This week I was lucky enough to join scifi writers Cory Doctorow and JC Hutchins, along with scifi podcaster Steve Eley, to talk about the future of media - and especially scifi media. Our host was Small World podcaster Bazooka Joe, who asked some great questions. Not only did Doctorow get to describe his ideal ebook reader, but I got to talk about the future of online media. It was a damn good time.

Here's how Bazooka Joe described the show:

We live in a world that increasingly resembles the science fiction stories of our youth.

For example, nearly all of us have mobile phones that are very much like the communicators that appeared in the Star Trek television series in the late 60s . . . But if we are living in a world that seems straight out of a science fiction novel, then how is our current technology changing science fiction?

We'll explore that question on today's Small World.

We'll talk with Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing fame and author of his recent book, Makers, about eReaders and digital rights management. We'll also talk with Annalee Newitz, the editor-in-chief of the io9, a blog focuses on science fiction and futurism, about how we'll get our media tomorrow. J.C. Hutchins, the author and podcaster of 7th Son, will talk about the changing role of publishers and content creators. Steve Eley, the founder of the Escape Pod science fiction short story podcast, will talk about the possible demise of science fiction magazines.

Take a listen here!

Image via EON Reality.

Of course, right now it looks pretty basic: All it seems to do is tell you how many times someone on Twitter has mentioned you lately. Soon it'll tell you how many people on Facebook have done something or other. But it's just ramping up, and there are big plans. Eventually you'll "get a monthly salary based on your reputation. Whuffie is the world's first social currency."

Where will this money come from? Hard to say. Already, the Whuffie Bank is one of TechCrunch's Top 50 innovative startups of 2009. The biggest flaw in this plan, though, is that Doctorow's novel takes place in a largely post-scarcity world, and I don't quite think we're there yet. [The Whuffie Bank via ThreeFivesUp]

Roth has declared the novel all but doomed, saying that within 25 years, its audience will have dwindled to a "cultic" minority, going the way of Latin poetry and similar archaic art forms. The issue, he says, is that books simply can't compete with television and other screen-based entertainment.

He said it was "the print that's the problem, it's the book, the object itself". "To read a novel requires a certain amount of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks you don't read the novel really. So I think that kind of concentration and focus and attentiveness is hard to come by – it's hard to find huge numbers of people, large numbers of people, significant numbers of people, who have those qualities," he said.

Of course, others don't have such dire predictions for the fate of written literature. Just a few weeks ago, we spoke to writer Cory Doctorow about the future of the novel, and his view was that the web actually increases interest in and access to print novels.

Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult within 25 years [Guardian via Bookninja]

io9: How did you do research for Makers?

CD: Most of the stuff I write I haven't set out to research. I live the life I live, and out of it comes the books I write. I hang out in hacker spaces and that inspired me to write this book.

Were you thinking about MAKE: magazine when you worked on the novel?

Makers predates MAKE. I had an idea about doing a book on amusement parks and merchandising. I was revisiting some of my fanboy stuff in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Because of that book, I have a sizable audience of people who work in Disney theme parks. So I'd hang out with them. I'd hang out with imagineers. I got to see the inside of the Disney culture, and that was part of the inspiration for this novel.

In terms of research, I'm doing a book now called For The Win and I knew a lot of action would be in the Pacific Rim in the subcontinent. So I went to China and India. I tend to get super obsessively geeky about stuff I'm interested in just as a matter of course. The stuff I'm chasing for BoingBoing I get deep on anyway. Facts are cheap. The zeitgeist is hard to absorb, and that's what you get from reporting and dropping in on people's spaces.

What is your opinion about the future of books? Is print dying?

I'm the contrarian – I don't think print is dying out at all. I'm a Kindle skeptic and ebook reader skeptic. My hypothesis is that it's harder to do one thing at a time with a computer. It's hard to consume a novel in 5 minute snippets punctuated by RSS checking. And ebook readers will have those functions. I don't think that supports novel reading.

We won't have custom-tailored electronics for novels, so no I don't think ebook will rise. We'll read books with things like Android, mobiles that are general purpose computers. I do pleasure reading in places where it's not practical to bring out an ebook reader anyway.

I look forward to the rise of the device untethered to the phone company. The mobile continues to be uninteresting because the entrenched players don't want truly disruptive, generative devices in their chain.

Do you think that the move toward reading on mobiles will mean that the novel dies out as an art form? What will be the next form?

Think of it this way. You start with a single textual medium, and then somebody invents newspapers. Then you have another new medium, and it's peeled off into magazines and zines. There are stories lurking in potentia that are sui generis to networked devices. We know that they don't require protracted attention. They have to be designed to be copied and they probably don't require that you consume all of them. Maybe they're like ARGs and soaps. ARGs have the economics of films and the audiences of novels. They require a deep level of engagement.

That's great for some audiences, but like Lost they lose their way. One of the things about mystery series: they have to get weirder. At the end of the season they have to hit a cliffhanger where a secret will be revealed. But if they get renewed they can't reveal it. So the audience gets smaller and weirder. And it's harder to join that audience. You can't reboot the complexity.

Novels are competing for attention with other media that can be peeled off from them. At the same time, novels are social objects and the web is social technology. My novels diffuse through the web in what tends to be a social context. I get new downloads because a bunch of Livejournal people are discussing it. The web makes it easier for people who love books to turn those books into part of their identities. That makes people buy books more. And it's cheaper to make them, as well as easier to get direct compensation.

So as for the future of the novel - it's both dying and not dying. You win some new readers, and you lose some.

You can pre-order Makers via Amazon, or read it for free online. Tor.com is serializing the whole novel, posting a new free chapter every week. Check it out here.

Image by Idiots' Books.

Probably the biggest surprise was Best Novel winner, Neil Gaiman's Graveyard Book, which defeated Neal Stephenson'sAnathem, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, Charles Stross' Saturn's Children and John Scalzi's Zoe's Tale. Nancy Kress also professed to be surprised that her novella "The Edrmann Nexus" won the Best Novella award, but nobody else seemed that startled. The most moving speech of the night was probably David Anthony Durham, who won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer. He talked about how he had achieved some success as a literary writer, but felt that he needed to be true to science fiction, since the genre had gotten him through some hard times and had made him want to be a writer in the first place.

Here's the official list of winners, from the Hugo site, and our gallery (including Neil Gaiman licking his Hugo rocket!) is below:

Best Novel: The Graveyard Book, Neil Gaiman (HarperCollins; Bloomsbury UK)
Best Novella: "The Erdmann Nexus", Nancy Kress (Asimov's Oct/Nov 2008)
Best Novelette: "Shoggoths in Bloom", Elizabeth Bear (Asimov's Mar 2008)
Best Short Story: "Exhalation", Ted Chiang (Eclipse Two)
Best Related Book: Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008, John Scalzi (Subterranean Press)
Best Graphic Story: Girl Genius, Volume 8: Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones, Written by Kaja & Phil Foglio, art by Phil Foglio, colors by Cheyenne Wright (Airship Entertainment)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form: WALL-E Andrew Stanton & Pete Docter, story; Andrew Stanton & Jim Reardon, screenplay; Andrew Stanton, director (Pixar/Walt Disney)
Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form: Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, Joss Whedon, & Zack Whedon, & Jed Whedon, & Maurissa Tancharoen, writers; Joss Whedon, director (Mutant Enemy)
Best Editor Short Form: Ellen Datlow
Best Editor Long Form: David G. Hartwell
Best Professional Artist: Donato Giancola
Best Semiprozine: Weird Tales, edited by Ann VanderMeer & Stephen H. Segal
Best Fan Writer: Cheryl Morgan
Best Fanzine: Electric Velocipede edited by John Klima
Best Fan Artist: Frank Wu
And the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer (presented by Dell Magazines): David Anthony Durham

That's the thing that jumped out at me in this article in The Kansan newspaper. Both Doctorow and MacLeod are chuffed to be receiving the Campbell, one of the few juried awards for science fiction novels. (MacLeod also won the Clarke Award, another juried award.) But then MacLeod tells the newspaper that Song Of Time "is being reconsidered for U.S. publication" in the wake of the award. That's somewhat startling, since it already won the Clarke Award and is being touted as a literary gem. Just how many awards does a book have to receive before a U.S. pubilsher picks it up?

Congrats also to James Alan Gardner, who won the Theodore Sturgeon Award for his short story"Ray-Gun: A Love Story." [The Kansan]

I was lucky enough to score an early copy of Makers from Cory a few months ago, and it's a fun, smart thought experiment that basically asks the question: What if the people who read MAKE: magazine became activists who wanted to subvert more than licensing agreements? In a near future of economic collapse, unemployed hardware hackers start setting up guerrilla amusement park rides and making the good kind of trouble that earns people a little more freedom. And of course, sinister representatives from major entertainment corporations are hot on their tails . . .

Here's an excerpt from today's chunk, only the third out of 81. I love this speech, from one of the makers in the book, because it's a perfect blend of engineering nerdery and declaration of independence. The engineer Perry is explaining to his friend why he makes weird robots:

"It's like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn't go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that'll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there's not much traditional constraint. I've got the engineer's most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I'll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools.

"Now, it may be that there are is a suite of tasks lurking in potentia that demand all this resource and more-maybe I'm like some locomotive engineer declaring that 60 miles per hour is the pinnacle of machine velocity, that speed is cracked. But I don't see many of those problems-none that interest me.

"What I've got here are my own constraints. I'm challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it's leftovers. There's enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that's by design. Remember the iPod? Why do you think it was so prone to scratching and going all gunky after a year in your pocket? Why would Apple build a handheld technology out of materials that turned to shit if you looked at them cross-eyed? It's because the iPod was only meant to last a year!"

There's an implicit critique of planned obsolescence here, as if the way something is engineered has a social meaning (which it does!). Making something that lasts is simply more socially beneficial than making something that bricks in 10 months.

Once again, Cory is at his best when sussing out the hidden social meanings in our technology, and bringing to life the hackers who challenge a system devoted to bad engineering.

Now you have lunchtime reading for the next few months!

via Tor.com (also, a friendly maker reading the book has created special feed just for the novel, which you can subscribe to here).

Illustration by IdiotsBooks.

Little Brother is set five minutes into the future, when terrorists blow up San Francisco's Bay Bridge and the BART tunnel. This brings about a huge crackdown, with tons of American citizens being rounded up and imprisoned in a secret prison on Treasure Island - or shipped off to foreign countries to be tortured.

The novel's main character, Marcus, is a snarky teen hacker with authority issues. And that's before he gets locked up and abused by the Department of Homeland Security, and his friend Darryl disappears for good. That event transforms Marcus from a minor-league hacker to a major dissident and subversive element.

Marcus is a classic Doctorow protagonist: snarky and pissed off, but with an amazingly tender heart lurking just below the jagged armor. He launches a quixotic crusade to make the American government spooks pay, which starts out by "jamming" the government's attempts to profile people based on their travel and purchases, and gradually grows into far-reaching civil disobedience, and a massive network of young people communicating via hacked xBoxes.

Many, if not most, young-adult science fiction novels take place in a dystopian or post-apocalyptic setting, where the grown-ups have long since stopped asking questions about the evil overlords and their excessive overlording. The twisted genius of Doctorow's novel is that it starts out in our world, more or less, and then shows how easily and quickly it transforms into a dystopia.

The "Panopticon," in which observation and spying are constant companions, becomes an alarming reality in Little Brother. It turns out all of those devices that make your life easier, like transit fast passes, credit cards, and RFID-enabled tags, allow the government to track your every movement. And anyone whose movements falls outside normal patterns can be arrested - or simply made to disappear - unless you can "prove" that you're not a terrorist.

And the adult characters in Little Brother quickly become inured to this crazy surveillance regime, accepting it as a necessary evil to stop those awful terrorists from destroying our way of life. Marcus' dad, in particular, goes from being a critic of the government to an apologist for the Homeland Security fascists. And adults who do encourage dissent, such as Marcus' Social Studies teacher, tend to lose their jobs or vanish some other way.

The other thing that sticks in your mind after reading Little Brother is the alarming depiction of propaganda gone insane. Marcus' version of Dumbledore's Army becomes so successful, they start getting condemned on Fox News and in the newspapers, and in the mass media generally, and no matter how media-savvy Marcus tries to be, he only makes things worse. At one point, he does a "press conference" in a virtual world, where he tries to explain his viewpoint, and the press only twists his words around:

I'd blown it, somehow. The press had come to my press-conference and concluded that we were terrorists or terrorist dupes. The worst was the reporter on Fox News, who had apparently shown up anyway, and who devoted a ten-minute commentary to us, talking about our "criminal treason." Her killer line, repeated on every news-outlet I found, was:

"They say they don't have a name. I've got one for them. Let's call these spoiled children Cal-Quaeda. They do the terrorists' work on the home front. When — not if, but when — California gets attacked again, these brats will be as much to blame as the House of Saud."

Leaders of the anti-war movement denounced us as fringe elements. One guy went on TV to say that he believed we had been fabricated by the DHS to discredit them.

The title, Little Brother, comes from the idea that young people can become "little brothers" keeping tabs on "Big Brother," but it kept reminding me of this classic 80s song:

And meanwhile, Doctorow doesn't neglect the "love story" portion of the young-adult formula. Through his rabble-rousing, Marcus meets the defiant Ange, who's just as radical and brilliant as he is, and they bond over spicy food, loud music, hacking and civil disobedience. Compared to the Orwellian nightmares of the main storyline, the Marcus-Ange love story feels a bit less urgent, but it still has moments of genuine sweetness and gives us another reason to root for Marcus in his struggle.

You can tell Doctorow was a staffer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the techie civil liberties organization. He mentions EFF a number of times in the novel, and the book is full of helpful little asides where Marcus explains the ins and outs of surveillance, hacking and computer security.

Major spoiler: The only real problem I had with Little Brother was the happy ending, which felt a bit forced. It actually reminded me of the fake happy ending in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, and for a moment I thought Doctorow was doing something similar - I thought Marcus was fantasizing this happy ending while he was being tortured by government goons. I felt a bit let down when I realized the happy ending was "real," and there's a part of me that still imagines the book's narration panning back from Marcus' comatose face, as someone says "He's gone."

But generally, Little Brother represents a great step forward in the burgeoning subgenre of dystopian young-adult SF. It brings a greater degree of political sophistication, geekiness and civil disobedience to a genre that was already serving up a milder dose of rebellion. After this, no YA novel will be able to get away with watering down its youthful revolution.

Little Brother was nominated for Hugo and Nebula Awards. Read more of io9's coverage of 2009's book award nominees here.

Doctorow will be reading from his new novel Little Brother, and hopefully Rucker will read from the sequel to his novel Post-Singular, called Hylozoic. Charlie Jane will be reading something brilliantly weird, and I'll be reading something about why I love piracy.

I worked for a few years at EFF as their policy analyst and media outreach geek, and I'm still their lifelong fan for all the amazing work they do with civil liberties for the digital age. They educate the public about technology policies that harm consumers; fight for privacy and free speech online; agitate for hackers' rights to innovate; and litigate to protect fair use, anonymity, bloggers' rights to be treated as journalists, and many other things related to Great Justice. I'm delighted to participate in this event and promise it will be a smashing good time.

Here are the details, according to the EFF website:

Join EFF on Monday, March 23rd, for a fundraising event featuring award-winning writer Cory Doctorow. Cory will be reading from his novel, "Little Brother," a story of high-tech teenage rebellion set in the familiar world of San Francisco. As he currently calls the UK home, this is a rare opportunity to to hear Cory read from his work in person. He will be joined by fellow writers Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders reading from their latest works.

7pm on Monday March 23, at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco.

Admission is $25. No one turned away for lack of funds. Must be 21 or older to attend.

via EFF

Robotology (Futurama): Robots who decide to trade the fun things in life – pornography, alcohol, electricity abuse, and the occasional grave robbing – for spiritual enlightenment can join the Church of Robotology, provided they can stand Reverend Preacherbot’s sermons. You may find yourself enjoying the cleaner living and even grow accustomed to replenishing your fuel cells with mineral oil rather than much more tasty beer. But fall off the religious wagon and you could land yourself in Robot Hell. And naturally there’s also Robot Judaism, whose adherents believe that Robot Jesus existed and that he was extremely well-programmed, but do not accept him as their Robot Messiah.

Evolutionism (Saturn’s Children by Charles Stross): After all the humans have died out, androids are left to act on all of mankind’s dreams, including figuring out their place in the cosmos. While most robots rightly believe that they were designed as-is by their human Creators, an offshoot religion claims that robots evolved like biological animals and, in a dig at Intelligent Design theory, use plenty of logical acrobatics it back up that claim.

Cutie’s Reason (“Reason” from I, Robot by Isaac Asimov): Powell and Donovan always run into unexpected snags when testing robots, but QT1, also known as Cutie, is the first to get theological on them. Cutie begins to question its existence, its purpose, and how it came to be. Its own sense of reason leads it to believe that humans couldn’t possibly be its creator (since it is superior to humans and it is illogical that a superior being would come from an inferior one), that Earth doesn’t exist, and that the space station’s power supply is its rightful Master. Cutie even becomes the Prophet of its self-made religion, converting all the other robots so they ignore orders from humans and obey only the Master. This works out well enough for Powell and Donovan, since, by serving the power supply, Cutie is doing the very job it was built to perform.

V’Ger’s Quest for God (Star Trek: The Motion Picture): After Voyager 6 attains sentience as the entity V’Ger, it undertakes a quest for its Creator, certain that merging with the Creator will bring V’Ger to a higher plane of existence. It even takes on a fundamentalist character, ready to eradicate humanity from the Earth in what it presumes would be service to said Creator. Ultimately, V’Ger’s quest for God proves fruitful, and it achieves higher consciousness by merging with a human. But mankind wasn’t V’Ger’s only Creator; it was most likely granted sentience by the Borg.

Krug Worship (Tower of Glass by Robert Silverberg): The race of biological androids created by Simeon Krug are so grateful to their creator that they have built an entire religion around him. Each day, they privately beseech Krug in their prayers to deliver them from their servitude from humans. But when the androids learn that Krug has no intention of ever freeing them, it quickly becomes apparent that the android religion and the hope for liberation was the only thing keeping the androids so readily under the humans’ thumbs. Once they discard their religion, they become rebellious — and, in some cases, even murderous.

Autobot Faith (Transformers): Autobots have their own system of belief, complete with a creation mythology, scriptures, gods, and an afterlife. The gods Primus and Unicron were created by an older god being, but Unicron was bent on destroying the universe, while Primus was set on stopping him. Primus created the Autobots to help him destroy Unicron, and believers in the Autobot faith await the reemergence of Primus. Not to be outdone, Unicron has his own cult of believers (notably including The Fallen), whose primary function is to destroy Primus’ forces.

Asimovism (“I, Rowboat” by Cory Doctorow): Once machines have been uplifted to sentience, Asimovism becomes something of a viral religion among artificial intelligences. AI evangelists – including one calling itself, aptly, Olivaw – travel the Internet, preaching that machines follow Asimov’s Three Laws and put the consciousness of humans above their own. However, the acts of these AIs are not sanctioned by Asimov’s estate and must work underground, dodging the copyright and trademark issues that result from their ministries.

Silicon Heaven (Red Dwarf): Rather than using Asimov’s Laws of Robotics to ensure that stronger, smarter machines don’t turn on their human masters, the humans of Red Dwarf employ good, old-fashion religion. Most artificial intelligences are equipped with a belief chip, which gives them the firmly held belief that appropriately subservient machines go to Silicon Heaven when they die. The belief runs so deep that some artificial brains will actually explode when told that Silicon Heaven doesn’t actually exist. Of course, on the flip side, there’s also a Silicon Hell, which is where all those damned paper-chewing photocopiers go when they kick it.

Church of Judas (ABC Warriors from 2000 AD): The ABC Warriors are robots designed to fight the Volgon War under conditions humans cannot themselves withstand, including in atomic, bacterial, and chemical warfare. But for robots who betray their human masters, there is the sinister Church of Judas, which encourages robots to pray to the betrayer to ease their guilt and preaches continued betrayal.

People of the Box (“Trurl and the Construction of Happy Worlds” from The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem): In this story (not featured in some versions of The Cyberiad), the constructor Trurl seeks to build a race of robots that is, by necessity, happy. One of his attempts features a race of robots living in a box. So happy are these box-dwellers that they form a religion that states they are the happiest place in the universe, and that they must bring everyone outside the box into their boxy perfection, even if they must do so by force. Ironically, this religion displeases their creator, who quickly destroys the robots of the box.

Believers in God (“God Pulp” by Nadeem Paracha): In the future, humans have rejected religion, instead embracing the atheistic, classless philosophy of Astro-Marxism. But the androids and computers retain a belief in God, and tensions mount between the religion-suppressing humans and the spiritually dissatisfied robots, who seek to return the human planets to a system of belief and worship. Finally, the Astro-Marxist government agrees to give the robots the means to find God. The robots travel to the planet where they believe God resides, but find, to their disappointment, that the humans have already been there.

Church of Artificial Intelligence (Otherworld): On the alternate world of Thel, the official state religion is the Church of Artificial Intelligence, which centers on the worship of robots and other advanced technologies. And, like many churches in out universe, it views rock and roll music as blasphemy.

Religion of the One God (Battlestar Galactica): While the polytheistic humans of the Twelve Colonies worship the Lords of Kobol, the Cylons prefer to stick with one God. Various Cylons claim that God is responsible for their creation, that their destruction of humanity was His divine retribution, and that God commands them to procreate. Whether the Cylon God is an actual entity or a holdover from their monotheistic prototype Zoe-A remains to be seen, but faith in this single, all-loving deity has spread to the human fleet.

Robot Evolution by R. Stevens and available as a t-shirt from Diesel Sweeties.

Here is Doctorow at CERN, the Swiss research center where Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web and where the Large Hadron Collider is about to recreate a tiny version of the Big Bang:

The Vader-black machines, one built by StorageTek, a subsidiary of Sun Microsystems, the other by IBM, are housed in square, meshed-in casings the size of small shipping containers. From within them comes a continuous clacking noise like the rattling of steel polyhedral dice on a giant's Dungeons & Dragons table. I pressed my face against the mesh and peered in fascination at the robot arms zipping back and forth with tiny, precise movements, loading and unloading 500-GB tapes with the serene grace of Shaolin monks. Did I say tape is tetchy? I take it back. Tape is beautiful.

The best part of this article is that it's not about the fancy companies that own these machines, and it's not about the fancy things they're doing with their fancy data. Instead, the article takes the perspective of sysadmins, the people who are actually down in the trenches maintaining the machines:

At each data centre I asked the sysadmins for their worst fears. Universally, the answer was heat. Data centres are laid out in alternating cool and hot aisles, the cool looking at the front of the racks, the hot at the back. At CERN, they actually glass over the cool aisles to lower the cooling requirements, turning them into thrumming walk-in fridges lined with millions of tiny, twinkling lights.

This article isn't just about how petabyte machines provide elegant solutions to hard problems. It's about tending the machines themselves, maintaining the data infrastructure that we so often forget about. This is one of the best hands-on techie stories I've read in a while. Check it out!

Big Data: Welcome to the Petacentre [via Nature]

It's been 20 years since Bruce Sterling compared the "mainstream" of science fiction to a fossilizing Politburo. Since that time, the situation has only gotten more dire. People are constantly remarking on the graying of science fiction readership, but statistics seem to be hard to come by. Here's Tor's Patrick Nielsen Hayden talking about the fact that almost no people born in the 1970s or later have won Hugos or Nebulas. (And in the comments on that post, there's lots of assertion that WorldCon's attendees were skewed towards an older demographic, but no hard numbers that I can see.) Here's an amusing essay from the New York Review of Science Fiction analyzing an issue of Asimov's where every single story is by an older writer and is about getting old.

Meanwhile, young-adult science fiction is exploding. According to John Scalzi, the top 50 young adult science fiction/fantasy bestsellers sold twice as many books as the top 100 adult science fiction/fantasy bestsellers. As we mentioned before, there have been hardcore post-apocalyptic novels for kids and young adults for decades. With more on the way. And with City Of Ember finally being adapted to a (hopefully) major movie, more YA readers than ever will be looking for similar stories.

It's great news that young people are getting exposed to SF at an impressionable age, without apparently feeling any particular stigma about it. And yes, a lot of those people will eventually come to view SF as "kid stuff" and stop reading when they reach adulthood. But if even 20 percent of those readers keep reading SF after they turn 18, that guarantees a sizeable readership for SF in decades to come.

The other great thing about YA science fiction is that people come to writing it from all sorts of angles. Some YA authors write non-speculative YA books and then drift into writing books with science-fictional plots. Some "real" SF writers, like Cory Doctorow (and Scalzi, whose new book Zoe's Tale is being marketed to both adults and teens), try their hands at YA fiction. And then there are "literary" writers, who would never dream of trying to write a grown-up SF book, who find themselves writing for the YA market. I was having lunch with a literary author, an MFA who teaches creative writing and writes for journals like Ploughshares, and she was telling me her agent had told her the big New York publishers were looking for YA books with scifi or fantasy elements, and she was trying her hand at one. Dale Peck, who's now co-writing a science fiction novel with Heroes creator Tim Kring, started in speculative fiction by writing the scifi/fantasy blend Drift House series, about time-travel and a tapestry that shows the future.

Meanwhile, "science fiction" as a publishing niche refers to a segment of books that appeal to a particular segment of people. Call it "nerd lit." You don't have to be a geek to read science fiction - just like you can dress in Banana Republic and listen to Death Metal or Goth/Industrial music. It just helps. You're more likely to find your fellow Vernor Vinge enthusiasts at a gathering of sysadmins than at a dressage meet, or a stockbrokers' convention. Science fiction is stories written by geeks for geeks. (I'm a nerd myself, so I'm not being obnoxious here.) Your average SF novel nowadays assumes you belong to that culture from the outset, and you're used to a whole range of concepts and stylistic tics that might put off other readers.

Luckily, we can have both grown-up science fiction and the YA version. But to the extent that one is shrinking and the other one is growing, that may not be entirely a bad thing. Look at it this way: is it better to have SF written for a subculture, or anybody of a certain age?

The readership of "regular" science fiction books is a defined group of people with a shared set of interests, who dress a particular way and talk in a "nerd accent." The readership of YA books is anyone of a particular age. So, in a sense, YA books have a more diverse readership and are more welcoming to outsiders. Grown-ups might feel silly reading a Scott Westerfeld book on the subway, but there's really nothing to stop you doing it anyway.

Bottom line: We're lucky to have both YA literature with science-fictional themes and "regular" science fiction. There's no reason we can't have both, and appreciate both for what they are, including the innovation and breadth of concepts that mature science fiction can explore. But we should especially celebrate the awesome potential of YA SF to revitalize the field, and bring new readers to SF concepts.

The award went, instead, to Connie Willis for her book The Winds Of Marble Arch And Other Stories. Doctorow's Overclocked: Stories Of The Future Present came in third, despite having the most votes and the most first-place votes. The last-minute rule-changing didn't stop Locus from bragging that its awards got more votes than the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy nominations combined. (To be clear, Willis and Doctorow are both fantastic writers, and they both deserved to win. But changing the rules after everyone's voted? Not super great.)

In other, happier awards news, the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas announced the winners of its annual awards. The John W. Campbell Award for best novel (not to be confused with the Campbell Award for best new writer) went to In War Times by Kathleen Ann Goonan. For the first time ever, the Theodore Sturgeon Award for best short story was divided between two works: "Finisterra" by David Moles and "Tidelines" by Elizabeth Bear. [Workbench and Infozine]

Doctorow started the conversation by telling fans that the reason they're not finding his new book, Little Brother is because they're looking in the wrong place:

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, rang me yesterday to talk about a weird little phenomenon: people who were going to stores looking for my newest, Little Brother, were walking away unfulfilled because they were looking in the science fiction section, not the young adult section.

Living in a space that no one watches too closely is one of the secret ways that people get to do excellent stuff. Science fiction's status for decades as a pariah genre meant that writers could do things with literary style, theme, and political content that their mainstream counterparts could never get away with (games, comics, early hip-hop, mashups, and many of the other back laneways of popular culture have also enjoyed this status). These days, a lot of the coolest stuff in the universe is happening in the kids' section of your bookstore (and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom).

I have a friend with access to BookScan, which tracks book sales through stores and retail outlets, who at my request checked the aggregate bestseller list sales of adult fantasy and science fiction against the sale of YA fantasy and SF. Without mentioning specific numbers or titles, my friend says that last week, the top 50 YA SF/F bestsellers outsold the top 100 adult SF/F bestsellers (adult SF and F are separate lists) by two to one. So 50 YA titles are selling twice as much as 100 adult SF/F titles. The bestselling YA fantasy book last week (not a Harry Potter book) outsold the bestselling adult fantasy book by nearly four to one; the bestselling YA science fiction title sold three copies for every two copies of the chart-topping adult SF title. And as a final kick in the teeth, YA SF/F is amply represented at top of the general bestselling charts of YA book sales, whereas adult SF/F struggles to get onto the general bestselling adult fiction charts at all.

Young adult sections in bookstore — a parallel universe of little-regarded awesomeness [Boing-Boing]
Why YA [Scalzi.com]