Reproducing, below, a message sent out on Cory Doctorow's mailing list about his appearance in Locus. I like the man's style. Particularly like the bit about "A lot of things that look like fringe activity, in hindsight will look like mainstream or the precursor to mainstream activity." This is an all together happier and more me-compatible message about the future of reading than the "Walmart Mafia" or "Poor Man's Movie" one.

Locus Magazine has posted an excerpt from the interview they've run
with me as their cover story for January:

        "My dad is a mathematician and teacher and my mom is a teacher,
        and I grew up in a political household: my folks are Trotskyists.
        My dad used to change 'Conan' stories into socialist parables. He
        would change Conan into this gender- and racially-balanced
        threesome called Harry, Larry, and Mary, and on long car trips he
        would retell these half-remembered 'Conan' stories but they would
        all turn into the proletariat casting off their shackles, killing
        the king, and forming soviets! These days, I like to think that I
        haven't moved to the right but at right angles to left-wing
        politics. But listening to his stories probably had something to
        do with my becoming a speculative fiction writer.
       
        "The world changes completely every five or six years, but most
        people don't notice. A lot of things that look like fringe
        activity, in hindsight will look like mainstream or the precursor
        to mainstream activity. While we weren't looking, e-books have
        become the dominant form of text on the planet. What we haven't
        done is create a class of writers who identify what they're doing
        when they produce the text as book writing. How do we create a
        class of well-paid, professional Web writers? Even if we can't,
        there may be a way to create hobby income and continue this
        really amazing Cambrian Explosion of new documents, information,
        articles, and stories that are published on the Web.
       
        "People today spend as much time as they can possibly drag
        themselves away from the real world to sit in front of the screen
        reading text, and I would argue that the text they are reading,
        the thing they are treating like a book, is a book. Our
        definition of the term has gone through radical shifts over the
        years. Dickens's were originally newspaper serials, thousand-word
        chunks.
posted by Lynda at 11:36   comment? e-mail lynda@okalrel.org 0 comments