Cory Doctorow is in Seattle to promote his new novel Little Brother, and thanks to Leslie Howle and Eileen Gunn, Lisa and I got to hang out with him for a bit over the weekend. It was a good time. Cory and I share quite a number of interests, some of which I knew about (SF, copyright law, privacy and security issues, Internet trivia and significa), and some of which I didn’t but could have guessed at (horribly impractical designer Japanese watches, MMORPGs, baroque baby-naming schemes*).
We tagged along to Cory’s reading at the Ballard Public Library (N.B., he’s got one more Seattle-area appearance, 7 PM tonight at the Ravenna Third Place Books, and if you’ve been thinking of going you really should, as he puts on a great show). Afterwards, with a little encouragement from Lisa, I introduced myself to Suzanne Perry, the events coordinator from Secret Garden Books who’d helped arrange Cory’s appearance, and mentioned that (a) I’m now a Ballard local and (b) the paperback of Bad Monkeys is due out in August. The upshot of which is, I’ll probably be appearing at the Ballard Public Library myself sometime this summer.
In the meantime, I’ve already finished Little Brother (more about that later) and am trying to decide which Doctorow book to try next. Suggestions welcome.
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*One minor discussion thread at Leslie Howle’s place was about naming a kid with an eye towards frustrating data collectors, e.g., choosing a name that would function as a command string if transmitted via modem. (Cory noted parenthetically that this particular e.g. was less cool now that modems were disappearing, which leads naturally to the Matt Ruff twist on the idea — saddling some poor child with a defunct command-string name that, because of its uniqueness, makes them much easier to identify and track.)