#skyboat

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting the audiobook of The Lost Cause, my novel of environmental hope

Tonight (October 2), I'm in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The Lost Cause is my next novel. It's about the climate emergency. It's hopeful. Library Journal called it "a message hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak." As with every other one of my books Amazon refuses to sell the audiobook, so I made my own, and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-lost-cause-a-novel-of-climate-and-hope

That's a lot to unpack, I know. So many questions! Including this one: "How is it that I have another book out in 2023?" Because this is my third book this year. Short answer: I write when I'm anxious, so I came out of lockdown with nine books. Nine!

Hope and writing are closely related activities. Hope (the belief that you can make things better) is nothing so cheap and fatalistic as optimism (the belief that things will improve no matter what you do). The Lost Cause is full of people who are full of hope.

The action begins a full generation after the Hail Mary passage of the Green New Deal, and the people who grew up fighting the climate emergency (rather than sitting hopelessly by while the powers that be insisted that nothing could or should be done) have a name for themselves: they call themselves "the first generation in a century that doesn't fear the future."

I fear the future. Unchecked corporate power has us barreling over a cliff's edge and all the one-percent has to say is, "Well, it's too late to swerve now, what if the bus rolls and someone breaks a leg? Don't worry, we'll just keep speeding up and leap the gorge":

https://locusmag.com/2022/07/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

That unchecked corporate power has no better avatar than Amazon, one of the tech monopolies that has converted the old, good internet into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four":

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

Amazon maintains a near-total grip over print and ebooks, but when it comes to audiobooks, that control is total. The company's Audible division has captured more than 90% of the market, and it abuses that dominance to cram Digital Rights Management onto every book it sells, even if the author doesn't want it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

I wrote a whole-ass book about this and it came out less than a month ago; it's called The Internet Con and it lays out an audacious plan to halt the internet's enshittification and throw it into reverse:

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

The tldr is this: when an audiobook is wrapped in Amazon's DRM, only Amazon can legally remove it. That means that every book I sell you on Audible is a book you have to throw away if you ever break up with Amazon, and Amazon can use the fact that it's hold you hostage to screw me – and every other author – over.

As I said last time this came up:

Fuck that sideways.

With a brick.

My books are sold without DRM, so you can play them in any app and do anything copyright permits, and that means Amazon won't carry them, and that means my publishers don't want to pay to produce them, and that means I produce them myself, and then I make the (significant) costs back by selling them on Kickstarter.

And you know what? It works. Readers don't want DRM. I mean, duh. No one woke up this morning and said, "Dammit, why won't someone sell me a product that lets me do less with my books?" I sell boatloads" of books through these crowdfunding campaigns. I sold so many copies of my last book, *The Internet Con, that they sold out the initial print run in two weeks (don't worry, they held back stock for my upcoming events).

But beyond that, I think there's another reason my readers keep coming back, even though I wrote a genuinely stupid number of books while working through lockdown anxiety while the wildfires raged and ashes sifted down out of the sky and settled on my laptop as I lay in my backyard hammock, pounding my keyboard.

(I went through two keyboards during lockdown. Thankfully, I bought a user-serviceable laptop from Framework and fixed it myself both times, in a matter of minutes. No, no one pays me to mention this, but hot damn is it cool.)

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

The reason readers come back to my books is that they're full of hope. In the same way that writing lets me feel like I'm not a passenger in life, but rather, someone with a say in my destination, the books that I write are full of practical ways and dramatic scenes in which other people seize the means of computation, the reins of power or their own destinies.

The protagonist of The Lost Cause is Brooks Palazzo, a high-school senior in Burbank whose parents were part of the original cohort of volunteers who kicked off the global transformation, and left him an orphan when they succumbed to one of the zoonotic plagues that arise every time another habitat is destroyed.

Brooks grew up knowing what his life would be: the work of repair and care, which millions of young people are doing. Relocating entire cities off endangered coastlines and floodplains, or out of fire-zones. Fighting floods and fires. Caring for tens of millions of refugees for whom the change came too late.

But with every revolution comes a counter-revolution. The losers of a just war don't dig holes, climb inside and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. Two groups of reactionaries – seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and seething white nationalist militias – have formed an alliance.

They've already gotten their champion into the White House. Next up: dismantling every cause for hope Brooks and his friends have, and bringing back the fear.

That's the setup for a novel about solidarity, care, library socialism, and snatching victory from defeat's jaws. Writing it help keep me sane during the lockdown, and when it came time to record the audiobook, I spent a lot of time thinking about who could read it. I've had some great narrators: Wil Wheaton, @neil-gaiman, Amber Benson, Bronson Pinchot, and more.

I record my audiobooks with Skyboat Media, a brilliant studio near my place in LA. Back in August, I spent a week in their recording booth – "The Tardis" – doing something I'd never tried before: I recorded a whole audiobook, with directorial supervision: The Internet Con:

https://transactions.sendowl.com/products/78992826/DEA0CE12/purchase

When it was done, the director – audiobook legend Gabrielle de Cuir – sat me down and said, "Look, I've never said this to an author before, but I think you should read The Lost Cause. I don't direct anyone anymore except for Wil Wheaton and LeVar Burton, but I would direct you on this one."

I was immensely flattered – and very nervous. Reading The Internet Con was one thing – the book is built around the speeches I've been giving for 20 years and I knew I could sell those lines – but The Lost Cause is a novel, with a whole cast of characters. Could I do it?

Reader, I did it. I just listened to the proofs last week and:

It.

Came.

Out.

Great.

The Lost Cause goes on sale on November 14th, and I'll be selling this audiobook I made everywhere audiobooks are sold – except for the stores that require DRM, nonconsensually shackling readers and writers to their platforms. So you'll be able to get it on Libro.fm, downpour.com, even Google Play – but not Audible, Apple Books, or Audiobooks.com.

But in addition to those worthy retailers, I will be sending out thousands – and thousands! – of audiobook to my Kickstarter backers on the on-sale date, either as a folder of DRM-free MP3s, or as a download code for Libro.fm, to make things easy for people who don't want to have to figure out how to sideload an audiobook into a standalone app.

And, of course, the mobile duopoly have made this kind of sideloading exponentially harder over the past decade, though far be it from me to connect this with their policy of charging 30% commissions on everything sold through an app, a commission they don't receive if you get your files on the web and load 'em yourself:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

As with my previous Kickstarters, I'm also selling ebooks and hardcovers – signed or unsigned, and this time I've found a great partner to fulfill EU orders from within the EU, so backers won't have to pay VAT and customs charges. The wonderful Otherland – who have hosted me on my last two trips to Berlin – are going to manage that shipping for me:

https://www.otherland-berlin.de/en/home.html

Kim Stanley Robinson read the book and said, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this." That's just about the perfect quote, because the book is a ride. It's not just a kumbaya tale of a better world that is possible: it's a post-cyberpunk novel of high-tech guerrilla and meme warfare, climate tech and bad climate tech, wildcat prefab urban infill, and far-right militamen who adapt to a ban on assault-rifles by switching to super-soakers full of hydrochloric acid.

It's a book about struggle, hope in the darkness, and a way through this rotten moment. It's a book that dares to imagine that things might get worse but also better. This is a curious emotional melange, but it's one that I'm increasingly feeling these days.

Like, Amazon, that giant bully, whose blockade on DRM-free audiobooks cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through university (according to my agent)? The incredible Lina Khan brought a long-overdue antitrust case against Amazon while her rockstar DoJ counterpart, Jonathan Kanter, is dragging Google through the courts.

The EU is taking on Apple, and French cops are kicking down Nvidia's doors and grabbing their files, looking to build another antitrust case for monopolizing GPUs. The writers won their strike and Joe Biden walked the picket-line with the UAW, the first president in history to join striking workers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/joe-biden-is-headed-to-a-uaw-picket-line-in-detroit-f80bd0b372ab?sk=f3abdfd3f26d2f615ad9d2f1839bcc07

Solar is now our cheapest energy source, which is wild, because if we could only capture 0.4% of the solar energy that makes it through the atmosphere, we could give everyone alive the same energy budget as Canadians (who have American lifestyles but higher heating bills). As Deb Chachra writes in her forthcoming How Infrastructure Works (my review pending): we get a fresh supply of energy every time the sun rises and we only get new materials when a comet survives atmospheric entry, but we treat energy as scarce and throw away our materials after a single use:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. We have shot past many of our planetary boundaries and there are waves of climate crises in our future, but they don't have to be climate disasters. That's up to us – it'll depend on whether we come together to save ourselves and each other, or tear ourselves apart.

The Lost Cause dares to imagine what it might be like if we do the former. We don't live in a post-enshittification world yet, but we could. With these indie audiobooks, I've found a way to treat the terminal enshittification of the Amazon monopoly as damage and route around it. I hope you'll back the Kickstarter, fight enshittification, inject some hope into your reading, and enjoy a kickass adventure novel in the process:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-lost-cause-a-novel-of-climate-and-hope

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/02/the-lost-cause/#the-first-generation-that-doesnt-fear-the-future

[aryastarkinsky]

I find this very funny 🤭

[eruzaarto]

BOAT.

[pleuvoire]

the spaceport city in decker being named sorafune is so wild to me because that just means “sky boat” and doesn’t sound like a place name literally at all. it sounds exactly like what a western toku fan with limited japanese knowledge armed only with jisho would name the spaceport city in their fanmade ultraman concept. except it’s real and canon and a main place name in an ultraman series

[craigbrasco]

Inktober 2024, Day 29 - Navigator. The traveler waved to the skyboat navigator.

[indigowriting]

it's finally done! i can officially say that i wrote and finished an original short story :D you can read it below the cut.

-

Synopsis: Waking without memories, Reva has only her two companions and the tomb they're exploring for company—and the two women who accompany her studiously avoid explaining to her what happened, or what, exactly, their relationship is.

Wordcount: 3.715 Setting: ambiguously science fiction Rating: 16+

Onlining hits like a sledgehammer—loud, insistent, painful, edged with the distinct lack of deftitude, of tacks. Her eyes snap open, and her body judders as it attempts to remember how to drag in the breaths that are now necessary. Her field of vision is a wash of muted greys, fuzzy and indistinct. Something hard digs into her shoulder—stone, or metal. Her hands spasm without direction, a leftover of the ReviLine coursing through her veins, released in a sharp pulse moments before to drag her body back to the land of the living. Her mouth is cottony and the faint taste of metal lingers at the back of her throat.

And then—two hands, one on each shoulder; indistinct words. Someone’s face floats into her vision, slowly fading into colour as her retinal cones boot back up, and then another, one almost gaunt, the other rounded, both of them reading clear anxiety, though the round face hides it better. She coughs, the sound harsh, and finally gets ahold of her faculties; shoves herself roughly into an upright position. “How long?” she croaks out, the weight of hands through her mesh inner suit burning brands, grounding her in reality. Her surroundings have finally solidified—the dusty inside of a tomb, high ceilings and lantern-light bathing the marble of the walls in a warm glow that nevertheless is unable to hide the disrepair. She doesn’t remember coming here, which means she must not have uploaded before coming into the tomb—must not have expected the tomb to be as dangerous as, apparently, it is. At least the rest of her memories are coming back—and yet, they feel fragmented, incomplete; a mere handful of what they should be. She frowns. “How long?” she asks again, this time locking gazes with her companions. She should know their names—there’s an instinctive trust, an ease when she looks at them, but she can’t, and that makes her skin itch.

The others exchange a glance. “Two days,” the gaunt one finally says. “Reva, what’s your last memory?”

Reva. It must be her name, but there’s no sense of attachment. She swallows and tries to focus; latches, finally, onto a memory. “Skyboating,” she says. “I was...” but that’s as far as it goes, the rest of it hazy and unsteady, as if ancient, crumbling film, staticked and choppy. It fills her chest with something ugly, roiling and hot, and the way the gaunt woman’s lips pinch into a thin line makes the sensation worse.

“It’s getting worse,” she says grimly, and then sighs; withdraws her hand from Reva’s shoulder. She holds herself as if someone is going to tell her she needs to leave; as if she thinks her presence here is in question, as if she’s used to taking up no space at all and hates having to negotiate her existence—sharp lines, large gestures. Even her retreat from Reva’s side takes up more space than it should, leaves her closer to her than it should. “Maj, she doesn’t remember us.”

“No shit,” says Maj, and it’s a quiet anger; makes Reva flinch instinctively. When she notices the reaction, her thick brows furrow, eyes rounding. “Sorry,” she says, the word sounding unpracticed but still, somehow, Reva knows it’s sincere. She lets out a sigh. “Let me help you up,” she says. “We’re only a third of the way into this tomb—you should eat something.” Her hand slides from Reva’s shoulder down to her arm, and when she pulls her to her feet, the motion is surprisingly gentle. “El.”

“I’ve got it,” El says, and pulls the large pack off her back, digging through one of its many pockets, muttering to herself as she goes through its contents before finally finding what she’s looking for—a slightly-battered rations bar and a bottle of what must be water or a fortified drink, faded letters stamped into the metal. When Reva takes it, it’s strangely warm against her palm—the heat of a warm body, of a yam plucked from the fire; the kind of heat that sits and simmers, self-sustaining, burning a eternal fuel.

The others are looking at her, and it’s only then that she realises that she hasn’t spoken in—how long? She doesn’t know. The passage they’re in has narrowed, and, stopped as they are, they can’t quite stand three to a shoulder, Maj and El turned slightly inwards so they can better fit, her in the middle. It’s familiar in a way she knows, instinctively, should spark—something. What, she’s not sure, and she realises, suddenly, they’re—waiting. As if this has happened before. But she doesn’t have anything to say, and it burns like liquid shame down her throat as she unscrews the bottle cap, hides her face behind it as she drinks. The liquid inside—thicker than water, but not quite thick enough to be a protein slurry, and tasting too much like fresh berries to be, either—is cold in contrast to the warmth of its container.

In the end, her companions don’t press. Reva is grateful for it, in the way that she is grateful for her every breath: aching, ashamed at the weakness she knows, somehow, she should have carved out of herself. The ReviLine in her blood is tell enough—no one upgrades their body that way unless they have a very specific, bloody goal in mind. It makes her wonder about Maj and El—for all that they’ve been brusque, they walk around her as if they are entering a tomb, a mausoleum: gentle, measured. Her mind stutters at the word reverent—something about that stings. Instead of thinking too hard on it, she caps the bottle; scans the walls ahead of them. The paint that was in the earlier section has faded, simplified; the narrative turned narrow, featuring only a small number of the characters it did previously. She can’t understand the specifics, but the paintings suggest something precious hidden in the tomb—and not just sanctified dead.

The bottle is gone from her hand, she realises suddenly, and when she looks, it’s been slipped back into El’s pack. She has no memory of doing so. It must have been unconscious. As easy as breathing. The thought makes the hair at the nape of her neck prickle.

And then: a crack in the wall; hairline, barely visible; spreading down, across the floor. Too even, too straight, to be anything but purposeful. Maj and El, walking in synchrony half a step ahead of her, are too busy looking at the murals, and so it is only Reva—eyes enhanced by the ReviLine in her blood, ten times more sensitive than a baseline human’s, able to pick out subtleties in the flickering light that others would miss—who sees it. Before the conscious thought of recognition sparks, she’s grabbing the others, bounding over the trap as it falls away, revealing sparking rows upon rows of jagged-tipped pikes embedded at the bottom—a painful, deadly end to anyone caught unawares.

They tumble to the ground just shy of the edge that drops off into the pit, a jumble of limbs. Instinctively, Reva rolls to protect them, her shoulder hitting the ground with a crunch that echoes in the small space, but it’s not enough—a muffled cry, the wet crack of bone. Her body, not as large as her companions’, wasn’t able to cushion the both of them. When she scrambles to her feet, Maj has curled in on herself, cradling her arm to her chest, her face a harsh set of pain. “Fuck,” she says, the word a shaky inhalation. The blood has stained her grey top dark, and the bone glints where it juts from the skin, surrounded by the wet mass of flesh where her skin’s torn.

“Kit,” Reva snaps, the words coming to her without thought. Her skin is hot, ants crawling beneath it. Her shoulder was dislocated—she roughly sets it. The ReviLine will take care of any lasting damage, and it’s not important right now. El digs out bandages and a splint, disinfectant and EasyKnit in her periphery; hands them to her in quick succession. Her long, narrow fingers don’t shake, but her mouth is set into a flickering line, and the part of Reva that isn’t holding Maj’s arm steady as she mindlessly sets the bone, pours EasyKnit over it and splints and wraps it can see the glint of tears held at bay by it.

It’s over almost as quickly as it happened. The silence is stark against Maj’s ragged, almost-gasping breaths. Reva sits back on her heels and swallows. “We should stop,” she says. “If there’s a trap like that, there’s certain to be more.”

“No.” 

It’s Maj who speaks, and she props herself up against the wall single-handedly; meets Reva’s gaze head-on. She runs her tongue across her lips, tips her head back against the dusty wall. “We can’t.”

“Why?” Reva demands. She shouldn’t, probably, but—seeing Maj bloodied like that—something about it twisted beneath her ribs; bone shards in her lungs. “Whatever treasure you’ve brought me with you to find—surely it’s not worth your life.”

El, already close, shuffles closer; pulls out a cloth and wipes the blood off her hands. “There’s nothing more important,” she says, quietly, and then refuses to say any more. Somehow, out of everything, that’s what holds Reva’s attention—the way her fingers clean the blood away, taking her hand and turning it so she can dig the already-dried blood from beneath her nails. She is certain there are things Maj and El aren’t telling her, and this—it both proves it and confounds it. What sort of woman lies to someone whose hand she holds this way? Still, she remains silent; lets El finish cleaning the blood off, until her skin is unmarred once again; lets her hold them for a moment, then two, without reason. Her gaze searches Reva’s face for something she doesn’t know the name of, and when she lets go, there’s a sense sorrow, quickly hidden as her face smoothes out into neutrality. “There,” she says. “Now you won’t rub it on your clothes.”

Reva nods her thanks. “If we’re going to continue, I should be in front,” she says. She thinks about suggesting they take a break, just long enough for the EasyKnit to begin taking effect, but she’s certain the others will rebuff it. Whatever it is they’re looking for, it spells tension in the lines of their bodies, desperation in the silent glances they give each other. Reva wonders if they told her, before; if she’s as close to them as these wordless actions she finds herself performing, or if it’s one-sided; if she trusts them more than they trust her. The thought makes her skin prickle uncomfortably, and she pushes it aside. This isn’t the time for those sorts of thoughts. Instead, she rises to her feet; offers a hand to Maj, propped up against the wall. There’s no hesitation to the other’s actions as she reaches out to take it. Reva doesn’t think about what that says; instead, says to El, “Monitor her for any adverse reactions. I’ll keep an eye out for more traps.”

El nods. “Alright,” she says. As Reva turns, she thinks she hears her say something else, but it’s too quiet to be distinct, even for her; could just be the click of her throat as she swallows. Behind her, there’s the sound of fabric on fabric; Maj leaning against El, probably. She scans the corridor ahead of them. It hasn’t narrowed any more since they crossed the trap, and it doesn’t appear to ahead of them, either. The paint on the walls is much more faded, now, and all she can really make out are indistinct human shapes. There’s no signs of traps, but she runs her fingers along the walls on either side anyway.

They walk like this for some time. Reva tracks the breaths of her companions behind her as they journey onward, the sounds so synchronous that it’s only her ReviLine-enhanced senses that let her pick out that it’s two, rather than one. At some point, she realises her own steps have fallen in time with the others’. She wishes she had uploaded more recently—like this, she may as well be walking through ancient ruins, stumbling unawares into things she does not have the knowledge necessary to understand. It’s disconcerting—but more importantly, it’s dangerous, to trust, as she apparently does, these two women who she doesn’t even know.

She keeps her thoughts to herself, though. There’s no point in voicing them aloud—and she needs to save her breath in case they come across any aerosolised traps. So she lets her steps stay in rhythm with El and Maj’s, and ignores the prickle at the nape of her neck that tells her they are watching her, because for reasons she doesn’t understand, this reads as comfort rather than danger.

Finally, after what feels like an eternity, the corridor opens up into a large room whose angled walls are shallow enough to give the impression of it being circular. A column stands at each intersection, marble and intricately-carved, and the walls are a riot of paint, murals depicting people in various scenes, some action-focused, some where the figures appear to be talking to each other. In the centre of the room, there’s a large pool with a raised dias in the centre, and a basin too high for her to see the contents of. Around the base of the dias are carvings of birds—she counts twelve in total as she circles it, looking for any signs of traps. Five of them, though, have been defaced in some way—some missing heads, or wings, or with gouge-like marks tearing them in half. The almost-lifelike detail of the carvings makes the sight strangely discomfiting—as if, if not for the destruction, they could step down and begin to crow.

“If there’s any treasure, it should be in the basin,” she says. She’s not sure what sort of treasure would even be placed in a basin, but tombs, she knows, are not always beholden to logic. “There aren’t any traps as far as I can tell.”

Maj lets out a snort. “Of course the bastards who built this place would put all their traps on the way to the main chamber, and none in it,” she scoffs. “Typical.”

Reva wonders, for a brief moment, what other traps they encountered along the way. Whatever they were, she can’t remember them—probably because one of them kicked her offline. Still, she doesn’t expect for El to snap, “Maj,” voice slightly raised for the first time that Reva has heard. And, surprisingly enough, Maj actually looks regretful, her lips twisting into a frown. El wavers for a moment, anger clear in her frame, before she lets out a sigh, visibly wresting her emotions under control. “Together?” she says.

Maj nods. “Always,” she says. Her gaze darts to Reva for a moment, as if she wants to add something, but, strangely enough, she doesn’t. Perhaps she was considering asking for a moment of privacy, but thought better of it. Still—that doesn’t quite fit.

Reva doesn’t ask. Right now, no matter whatever else they haven’t told her, she’s responsible for keeping them safe. “I’ll come with you,” she says, tilting her head towards the dias. “There might be traps that I can’t see from here.”

“Alright,” El says; and then: “just...be careful. We don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

Better me than you, Reva doesn’t tell her. At least I can online again. Still, she nods.

There’s no more words spoken. They make their way towards the dias, steps light. The pool isn’t anything special—just water, though it’s kept brilliantly clear through what must be a sophisticated filtration system, pebbles paving the bottom. The water is cool even through her boots, and it only takes a few steps to make it across to the dias. It takes a moment longer to climb up onto it—it’s taller than it appears, award to try and step up onto. 

The basin, though—whatever Reva was expecting, this isn’t it: an almost slate-grey, deep-sided, the bottom quarter is filled with a milky, rosy-gold liquid. It doesn’t look like any sort of treasure that Reva can think of, but the way Maj and El look at it—it must be important to them, at least.

And then—Maj slips her pack off and tugs the zipper open one-handedly, pulling out an ornate, silver cup, delicate filigree spilling across the outside, and dips it into the basin, filling it with liquid before Reva can even open her mouth to warn her. As she draws it back out, the level of the liquid recedes, and for a moment, there’s a deep, heavy silence. 

Then, as if a clap of thunder echoing through the room, the ground beneath them bucks; sways, shakes. Maj drops to the ground, cradling the cup, and a moment later, El falls to her side. Reva crouches, keeping an eye on the basin to make sure that, if it does come tumbling down, she can catch it.

Finally, the commotion stops. Around them, dust streams through the room in plumes, hazy in the light of their lanterns. Maj and El are both wide-eyed, focused on the cup, and when a few moments pass without further disturbances, Maj rises shakily to her feet; holds the cup out to Reva. “Drink,” she says.

Reva stares at her, uncomprehending. “This is your treasure,” she says. “Don’t you want to—to take it with you, to analyse it, or sell it, or—?”

“Crow,” Maj says, and, oh—that’s not anger, or irritation; that’s desperation. “Please, this—the treasure,  it’s you.” Her eyes are glassy, and she blinks rapidly in a clear attempt to banish them. By her side, El is only slightly better; the tumble to the ground sent her hair into a disarray, and there’s dust in a fine layer all over her face, her eyes wide, imploring.

Crow. She doesn’t understand the depth behind it, but she can tell, instantly, that that’s her name—not Reva. Or perhaps Reva is her name, but it’s never been anything more than that. The way Maj says Crow is as if it is precious. She’s not a woman who looks like she would ever do anything gently, but this—this is painfully so. Crow swallows; glances at El. “If I drink it, you have to explain what you’ve been hiding from me,” she says, because somehow, the concept of saying no doesn’t even pass her mind.

“Of course,” El says; quick, as if all she’s been waiting for is Crow to ask her.

There’s a beat of silence, and then Crow takes the cup. Maj’s hands are warm where they brush. The liquid tastes almost floral as she swallows it, her eyes closing of their own accord. When she opens them, her companions are looking at her, hope writ clear across their faces.

Whatever they see on hers must not be what they were expecting, because Maj says, voice trembling, “Crow...” and then tears begin to fall down her cheeks, round as raindrops off leaves. “She doesn’t remember,” she says to El, and her voice is broken, devastated; the first hint of fragility Crow has seen in her; and a moment later, El is cradling her, the two of them sinking to the ground, wrapped around each other, both crying—Maj fast and hiccoughing, El slower, like melting ice. “It was supposed to work,” she can barely make out in between Maj’s sobs. She swallows thickly. It feels like an intrusion to be here, watching them fall to pieces, but to leave feels sacrilegious, and—she doesn’t want them to be alone, even if she’s the source of their grief.

Time passes in ebbs and flows. Eventually, Maj’s tears run dry. When she pulls back, her face is still raw with emotion, but she sets her lips in a firm line. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It was my idea to not tell you if you had another episode. I thought—I thought it would be easier for you, if you didn’t have to miss your memories. If you were able to just—get them back.”

“You’ve been having episodes starting about a year ago,” El adds, quietly. “At first, we didn’t know—we thought it must be an injury, or an illness. The ReviLine—it’s supposed to be top of the line. That’s why your family upgraded you—so you could finish tomb expeditions that would have killed anyone else permanently. But I guess even perfect technology fails eventually,” she adds, bitterly. “Everyone we visited told us the same thing: you’d offlined too many times, and the strain of it on your system was beginning to destroy your memories. Eventually, you started offlining more and more, and at random, and each time, you would forget more and more.”

“This was the first time you’d forgotten us,” Maj says, quiet. She’s not looking at Crow; as if it’s too painful. “The fountain—it was supposed to heal you.”

There’s flames of anger licking at Crow, but—she can understand their decisions. She can understand why her past self agreed to search for this—fountain. She can feel the sharp, ragged outline of sorrow in her chest, the absence of things she should know; the absence of memories for the two women she is certain, now, mean more to her than anything in the universe. How cruel, then, for their hopes to be crushed. She lets out a shallow breath; drops the now-empty cup. It hits the ground with a sharp clang. A moment later, her knees hit the ground in front of them. “I can’t be the Crow you knew,” she says, quietly, “but if you can tell me our history—maybe I can be a Crow.” The crows on the dias, she notices distantly, are all gone, now. She holds out her hands, palms up.

For a moment, the others hesitate; then, at once, they take her hands in their own, and begin to speak.

[findingweeherbs]

She sang the Skyboat song for Season 7 Outlander….💔🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿😞🙏🏻.

[bluegekk0]

So like is everyone in the Shivering Isles actually insane? Why is that guy walking in circles and talking about building a skyboat? Why is that argonian looking for a fork? Do these people all smoke crack? What is going on?? Can I have some???

[spockvarietyhour]

the debriefing scene with the pilot - skyboat captain - is cut differently. There's more intro to it in the Ulysses cut and crying about dearly departed Ed but then the og has a longer back end to the scene where Deacons goes on about where the Mariner's heading.

In the Ulysses cut that part comes after the Mariner's confrontation with the drifter played by Kim Coates (and then some).

[pianotunerwolverhampton]

Here is one of the songs from my musical memories concert over the weekend - sky boat song played on the 1890s C Bechstein Concert Grand. All Saints Church, Wellington, Telford, Shropshire

www.matthewjamesrichards.co.uk

#SkyBoat #church

#piano #telford #Wellington #pianotuner #pianotuning #pianotuners #music #bechstein #pianist #musicians #grandpiano

[masterofthedungeonnotkinkyt-blog]

Skyboats

Every morning I would wake at dawn To find him kneeling His ear placed to the ground Or towards the air And sea

He would have me Make what he heard Into reality

My hands broke weaving Stone and sowing Water into Air. They bled into the sounds, So I became apart of Them

The sounds looked Like skins and nerves they, Looked like bone too, And they breathed.

Sometimes I would Kneel on the Ground of sand and rock

Then I would Lean my ear up To the things I had made I would hear each Of their songs.

One morning I woke Late. Stumbling from the cold

I found him peeling, In one hand a knife, The other one shook - Pulling back skin -

He raised his head Nodded for me to join him Red water pooled around us, Their songs grew long and, Quiet,

We took the bone and Made structure

We took the skin and dried it And warmed ourselves with the flesh,

By summer we were finished, Floating on the clouds, Making our own songs: And leaving the lost ones behind. P.S. This is an ekphrastic poem about boats at my local library, I can take a picture of them if anyones interested!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won't sell (read by Wil Wheaton!)

Red Team Blues is my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller; it’s a major title for my publishers Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and it’s swept the trade press with starred reviews all ‘round. Despite all that, Audible will not sell the audiobook. In fact, Audible won’t sell any of my audiobooks. Instead, I have to independently produce them and sell them through Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/21/anti-finance-finance-thriller/#marty-hench

Audible is Amazon’s monopoly audiobook platform. It has a death-grip on the audiobook market, commanding more than 90% of genre audiobook sales, and every single one of those audiobooks is sold with Amazon’s DRM on it. That means that you can’t break up with Amazon without throwing away those audiobooks. Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I can’t give you a tool to convert my own copyrighted audiobooks to a non-Amazon format. Doing so is a felony carrying a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for an act that in no way infringes anyone’s copyright! Indeed, merely infringing copyright is much less illegal than removing Amazon’s mandatory DRM from my own books!

I’ve got amazing publishers who support my crusade against DRM, but they’re not charities. If they can’t sell my audiobooks on the platform that represents 90% of the market, they’re not going to make audio editions at all. Instead, I make my own audiobooks, using brilliant voice actors like Amber Benson and @neil-gaiman​, and I sell them everywhere except Audible.

Doing this isn’t cheap: I’m paying for an incredible studio (Skyboat Media), a world-class director (Gabrielle de Cuir), top-notch sound editing and mastering, and, of course, killer narrators. And while indie audiobook platforms like Libro.fm and downpour.com are amazing, the brutal fees extracted by Apple and Google on app sales means that users have to jump through a thousand hoops to shop with indie stores. Most audiobook listeners don’t even know that these stores exist: if a title isn’t available on Audible, they assume no audiobook exists.

That’s where Kickstarter comes in: twice now, I’ve crowdfunded presales of my audiobooks through KS, and these campaigns were astoundingly successful, smashing records and selling thousands of audiobooks. These campaigns didn’t just pay my bills (especially during lockdown, when our household income plunged), but they also showed other authors that it was possible to evade Amazon’s monopoly chokepoint and sell books that aren’t sticky-traps for Audible’s walled garden/prison:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/90282-we-wrote-a-book-about-why-audible-won-t-sell-our-book-and-snuck-it-onto-audible.html

And today, I’m launching the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues, and even by the standards of my previous efforts, I think this one’s gonna be incredible.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

For starters, there’s the narrator: @wilwheaton​, whose work on my previous books is outstanding, hands-down my favorite (don’t tell my other narrators! They’re great too!):

https://wilwheaton.net/

Beyond Wil’s narration, there’s the subject matter. The hero of Red Team Blues is a hard-charging forensic accountant who’s untangled every Silicon Valley finance scam since he fell in love with spreadsheets as as a MIT freshman, dropped out, got his CPA ticket, and moved west. Now, at the age of 67, Marty Hench is ready to retire, but a dear old friend — a legendary cryptographer — drags him back for one last job — locating the stolen keys to the backdoor he foolishly hid in a cryptocurrency that’s worth more than a billion dollars.

That’s the starting gun for a “grabby next-Tuesday thriller” that sees Marty in between three-letter agencies and international crime syndicates, all of whom view digital technology as a carrier medium for scams, violence and predation. Marty’s final adventure involves dodgy banks, crooked crypto, and complicit officials in a fallen paradise where computers’ libertory promise has been sucked dry by billionaire vampires.

It’s a pretty contemporary story, in other words.

I wrote this one before SVB, before Sam Bankman0Fried and FTX — just like I wrote Little Brother before Snowden’s revelations. It’s not that I’m prescient — fortune-telling is a fatalist’s delusion — it’s that these phenomena are just the most spectacular, most recent examples in a long string of ghastly and increasingly dire scandals.

Red Team Blues blasted out of my fingertips in six weeks flat, during lockdown, when technology was simultaneously a lifeline, connecting us to one another during our enforced isolation; and a tool of predatory control, as bossware turned our “work from home” into “live at work.”

The last time I wrote a book that quickly, it was Little Brother, and, as with Little Brother, Red Team Blues is a way of working out my own anxieties and hopes for technology on the page, in story.

These books tap into a nerve. I knew I had something special in my hands when, the night after I finished the first draft, I rolled over at 2AM to find my wife sitting up in bed, reading.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I had to find out how it ended,” she answered.

The next day, my editor sent me a four-line email:

That. Was. A! Fucking! Ride! Whoa!

Within a week, he’d bought Red Team Blues…and two sequels. I finished writing the second of these on Monday, and all three are coming out in the next 22 months. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

Kickstarter backers can get the usual goodies: DRM-free audiobooks and ebooks, hardcovers (including signed and personalized copies), and three very special, very limited-run goodies.

First, there’s naming rights for characters in the sequels — I’m selling three of these; they’re a form of cheap (or at least, reasonably priced) literary immortality for you or a loved one. The sequels are a lot of fun — they go in reverse chronology, and the next one is The Bezzle, out in Feb 2024, a book about prison-tech scams, crooked LA County Sheriff’s Deputy gangs, and real-estate scumbags turned techbros.

The third book is Picks and Shovels (Jan 2025), and it’s Marty’s first adventure after he comes west to San Francisco and ends up working for the bad guys, an affinity scam PC company called “Three Wise Men” that’s run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi who fleece their faithful with proprietary, underpowered computers and peripherals, and front for some very bad, very violent money-men.

Next, there’s three Marty Hench short story commissions: the Hench stories are machines for turning opaque finance scams into technothrillers. While finance bros use MEGO (“my eyes glaze over”) as a weapon to bore their marks into submission, I use the same performative complexity as the engines of taut detective stories. Commissioning a Hench story lets you turn your favorite MEGO scam into a science fiction story, which I’ll then shop to fiction websites (every story I’ve written for the past 20 years has sold, though in the event that one of these doesn’t, I’ll put it up under a CC license).

Finally, there’s a super-ultra-limited deluxe hardcover edition — and I do mean limited, just four copies! These leather-bound editions have Will Staehle’s fantastic graphic motif embossed in their covers, and the type design legend John D Berry is laying out the pages so that there’s space for a hidden cavity. Nestled in that cavity is a hand-bound early draft edition of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues. The binding is being done by the fantastic book-artist John DeMerritt. Each copy’s endpapers will feature a custom cryptographic puzzle created especially for it by the cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

I often hear from readers who want to thank me for the work I do, from the free podcast I’ve put out since 2006 to the free, CC BY columns I’ve written for Pluralistic for the past three years. There is no better way to thank me than to back this Kickstarter and encourage your friends to do the same:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

Preselling a ton of audiobooks, ebooks, and print books is a huge boost to the book on its launch — incomparable, really. Invaluable.

What’s more, helping me find a viable way to produce popular, widely heard audiobooks without submitting to Amazon’s DRM lock-in sets an example for other creators and publishers: we have a hell of a collective action problem to solve, but if we could coordinate a response to Audible demanding the right to decide whether our work should have their DRM, it would force Audible to treat all of us — creators, publishers and listeners — more fairly.

I’ll be heading out on tour to the US, Canada, the UK and Germany once the book is out. I’m really looking forward to as many backers in person as I can! Thank you for your support over these many long years — and for your support on this Kickstarter.

Today (Mar 22), I’m doing a remote talk for the Institute for the Future’s “Changing the Register” series.

[Image ID: A graphic showing a phone playing the Red Team Blues audiobok, along with a quote from Booklist, 'Jam-packed with cutting-edge ideas about cybersecurity and crypto. Another winner from an sf wizard.']

[eruzaarto]

Skyboat.

[my3dartblog]

Morning Star Skyboat is a continuation of my series of Сelestial Travelers.This beautiful ship captain who you can become can take you to the most exotic corners of the heavenly ocean. On board the Morning Star Skyboat can easily find the most mysterious and secret places that you've always dreamed of-) Model has many details of rotating and moving parts is designed specifically for use in your work! Software: Daz Studio 4, DAZ Studio 4 With IRAY Coming soon: https://3d-stuff.net/ #daz3d #dazstudio #3drender #3dart #daz3dstudio #irayrender #3dartwork #blender #blenderrender #blenderart #noaiart #noaiwriting #noai https://3d-stuff.net/

[the-great-horned-rat]

* NNNNNAAAHHH WHAT-WHAT DO TONIGHT? EAT-KILL SKYBOAT DWARFTHINGS? LAUGH AT GODLESS GIANTS?....CHEW HOLES INTO STUPID COMET GODTHINGS CITIES! YESSSSSS-YES DO-DO THAT MY CHILDREN!"

[pairofcosm]

What videos my characters would make as YouTubers:

Sovya (Isaia): a mix of gardening updates and detailed demonstrations of how they take apart and clean their various robot appendages. Also Jeanne makes them do the “I did my girlfriends makeup” trend

Beck-13 (Isaia): historical information and social activism about the injustices faced by clones

Ethan (The Knocking): book reviews and literary discussions of short stories and journals

Olivia (The Knocking): Ballet At Home For Beginners (All Ages!)

Diamond (Paracosm): very earnest but poor quality videos of him explaining how to fix a hovercar’s transmission

Reed (Paracosm): I PRANKED both of my dads SIMULTANEOUSLY (UNDERWATER PRANK MUST SEE!!!)

Sila (Paracosm): suspiciously aggressive informational videos that hint at the vast web of drama that runs deep through the atombee husbandry community. Reed and Diamond are too scared to comment

Pirouet (Paracosm): all his videos have been deleted by his boss. cringefail

Girana (dnd): worlds angriest video game streamer. Becomes famous for how many times she ragequits dark souls before finishing the game

Elain (dnd): somewhere between kickthepj and itsamemyleo. whimsical, creative, crafty storytelling videos. Is the hot gf guest appearances on Girana’s channel

Dirk (dnd): a few older videos of him and a band jamming and improvising some folk music, but mostly deactivated. One music class that Leo convinced him to teach and record.

Leo (dnd): mostly recordings of his lectures, but one singular “Day In The Life on my Sentient SkyBoat with my Pirate Husband!” that makes his students go “what the actual hell”