The Bottle Imps is the newest story by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling. Read all eleven of their tales in the 2nd edition of their anthology, Transreal Cyberpunk.
The post "The Bottle Imps" — new short fiction by Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling appeared first on Boing Boing.
There was a time when the internet was cool. One could be forgiven if memories of the cool-internet era have grown fuzzier over the years, now that the web has become a self-regulating machine in an indomitable surveillance system and all. But I know it was true, because I was there. “Information superhighway” was a fitting nickname for a system that could blast the average user through a vast network of art and intelligence. (“Blast” being a relative description of how fast dial-up and early WiFi felt at the time.)
Most of my adult music taste can be traced back to those early days, watching hyper-pixelated videos of the “Numa Numa” guy dancing to Romanian boy-band hits, or animated aliens piloting their spaceship to the thumping Europop of Eiffel 65’s “Blue (Da Ba Dee).” Archaic video hosting sites were a cultural gateway. Laggy Adobe Flash games commandeered afternoons. It was heaven, until it wasn’t.
But paradise can’t be lost if it was never really paradise to begin with. The internet’s dark underbelly was always there, lurking slightly out of frame behind the firewall. If something that once seemed magical could be turned into something so corrupt in a comparably short time, its malevolent potential was a feature from the beginning, not a bug.
“Public Access Afterworld” is less of an artistic pivot than a confirmation that Schoenbrun’s worldbuilding skill is well beyond their peers, cinematic or literary.
Few people navigate the internet’s light-to-dark spectrum as well as writer-director Jane Schoenbrun, whose films play like dispatches beamed out from the depths of online black holes. Their work remixes the thrill of early internet exploration into colorful abstraction, cracking open an esoteric feeling to analyze its contents and origin — to varying effect. Schoenbrun’s three feature films, 2021’s “We’re All Going to the World’s Fair,” 2024’s “I Saw the TV Glow” and last summer’s “Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma,” are as unwieldy as their verbose titles suggest. It’s impossible to watch one, let alone all three, without realizing that Schoenbrun has a lot on their mind, sometimes too much for a single film to bear. Schoenbrun’s talent for image-making, however, ends up shouldering much of that weight, letting intricate ideas about identity and personal relationships to digital media sit gracefully atop beautifully rendered cinematography.
But what happens when someone so known for their visual flair abandons alluring imagery altogether and lets their writing do all the work?
In Schoenbrun’s debut novel, “Public Access Afterworld,” the filmmaker takes a sizable risk, stripping away the meticulously crafted onscreen worlds to assert the dexterity of their prose. At 592 pages, this book could easily feel like a smug kiss-off to all those — present company included — who have criticized Schoenbrun’s reluctance to pare down their concepts into less dense works. But while the novel is imposing from sheer size alone, the shift in medium lends their elaborate, occasionally exhausting storytelling a curious new potency.
Schoenbrun confidently guides readers down winding, interconnected roads, bouncing between online cults and peculiar digital ephemera to weave a gripping search for truth in a time when the internet has made everything fiction. “Public Access Afterworld” is less of an artistic pivot than a confirmation that Schoenbrun’s worldbuilding skill is well beyond their peers, cinematic or literary.
Like the rest of their work, Schoenbrun’s novel is deeply concerned with the internet and its seedy electronic underbelly, using traditional media as a portal to the web’s sleaziest, scariest parts. “Public Access Afterworld” is divided into episodes, not chapters — although each episode has eight individual components, like a TV show divided by ad blocks. This unique structure serves the story, following the zealots of the titular analog realm that lurks beyond the television static through the action.
We begin in 2009, just after television signals convert to digital transmission, when high school best friends David Sawyer and Erin Morrison see something strange in the fuzzy image filling their old cathode-ray television screen: a broadcast from an unknown entity called Public Access Afterworld. Their lives soon become consumed by the quest to find the source, turning to proto-internet message boards and video hosting sites in their search. Before long, dead ends give way to a digital abyss, pulling them both into something that will alter their perception of reality and the lives of hundreds of others called to follow them.
This audacious mystery makes an ideal premise for a novel, where Schoenbrun can toy with reader expectations without the added task of ensuring that the final image reflects their objective. As it turns out, Schoenbrun’s writing is stronger when it’s devoid of visual images. Description and style can take hold without restraint. And while their prose is sometimes redundant, even the excess flows without struggle.
A screenplay may be a different monster from a novel, but both depend on a writer’s foresight. An image has to exist in the mind before it makes it onto the page. But whether that image translates to the viewer in its final context is another matter.
“Public Access Afterworld” is a page-turner in the tradition of supermarket paperbacks from Stephen King and Clive Barker, both of whom know cinema well. But Schoenbrun’s innate familiarity with the internet — its legendary Creepypasta stories and disconcerting YouTube videos that seem to spring from the void — sets their story apart from the classics. This is a contemporary novel through and through, and Schoenbrun writes with practiced conviction, subtly differentiating the different characters’ perspectives without dropping the pace.
Having three movies under their belt helps there, too. A screenplay may be a different monster from a novel, but both depend on a writer’s foresight. An image has to exist in the mind before it makes it onto the page. But whether that image translates to the viewer in its final context is another matter. In their filmmaking, Schoenbrun sometimes struggles to apply broader themes within a minute-to-minute narrative, creating pacing issues that reveal a dissonance between intention and execution.
For example, there’s a sizable gap between the one-shot montage sequences in “TV Glow” and “Camp Miasma.” The former brilliantly evokes wistful teenage dreaming as a character walks through their high school, adorned by a yearning Caroline Polachek song and light-pink diary scribblings. It’s a clever riff on teenage social politics and the hormone-ridden adolescence that so often define both our identities and our future. The “Camp Miasma” montage, on the other hand, toils under three layers of metafiction, as an ’80s slasher-film murderer stalks and kills at summer camp set to a Counting Crows tune, haphazardly interrogating the viewer’s relationship to nostalgia. With Schoenbrun, I often find it’s hit or miss.
But in the current media landscape, consistency is overrated. I’m always more drawn to big ideas that have the potential for colossal failure. There are certain things you can draw from a Schoenbrun film that you could never get from, say, a Martin Scorsese movie, no matter how hard you try — and I’m not just talking about the trans subtext in all of Schoenbrun’s work. For an artist as formidable as Scorsese, a flop means nothing. But for someone like Schoenbrun, defeat defines their future. Every decision is a risk. And art without risk is just a product.
While I’m hesitant to claim that Schoenbrun’s primary strength is as a novelist rather than a filmmaker, “Public Access Afterworld” goes some distance toward making that case. It’s not that Schoenbrun is bad at making movies, but their mind seems to operate like a story map, with hundreds of red strings pinned between plot points. Too many overlapping yarns in a movie make for a convoluted final product, a big clump of colorful material that’s too dense to pry apart to see the substance lurking below. But at least in this novel, the yarns overlap without tangling. A clear view suits Schoenbrun’s cerebral nature. We can admire the blue sky before the clouds cover the sun.
Read more
about Jane Schoenbrun’s worlds
The post “Public Access Afterworld” is a novel for the terminally online appeared first on Salon.com.
Walter Koenig, famed for his role as the villainous telepath Alfred Bester in Babylon 5 and as Star Trek's Pavel Chekov, is dead at 90. A representative confirmed his death this morning.
Koenig was born in Chicago in 1936; the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, he did not pursue acting until after college.
The post Star Trek star Walter Koenig dead at 90 appeared first on Boing Boing.
According to an Economist editorial, "AI is breaking the British state" by making it too easy to file complaints, demands and appeals, which will "drown the state" with "demands as well-crafted as a first-class lawyer's":
Let's pause a moment to appreciate the Economist's touching credulity about AI's coming legal mastery. The law seems to be the area where AI is most prone to "hallucinate" (that is, "produce defective outputs"), which can only be sorted through by skilled practitioners whose experience gives them the discernment to distinguish useful arguments from foolish ones:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh
(And this requires those skilled practitioners to avoid the "automation blindness" that afflicts people who are asked to remain vigilant for things that seldom occur, a phenomenon that has turned every TSA agent into the water-bottle-detectingest motherfucker the human race has ever produced, who still misses 95% of the guns that red teams bring through the checkpoint):
More notable than the Economist's faith-based predictions about the impending army of hyper-competent robo-lawyers is the magazine's proposed solution to this looming crisis: "stop creating entitlements that are ripe for AI-fuelled claims…prune the mass of procedural rights." Above all, replace the bureaucrats who process your "complaints, demands and appeals" with more AI, which will arbitrarily decide who gets what, through "personalised welfare interventions" that are not based on any kind of guaranteed rights.
Writing on his blog, the political scientist Henry Farrell tells us where this will inevitably end up: with AI-based robot wars in which increasingly stingy and pernickety robo-bureaucrats create demand for progressively more aggressive robo-lawyers:
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/the-downside-of-robot-solutionism
As Farrell writes, this end-time was foretold by the prophet Alan Moore with his 1980s 2000 AD character Abelard Snazz, "the man with the two-storey brain":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abelard_Snazz
Snazz "solves" the street crime epidemic on the planet Twopp with "Big Police Robots," who spiral out of control, arresting the citizens of Twopp for trivial crimes like wearing brown shoes with a blue suit ("breaking the laws of good taste"). To solve this new problem, Snazz invents "Big Criminal Robots" whose "cunning, efficient" crimes "take up all the police's time."
Twopp is left in a state of high-stakes Big Robot crimewars, in which the most efficient criminals imaginable battle the most ruthless robocops science can deliver, with the Twoppians caught in the crossfire, collateral damage in a robotic forever war (on crime).
As Farrell writes, this is already afflicting the US health system, where an army of insurance company robo-claim-deniers have been countered with a doctors' army of robot-claim-appealers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/10/health/doctors-insurers-artificial-intelligence.html
The point being that people need health care, people need public services, and while there will always be some waste at the margins (whether due to incompetence or dishonesty) responding to this by beefing up the system's defenses with more advanced red tape just requires the people who legitimately need these services to employ more aggressive tactics.
In support of this, Farrell points to a great, long essay by Dan "Accountability Sink" Davies for the Niskanen Center, "'The Problem Factory' – Preemptive risk aversion in infrastructure planning and the role of professional services":
Davies' essay describes how increasing bureaucratic defenses against frivolous or dishonest claims drives the participants in these processes to assume a war footing and approach the system as a battlefield, leading to the very runaway cost inflation that the bureaucratic process was instituted to prevent.
(Davies, a cybernetician, has some fascinating advice about how to structure planning processes to minimize this, but that's out of scope for this particular post.)
This reminds me of nothing so much as the spam wars. There was a time when it was very easy to set up a mail server and provide email access for anyone who wanted it – including spammers. Increased spam begat increased anti-spam countermeasures, notably the creation of blocklists that allowed mail administrators to automatically reject email from "insecure" mail servers.
Inevitably, spammers figured out how to send spam from "secure" servers, resulting in stricter, more onerous standards for mail server configuration. Spammers – for whom the ability to send spam is an existential matter – figured out how to meet these standards, so the security demands jumped again – and again, and again.
Today, sending and receiving mail is so technically challenging that most of the internet's email is run by a handful of giant, mostly US-based corporations. If any of these companies decides your mail server is spamming, you effectively disappear from the internet and good luck getting them to acknowledge an error. Meanwhile, these companies emit an avalanche of spam, but no one will ever block their servers, because to do so would be to cut off billions of legitimate email users:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
And since most of these companies are US-based, they are liable to being weaponized by Trump, who has taken to ordering his tech giants to block foreign officials whose policy decisions make him angry:
https://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2026/07/icc-trump-push-dismantle
Another parallel is the content moderation wars that saw the large platforms coming up with progressively more detailed rules about what constituted harassment and hate speech, only to have dedicated trolls master these rule-books. Trolls – for whom harassment was a full-time vocation – became the world's greatest experts on the platforms' speech policies, which let them skate right up to the line when abusing their victims, and to get those victims kicked off the platforms if they could be lured into putting a single toe over the line in response:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/
Farrell criticizes the Economist's answer to the (alleged) looming robo-lawyer threat as "solutionism," Evgeny Morozov's word for "Recasting all complex social situations … as neat problems with definite, computable solutions":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix
Using AI to root AI-generated bureaucratic appeals sacrifices the system's putative purpose – delivering services – in the name of defending that service from abuse and misuse of the system's resources. As the pioneering cybernetician Stafford Beer famously wrote, "the purpose of a system is what it does." If your bureaucracy is more concerned with fighting fraud than delivering service, then it isn't a service delivery system at all – it's a service denial system.
As Farrell writes, the people of Twopp can tell you how this ends – in a war of giant robots in which we are all collateral damage.
(A brief postscript: Farrell is a font of science fictional analogies to modern policy issues. This weekend in the FT, he and Dan Wang published an excellent editorial on the relevance of the paranoid, claustrophobic fiction of Philip K Dick to our present political reality:)
Ebooks Are Coming to Libro! https://blog.libro.fm/ebooks-coming-librofm/
What Defeating the American-Israel Political Action Committee Means, on the Ground https://rickperlstein.substack.com/p/what-defeating-the-american-israel
They Live https://badtastegoodcause.com/they-live
#20yrsago Seymour Cray liked to tunnel under his house https://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/writing/PCW/cray.htm
#20yrsago Fake anti-Net Neutrality groups https://web.archive.org/web/20060815175125/http://www.commoncause.org/site/pp.asp?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=2007877&auid=1871905&kntaw4229=C9E5C86AD89540898B5D07CB54AB0FE6
#20yrsago HOWTO fold a bottle opener out of paper https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrXmDiYHUY0
#20yrsago Wikipedia’s template language is Turing-complete https://web.archive.org/web/20070707115525/http://www.mentalpolyphonics.com/?p=30
#20yrsago Schwarzenegger sends Guard to California’s airports https://web.archive.org/web/20060813201014/http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/08/11/SECURITYLOCAL.TMP
#15yrsago Marvel to comics retailers: we’ll give you limited edition singles if you destroy our competitors’ products https://web.archive.org/web/20110908023907/http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/08/the-great-marvel-comics-rip-off/
#15yrsago LinkedIn opts you into being used in advertisements; here’s how to opt out https://brandimpact.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/a-box-you-want-to-uncheck-on-linkedin/
#15yrsago MagicJack owner follows up his dumb lawsuit against Boing Boing with a dumb lawsuit against Women’s Professional Soccer https://memex.craphound.com/2011/08/11/magicjack-owner-follows-up-his-dumb-lawsuit-against-boing-boing-with-a-dumb-lawsuit-against-womens-professional-soccer/
#15yrsago Al Jazeera fixes its protections for whistleblowers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/al-jazeera-follows-effs-whistleblower
#15yrsago New Zealand Parliament may lose Internet access due to insane new copyright law https://web.archive.org/web/20110830211231/http://www.greens.org.nz/press-releases/parliament-risk-fines
#15yrsago British aviation bans all hand-luggage http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4778615.stm?ls
#15yrsago Soldering is Easy: CC licensed HOWTO solder comic https://mightyohm.com/blog/2011/04/soldering-is-easy-comic-book/
#15yrsago Taxonomy of technological risks: when things fail badly https://web.archive.org/web/20190221205543/https://www.sei.cmu.edu/about/divisions/cert/index.cfm
#15yrsago Secret anti-racist shirts covertly distributed to neo-Nazis https://web.archive.org/web/20110810082217/http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15305581,00.html
#15yrsago XKCD on the password paradox: human factors versus computers’ brute force https://xkcd.com/936/
#10yrsago American Bar Association votes to DRM the law, put it behind a EULA https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/after_strong_debate_house_calls_for_publication_of_privately_drafted_standa/
#10yrsago Trump only writes the angry tweets, the nice ones are written by a staffer with an Iphone http://varianceexplained.org/r/trump-tweets/
#10yrsago Aviation’s war on moisture turns ten today https://memex.craphound.com/2016/08/10/aviations-war-on-moisture-turns-ten-today/
#10yrsago Court rules that FCC can’t force states to repeal laws banning municipal ISPs https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/08/in-blow-to-muni-broadband-fcc-loses-bid-to-overturn-state-laws/
#10yrsago NRA is spending $3m on pro-Trump ad that says Clinton “will leave you defenseless” https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/09/politics/nra-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-election-2016/index.html
#10yrsago Nauru files: leaks tell abused childrens’ stories from Australia’s offshore concentration camp https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/aug/10/the-nauru-files-2000-leaked-reports-reveal-scale-of-abuse-of-children-in-australian-offshore-detention
#10yrsago Why did it take a private foundation to do public science right? https://medium.com/the-spike/how-a-happy-moment-for-neuroscience-is-a-sad-moment-for-science-c4ba00336e9c#.58om85nvg
#10yrsago Profile of People’s Ride: a co-operative, driver-owned alternative to Uber https://www.democracyatwork.info/profile_peoplesride
#10yrsago The story of the story of Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/herocomplex/la-ca-hc-ghosts-disneylands-haunted-mansion-20151016-htmlstory.html
#10yrsago Designer makes clothes out of German transit upholstery fabric, rides trains https://web.archive.org/web/20160808130200/http://www.bbc.com/autos/story/20160804-why-are-trains-seats-so-hideous
#10yrsago America will finally gather statistics on which and how many people are killed by law enforcement https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/08/police-officer-related-deaths-department-of-justice
#10yrsago Monopoly power and the decline of small business: big business vs democracy, growth & equality https://ilsr.org/article/independent-business/monopoly-power-and-the-decline-of-small-business/
#10yrsago As social media centralized, blogging’s core infrastructure has withered https://medium.com/@anildash/the-lost-infrastructure-of-social-media-d2b95662ccd3
#10yrsago 48 hours later, Adblock Plus beats Facebook’s adblocker-blocker https://www.theverge.com/2016/8/11/12439990/facebook-unblockable-ads-defeated-by-adblock-plus
#10yrsago 100 million VWs can be unlocked with a $40 cracker (and other cars aren’t much better) https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/usenixsecurity16/sec16_paper_garcia.pdf
#10yrsago DEA bribes rail/airline employees for tipoffs that lead to warrantless cash seizures https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/2016/08/10/dea-travel-record-airport-seizures/88474282/
#10yrsago Trump is an object lesson in the problems of machine learning https://mathbabe.org/2016/08/11/donald-trump-is-like-a-biased-machine-learning-algorithm/
#5yrsago IRS leaks reveal billions reaped through ultra-wealthy lobbying on the tax bill https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#shitty-man-of-history-theory
#5yrsago Canada's got the world's worst internet ideas https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#no-canada
#5yrsago End of the line for Uber https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/10/unter/#bezzle-no-more
#1yrago Goodhart's Law (of AI) https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/11/five-paragraph-essay/#targets-r-us
Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales
Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/
Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification
Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/
London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn
South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/
Vancouver: BC Policy Solutions Gala, Nov 12
https://bcpolicy.ca/gala/
F@#$ the AI Overlords (On The Media)
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/f-the-ai-overlords
Why AI Won't Replace Workers, But Will Crash The Economy (Smart Cookies)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRmUuxJolY
AI and the Enshittification Era (The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dAIJRjb-Bw
AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo
"Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027
"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027
"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing:
"The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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We are so pleased to present another iteration of The Storytellers, a series of author readings by Locus Awards finalists. Previously we heard Naomi Kritzer reading “The Little Free Library”. Today we are excited to show our beloved Cory Doctorow reading from his 2025 book, The Bezzle, reviewed by both Paul Di Filippo and Gary K. Wolfe on our site!
CORY DOCTOROW is a science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist. He is a contributor to many magazines, websites and newspapers. He is a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He holds an honourary doctorate in laws from York University (Canada) and an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; he is also a Cornell University AD White professor-at-large, a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate and a Visiting Professor of Practice at the University of North Carolina’s School of Library and Information Science. In 2024, the Media Ecology Association awarded him the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity. In 2022, he earned the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Awardee for lifetime achievement. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
His novels have been translated into dozens of languages and are published by Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), Verso Books (UK), Beacon Press (US), SCRIBe (UK), Titan Books (UK) and HarperCollins (UK). He has won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.
He is the author of dozens of books, most recently Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It; and the novels Picks and Shovels and The Bezzle (followups to Red Team Blues). Other notable books include the solarpunk novels Walkaway and The Lost Cause; the tech policy books The Internet Con and Chokepoint Capitalism; and the internationally bestselling YA Little Brother series; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer.
While you are here, please take a moment to support Locus with a one-time or recurring donation. We rely on reader donations to keep the magazine and site going, and would like to keep the site paywall free, but WE NEED YOUR FINANCIAL SUPPORT to continue quality coverage of the science fiction and fantasy field.
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