romanian Orthodox priest Father Daniel Corogeanu and four nuns have been charged with murder after ordering another nun who was "possessed by the devil" and "beyond salvation" to be crucified. The nun, Maricica Irina Cornici, was found dead and chained to a cross last Wednesday. A member of the Holy Trinity order in the village of Tanacu, Sister Irina reportedly was imprisoned after arguing with the priest during a Sunday mass. From the Telegraph:

During a short funeral service at the weekend attended by 13 nuns who showed no emotion, Father Corogeanu said: "God has performed a miracle for her, finally Irina is delivered from evil."

Romanian reporters present at the ceremony said strangle marks were clearly visible on the corpse, which lay in an open casket.

Claps of thunder were heard as the coffin was lowered into the ground, a sign "that the will of God has been done", Father Corogeanu said...

Sister Irina joined the order three months ago, after visiting a friend who lived there.

According to medical reports she had been treated for schizophrenia.

Link (Thanks, Vann Hall!)

An $18,000 bar of soap

By David Pescovitz at 12:12 pm Sunday, Jun 19 • Comments • Share

A bar of soap sold for $18,000 this week at Art Basel, a massive international art fair in Switzerland. Gianni Motti's soap artwork was purportedly fabricated from fat formerly belonging to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. From Ananova:

The artist said: "Berlusconi had face lifting and liposuction operations in a clinic in Lugano, where I have good connections that provided me with some of the fat. It was jelly-like and it stunk horribly, like butter gone off or old chip pan oil."

According to Motti, the artwork called Mani Pulite (which means "clean hands" in Italian) expresses opposition to corruption and mafia structures in Italy, as well as his personal opinion of Berlusconi's policies.

Link to Anonova article, Link to Reuters article mentioning the sale (with Motti's name misspelled)