Author Will Shetterly has released two of his books to the public in text format under a Creative Commons license - meaning they’re free to read and share.

Cory Doctorow writes:

On Tuesday, I blogged Will Shetterly amazing new American magic-realist novel, The Gospel of the Knife — now, Will has released the whole text of the novel under a Creative Commons license!

That’s just for starters: Will has also released the full text of Dogland, the book that comes before “Gospel.” This is an incredible, magical novel about a kid whose father opens a dog theme park in Florida in the 1950s, and lands his family in the middle of the segregation fight, the wonderment and despoiling of Florida, and a centuries-old mystery. Dogland is one of my favorite novels of all time, and having it online to email to people will greatly ease my task of ensuring that as many people as possible read this and have their lives changed by it.

You can read both of the books for free on Shetterly’s Blogspot site.
Links: Dogland, Gospel of the Knife (via BoingBoing)

Fred Saberhagen, a giant in the SF&F genres, has passed away. Here’s the obituary from Locus (via BoingBoing):

SF and fantasy writer Fred Saberhagen, born 1930, died June 29, 2007, at the age of 77. He began publishing in 1961 with short stories in Galaxy and If magazines, and published collection Berserker in 1967, first in a series about interstellar killing machines programmed to destroy all life. Saberhagen’s 60+ books also included the Empire of the East sequence, beginning with The Broken Lands (1968), the Dracula sequence, beginning with The Dracula Tape (1975), and two books co-written with Roger Zelazny, Coils (1981) and The Black Throne (1990). His last book was Ardneh’s Sword (Tor, 2006).
• The family will announce a date for a Memorial Celebration later this year. Donations would be appreciated to Doctors without Borders, Catholic Relief, SFWA Emergency Medical Fund, and John 23rd Catholic Church in Albuquerque.
» Wikipedia entry
» Official site: Berserker.com

Another author goes Creative Commons. SF author and blogger Cory Doctorow writes:

Lewis Shiner has begun to post all of his short fiction online for free, under a Creative Commons license. Lewis Shiner is one of the great science fiction writers of the last 30 years, author of the World Fantasy Award-winning novel Glimpses (a book I’ve re-read 10 times, which haunts me every time I hear a Beatles, Beach Boys, Doors, or Jimi Hendrix song). Unfortunately, all his novels are out of print (the exception being a new audiobook, which I just ordered). He also edited a seminal anti-war science fiction anthology, When The Music’s Over that I read until it came apart. Shiner was also an early cyberpunk, who had two stories in Bruce Sterling’s ground-breaking anthology Mirrorshades

Shiner posted his fiction along with a manifesto about the collapse of short fiction markets and the importance of short fiction as a way for writers to experiment and for readers to discover new writers. He calls the project the “Fiction Liberation Front.”

Link

Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing says:

Clarion West is one of the family of Clarion science fiction writers’ workshops, bootcamps that train some of the best writers in the field. It’s run as a charity, and relies on fundraising to keep the lights on.

Clarion West board member Eileen Gunn sez, “The Clarion West Writers Workshop is running an unusual fundraising auction on eBay this week, offering bidders the right to appear in stories by various science-fiction and fantasy writers: Paul Park, Eileen Gunn, Vylar Kaftan, and K. Tempest Bradford. Eight auctions are underway already and will end at some point after 9:30 p.m. PST on June 26.” Link

The Guardian writes:

The American writer Norman Mailer is to use a “remote pen” to do a book-signing from the other side of the Atlantic, after age and ill-health forced him to cancel a rare public appearance in the UK.

…Mailer will use an internet-based technique devised by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood for remotely signing books called LongPen.

Mailer will be at his home in Provincetown on the east coast near New York, while his audience will be in the tented city which is built in a Georgian square in Edinburgh’s New Town each year for the festival.

According to an older Guardian article on the subject of the LongPen’s launch last year (via Neil Gaiman’s blog archives):

LongPen allows an author to see the reader she is signing for, and vice-versa, using a videoconferencing system, and an image of the page to be signed.

She then writes her inscription on a touch-sensitive LCD screen and presses a button. That sends a signal to the remote bookstore, where the robot arm, clutching an ordinary ballpoint pen, copies out the message on to the book.

A signing through the LongPen is certainly better than a complete cancellation, though in my opinion it leaves something to be desired over an in-person encounter with a favorite author. Still, if the alternative is a tired/grouchy/sick author, a signing through the LongPen might actually allow better “quality time” with them.

It’ll be interesting to see whether more authors will begin to take advantage of technology like the LongPen to make appearances at signings they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to attend. Though authors have been slower than members of other employment sectors to take advantage of virtual interaction, there’s been a recent push to take advantage of technology to interact with readers: commonplace videoconferencing at events and George R. R. Martin’s appearance in Second Life are only a couple examples.

From The New York Times:

We asked a handful of writers what books they’ve enjoyed most over the last few months, and why. Their choices — from best sellers to poetry collections to a philosophy of science — are idiosyncratic and instructive.

Writers contributing to the article include Stephen King and Ursula Le Guin. View full story here.

An excerpt:

My ability to not-do things is considered by many people to be nigh-transcendental in its scope.

Just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about, back when I was in college, I was putting off writing a paper. Now anyone can put off a paper by watching TV or playing a video game, that’s a cakewalk. I, however, was watching snow melt on the sidewalk and occasionally poking at things with a stick. That’s all, and I’d been keeping it up for four hours.

Patrick Rothfuss is the author of the acclaimed fantasy novel The Name of the Wind. Full post on his blog.

Bestselling fantasy author George R. R. Martin (of the amazing series A Song of Ice and Fire, which is right up there on the top of my personal list of favorite books) is making an appearance in the virtual world of Second Life. He’s joining a growing list of politicians, authors and musicians who have been using SL to connect with people in the virtual environment.

Yes, I’m making a virtual appearance in Bantam’s virtual bookstore on Second Life. For those of you who don’t know it, Second Life is… well, sort of like World of Warcraft without the axes, swords, and monsters. Our world, kinda sorta, virtually. Anyway, I’ll be there this Thursday evening, in avatar form, doing a reading from A DANCE WITH DRAGONS and doing a Q&A afterwards. Proceedings will start at 9:00pm eastern [2am GMT] and run about an hour. This will be a first for me, so it will be fun to see how it goes. Ah, ’tis a brave new world, surely.

If you’d like to be part of the festivities, get thee to www.secondlife.com. You can sign up there, download the software, and design your own avatar. (I’ve never done a reading with monsters in the audience before, at least not the sort you could tell my looking at ‘em).

The virtual bookstore can only hold about sixty avatars, but the overflow will be able to see and hear the reading from satellite sites, and send questions via IM.

I’ve never done this before either, so that’s about all I can tell you about how things will work… but if you live out in the bookdocks where I’m never likely to visit on a book tour, this virtual appearance could be the next best thing. See you there!

Link to blog post. For those of you with Second Life (and if you don’t have it, get it - it’s very easy to set up), just search “bantam” in the places search tab and teleport over.

See you there!