Gareth says:

Device is a new art gallery in La Jolla, California created by sculptor Greg Brotherton and his wife Amy. Their next show, Fantastic Contraption, opens July 19 (and runs through Sept. 2). The 18-artist show explores the leaky margins between humans and their machinery and includes some of my favorites: Stephane Halleux, Nemo Gould, Theo Kamecke, and Mike Libby (all of whom have appeared here on Make: Blog).

IDW Publishing has produced Device Volume 1: Fantastic Contraption, a gorgeous art book, to accompany the show. I was thrilled and honored to be asked to write the introduction for it.

The book is 140 full-color pages, sells for $20 ($13.60 on Amazon), and is available for pre-order now.

Fantastic Contraption show and book (Makezine)

On Cool Tools, Merlin Mann reviews It's All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life With Less Stuff.

It's All Too Much is a terrific book that inverts the typical approach to dealing with existential kipple. Rather than helping you find new places and novel ways to "organize" all your crap, author Peter Walsh encourages you to explore why you ever kept all that junk in the first place. Does it reflect a fantasy waistline or a long-abandoned career? What about this "priceless" relic of a late loved one that's been sitting in a moldy trash bag for 10 years? Be honest: what place do these things have in the life that you imagine for yourself? Because, if the stuff you accumulate isn't actively helping get you closer to a life you truly want, then it's getting in the way, and it needs to go. Period.

The biggest change in attitude this book made in my life was to teach me not to generate false relevance by "organizing" stuff I don't want or will never need. Organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love - it's not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to manufacture makebelieve meaning. For me, this is about the opposite of organizing; it means disinterring every sarcophagus of crap in my house and, item by item, evaluating whether it's making my family's life better today.

Kevin weighs in with his own hearty recommendation for the book:

Merlin Mann's review turned me onto this fantastic book. We've rethought our household because of it. We were reminded that life is not about stuff; it's about possibilities, which the right tools can enable. For a world of expanding stuff, this book is the necessary anti-stuff tool. If you are reading Cool Tools, you need to read this. It will help you distinguish between that which is fabulous for you personally and that which is just more junk to organize.

Kevin includes a bunch of excerpts from the book. Here are a few:

Imagine the life you want to live. I cannot think of a sentence that has had more impact on the lives of people I have worked with. ... When clutter fills your home, not only does it block your space, but it also blocks your vision.

*

You need space to live a happy, fruitful life. If you fill up that space with stuff for "the next house," your present life suffers. Stop claiming your house is too small. The amount of space you have cannot be changed -- the amount of stuff you have can.

*

I know it sounds strange, but if you start by focusing on the clutter, you will never get organized. Getting truly organized is rarely about "the stuff." This is the bottom line: If your stuff and the way it is organized is getting you to your goals... fantastic. But if it's impeding your vision for the the life you want, then why is it in your home? Why is it in your life? Why do you cling to it? For me, this is the only starting point in dealing with clutter.

*

If it's taken you ten years or more to accumulate your mess, it's impossible to make it disappear overnight. Letting go is a learning process. You might need to start slowly, and it may take time to discover that not having things makes your life better, not worse.

*

Most things that you save for the future represent hopes and dreams. But the money, space, and energy you spend trying to create a specific future are wasted. We can't control what tomorrow will bring. Those things we hoard for an imaginary future do little other than limit our possibilities and stunt our growth. When I urge you to get rid of them, I'm not telling you to discard your hopes and dreams. It's actually quite the opposite. Because if you throw out the stuff that does a rather shabby job of representing your hopes and dreams, you actually create room to make dreams come true.

It's All Too Much -- How to declutter your life (Cool Tools)

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 07 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

Cory visits his favorite comic book store in all the world -- Secret Headquarters, in the Silverlake area of Los Angeles. With shop owner Dave Pifer, he walks us through some of the graphic novels and comics he loves, everything from manga to zine howto manuals to Jodorowsky to Warren Ellis. Cory is particularly fond (as are all of us at BBtv) of the shop's awesome simultaneous tribute to Stan Lee and the Sex Pistols in this t-shirt, "God Save Stan Lee."

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion, downloadable video, and instructions on how to subscribe to the BBtv video podcast.

Infinite Matrix editor Eileen Gunn sez, "I've put up a new issue of the Infinite Matrix -- in honor of Cory's birthday and because I have three great stories the world needs to read: a reprint of Cory's fine Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers and two excellent stories by writers from Eastern Europe: Serbian activist and writer Yasmina Tesanovic's charming Cats and Cars at and Ukrainian SF writer Yana Dubinianska's spine-tingling Barge over Black Water. "

Nimby and the D-Hoppers is one of my most widely reprinted stories, and it's one of a very small handful of stories that I hadn't yet published for free online, though it has been released as CC-licensed podcasts and a CC licensed comic. As with the other adaptations, the text is Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.

And yup, yesterday was my birthday! I'm 37, which means I'm now in my prime. It sure beats being a total square at 36. Link

Mary sez, "Jim C. Hines, author of Goblin Quest, has just written lyrics to go with the Gilbert and Sullivan perennial 'Modern Major General' AND he's released them under a Creative Commons license. They are ripe with video potential."

I am the Very Model of a Modern SF Novelist

I am the very model of a modern SF novelist,
I've manuscripts space opera, anime, and fantasist,
I know the kings of fandom and the best flamewars historical
From Andrew Burt to LiveJournal, in order categorical;
I'm very well acquainted too, with matters editorial,
I keep my cover letters brief and never too suctorial,
About rejection etiquette I'm teeming with propriety,
With many cheerful facts about your online notoriety,
I'm very good at worldbuilding and proper use of ansibles;
I know the hyphenated names of beings unpronounceable:
In short, in matters space opera, anime, and fantasist,
I am the very model of a modern SF novelist.

Link (Thanks, Mary!)

George Dyson, one of my all-time-favorite science writers, has written a short science fiction story for Edge. Bruce Sterling describes it thusly: "Amazingly, this piece reads almost exactly like I would have imagined it. Try to imagine Hugo Gernsback writing "Ralph 124C41+" only Hugo used to live in a treehouse, is a comprehensive scholar of extinct technologies, and has an IQ high enough to boil mercury."

Google was inverting the von Neumann matrix—by coaxing the matrix into inverting itself. Von Neumann's "Numerical Inverting of Matrices of High Order," published (with Herman Goldstine) in 1947, confirmed his ambition to build a machine that could invert matrices of non-trivial size. A 1950 postscript, "Matrix Inversion by a Monte Carlo Method," describes how a statistical, random-walk procedure credited to von Neumann and Stan Ulam "can be used to invert a class of n-th order matrices with only n2 arithmetic operations in addition to the scanning and discriminating required to play the solitaire game." The aggregate of all our searches for unpredictable (but meaningful) strings of bits, is, in effect, a Monte Carlo process for inverting the matrix that constitutes the World Wide Web.

Ed developed a rapport with the machines that escaped those who had never felt the warmth of a vacuum tube or the texture of a core memory plane. Within three months he was not only troubleshooting the misbehavior of individual data centers, but examining how the archipelago of data centers cooperated—and competed—on a global scale.

Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

I previously posted that the good folks at Daily Grail republished the classic 1979 fortean book, "Messengers of Deception: UFO Contacts and Cults," by my friend Jacques Vallée. (Jacques is a computer scientist, astrophysicist, UFO researcher, and the basis for the Lacombe character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He is also a past president former research director at Institute for the Future, where I am a researcher.) Today, the Daily Grail posted an interview with Jacques where he talks about the work that has made him a "heretic among heretics." From the interview:

TDG: When we look at ufology in the 1960s, versus today, I'm not sure a lot of progress has been made (perhaps even the opposite). Is ufology a sisyphean endeavour, unworthy of our prolonged attention? You've personally devoted almost 50 years of research and writing to exploring the phenomenon - can you give a simple opinion to the question: what is behind the UFO phenomenon?

Jacques Vallée: You’re asking me two different questions here. I have convinced myself that there was a real UFO phenomenon once the errors, hoaxes and occasional manipulations were screened out. We do know a great deal more today than we did just 10 years ago, thanks to dedicated researchers who have invested their time and resources to documenting the data. That is not as good as a serious scientific research effort, but one should never underestimate what can be achieved by motivated amateurs. This being said, it would be unrealistic to expect quick solutions, in this field as in any other scientific endeavor.

I have also been interested in the nature of consciousness, and that field has not gotten closer to a solution in fifty years either. Similarly, look at some of the lingering enigmas in archaeology, or in medicine: all we can do is document our data and hope someone will make sense of it at a later time.

Jacques Vallée interview (Daily Grail), Buy Messengers of Deception (Amazon)

Previously on BB:
• Jacques Vallée's Messengers of Deception

This marvellous paperback chair is on display at Myopic Books in Providence Rhode Island (where the Rag and Bone blog's proprietor spotted it). It was made by artist David Karoff: "David Karoff welded the chair and attached the paperbacks: they have holes drilled though their insides and are slipped onto a hidden rebar frame. All of the materials are recycled - even the books, which are cast-offs from the Rochambeau Library Book Sales." ZOMG I wish this was for sale. Link (via Make)

The Oregon State Hospital, the filming location for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, will be torn down in a few months. (Photo from Wikimedia Commons.) From the Associated Press:

Although Cuckoo's Nest was filmed here, neither the movie nor the 1962 Ken Kesey novel on which it was based makes any specific references to Oregon State Hospital. Kesey drew on his experiences working at a veterans hospital in Palo Alto, Calif., and set his satirical story at an unnamed institution in Oregon.

Actor Michael Douglas, co-producer of the movie, scouted various West Coast locations and chose the Oregon institution because then-Superintendent Dean Brooks agreed to give the moviemakers unfettered access.

"They wanted to make it on location with real patients," said Brooks, now 91, who was given a speaking part as a weak-willed doctor who acquiesces to Nurse Ratched. Brooks said 89 patients were hired as extras.

Cuckoo's Nest Hospital to be Torn Down (Time)

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our John posts about this marvellous artifact: the autographed typewriter on which Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy for sale for a mere ~$25K. An archivist friend of mine tells me that libraries that once collected authors' papers are now storing their hard-drives:

N.V. Books in Great Wolford, Warwickshire is selling Adams' vintage Hermes Standard 8 typewriter for a cool $25,257.94. Or, rather, they are selling a first-edition copy of Hitchhiker's Guide in "fine" condition and generously throwing in the typewriter as extra. With strange significance, the x key is particularly discolored and worn, which I hope will prompt someone to do a statistical breakdown of the frequency of letter x's in Adams' oeuvre. Also, for authenticity, an "End Apartheid" sticker is slapped on the side, identifying it with almost carbon-dated efficiency as a relic of the late 70s and 80s.

Link, Discuss this on Boing Boing Gadgets

Jeroen van Bergeijk says:

Here are some great shots of African cars in various states of disrepair. I made these pictures on my travels through West-Africa. I wrote a book about my efforts to sell an 1988 Mercedes 190D in Burkina Faso, called My Mercedes is Not for Sale.

The book is coming out in translation on July 15th in the US and the UK I am doing a reading in New York City on the 15th in Idlewild Bookstore in Manhattan (7 pm). (BB blogged about that store recently here)

My Mercedes is not for sale booksigning

Mary sez,

To raise money for the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series, the hosts (Ellen Datlow and Matt Kressel) are holding a raffle. The prizes are unbelievable. Original art from Thomas Canty, Neil Gaiman’s keyboard (autographed), short story critiques by Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois… The list goes on and on. Seriously, one of the items is your own wormhole.

Between July 14th and July 28th, you can buy raffle tickets for only a dollar each. 1 buck. That’s nothing. And you can buy as many as you want.

If you aren't familiar with the KGB Fantastic Fiction reading series, Terry Bisson and Alice K. Turner started the series in the late 1990s, attempting to bring together mainstream writers with writers of speculative fiction in order to show, in Alice Turner’s words, “that at a certain level they were plowing exactly the same field.” In the spring of 2000 Ellen Datlow took over for Alice K. Turner and in August 2002 Gavin J. Grant, publisher of Small Beer Press, stepped in for Bisson when he moved to California. Matthew Kressel stepped in for Gavin in April of 2008.

The reading series features luminaries and up-and-comers in speculative fiction. Admission is always free.

Link (Thanks, Mary!)

I just spent ten minutes cracking up in a bookstore over a copy of Goodnight Bush, a satirical remix of the classic Goodnight Moon that wishes the Commander-in-Chief a hearty farewell (and don't let the door of history hit you in the ass on the way out). I couldn't take a copy home because all the store's copies were spoken for -- apparently they can't keep it on the shelf. Link

Science fiction writer Elizabeth Hand has written a thoroughgoing and thoughtful eulogy for Thomas M Disch for Salon today; Disch, one of the grand talents of science fiction, committed suicide on July 4.

Few people make a successful career of contemplating death and suicide; fewer still approach the subject with the genuine ebullience and elegant despair of the prolific, criminally underappreciated writer Thomas M. Disch, who shot himself in his Union Square apartment, in New York, on the Fourth of July. Disch was a seminal figure in science fiction's New Wave, the iconoclastic 1960s movement that gave the genre a literary pedigree and popularized the term "speculative fiction." His books influenced writers such as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem; his dystopias "Camp Concentration" and "334" are considered science fiction classics, along with his greatest novel, "On Wings of Song," a beautiful, dark meditation on the power and limits of transcendence through art.

An openly gay man for most of his working life, Disch wrote mysteries, historical novels and neo-gothic satires; children's books, including "The Brave Little Toaster" and its sequel; at least five collections of short fiction; 15 volumes of poetry, always as Tom Disch; plays and libretti; four volumes of nonfiction; screen adaptations, novelizations and one of the first interactive computer games. He edited anthologies; he wrote book reviews, theater reviews, art reviews, music reviews. He wrote collaboratively and pseudonymously; he kept a popular blog, Endzone, in which he shared new poems, some unpleasant post-9/11 screeds, and witty discourses on the meaninglessness and minutiae of life. In his most recent novel, he wrote in the voice of God, and on his publisher's Web site answered questions from readers. He wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote, for the sheer joy of it and for an even more primal impulse: to tell a story to the dark.

Link

See also: RIP, Thomas M Disch

Craphound, the first short story I ever published in a professional market, has been turned into a fine little audio reading by Literal Systems (using the Creative Commons license), read by Rosalia Triana.

Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him -- respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months' rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.

So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth.

Craphound spotted the sign -- his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC's summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: "The Shadow," "Quiet Please," "Tom Mix," "The Crypt-Keeper" with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said "Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!"

Link (Thanks, Bri!)

Neil Gaiman and his publisher have published the results of their free online release of his novel American Gods earlier this year -- the conclusion? Giving away ebooks for free sold books:

The Indies [ie. independent booksellers -- Neil] are the only sales channel where we have confidence that incremental sales were driven by this promotion. In the Bookscan data reported for Independents we see a marked increase in weekly sales across all of Neil’s books, not just American Gods during the time of the contest and promotion. Following the promotion, sales returned to pre-promotion levels.

Link (Thanks, Neil!)

See also: Free download of Neil Gaiman's American Gods

My friend Joe Hutsko contacted with the intriguing offer to serialize his novel, The Deal, on Boing Boing. I jumped at the chance. I read The Deal when it first came out in 1999 and loved the thrilling story about a Apple-like company's undertaking to create an iPhone-like device.

Here's a link to Chapter 06 as a PDF or a text file. (Here's chapter 1 and an introduction to the book, and here are the previous chapters)

To buy a paperback copy of the book, visit JOEyGADGET or purchase directly from Amazon.

Rick Kleffel sez, "John W. Campbell Award winning author Jay Lake will be in the studio on Saturday, July 12 for GeekSpeak, to be interviewed by RIck Kleffel, Lyle Troxell and Sean Cleveland. We'll be taking your phone calls at 1-800-655-5877, or you can email me your questions in advance (agony@trashotron.com). We'll be talking with Jay about his latest novels, Mainspring and Escapement and the widespread interest in the the Steampunk aesthetic. We want your live voices on the air, so be sure to call!" Link (Thanks, Rick!)

See also: Jay Lake's "Mainspring": Clockpunk adventure

Lisa Katayama will be signing her wonderful book, Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan, at Double Punch in San Francisco this Sunday, July 13. Lisa Katayama book signing (Tokyo Mango)

William Smith, proprietor of Hang Fire Books, reviewed "A really fascinating novel" from 1943 called I Am Thinking of My Darling by Vincent McHugh. I just bought a copy on Amazon for 12 cents.

Originally published in 1943, the book is about a happiness virus that spreads across New York City like a plague. The disease makes the afflicted lose their inhibitions, act like they perpetually have 2-3 drinks under their belt (without slurring or clumsiness, they're sharper in fact), and extremely resistant to doing anything they don't want to do.

Sounds more like a paradise than a plague right? Problem is that only 10-20% of the populace feel like doing their jobs anymore so law enforcement, public safety, garbage collection etc, go right out the window. And--though the author's description of crowd euphoria is appealing and not conservative or reactionary--some people's euphoric impulses are dangerous to themselves and others.

The protagonist of the novel is a civil servant who's promoted to acting Mayor when the former gets the virus and heads back to Westchester to build model trains. He loves the city in all its particulars and he loves his job (which is why he keeps going even when he gets the virus himself). His wife is an actress who evades him for the entire novel (because her bliss is to take on a series of elaborate character parts) and the chase takes us on a grand tour of the uninhibited city.

The novel feels extremely contemporary and realistic in the city's response to a disaster (so much that I almost put it down after the 50th motion was put before a board, argued about, voted and passed). And the author's descriptions of euphoria and ideas about what happiness means are entertaining and thought provoking.

The book is basically a zombie novel except instead of a walking corpse the infected turn into Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby.

I Am Thinking of My Darling (Hang Fire Books)

If you are at a loss for what book to read, check out Art Garfunkel's list of over 1000 books he's read, from June 1968 to present.

Since the 1960's, Art Garfunkel has been a voracious reader. We are pleased to present a listing of every book Art has read over the last 40 years. To view a list of Art Garfunkel's favorite books, go to Favorites. This book list has been divided into several pages to allow easy downloading. Each page indicates the author, title, date of publication and number of pages (when available).

Art Garfunkel's library (artgarfunkel.com)

Simon from Bloggasm interviewed some of Tor's authors who've given away their books for free online while they were available in stores and asked them if they believed the giveaways had sold more print books, and what made them think so:

“‘Scientifically’?” he [Scalzi] wrote to me in an email. “Probably not, unless you somehow managed to control (or at least account for and factor in) every incident of someone discussing your work and or going down a decision path to acquire the work, which is probably more work than it’s worth. But I don’t think that ’scientifically’ is the standard required here; I think ‘heuristically’ is probably better. If you consistently see a rise in sales of an author’s work after the release of a free e-book, then heuristically you have a good idea it’s beneficial.”

In his case, Scalzi watched sales of his book shoot up by 20 percent. But what’s even more interesting is that the sequel to Old Man’s War saw an increase of over 30 percent. Both he and Buckell benefited more from sales of books later in their series.

Link

I just got word from IDW, the publishers of my graphic novel Cory Doctorow's Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (which collects six of my short stories, adapted for comics by a team of talented writers and artists), that Barnes and Noble and Books-a-Million have both taken very large orders of the hardcover, every copy of which is signed and numbered (yes, I signed thousands and thousands of tip-in sheets, by hand, until I thought my arm would fall off). They're available online, of course, but practically every BN and BAM store nationwide is bound to have them. The book has also seen great orders from independents across the nation -- and, of course, it's available as a free, Creative Commons licensed download. Futuristic Tales on BN.com, Futuristic Tales at Books-a-Million, Futuristic Tales at independent booksellers near you, Download Futuristic Tales for free!

David Pearson Design highlights the beautiful, three-set "Great Ideas" collection from Penguin, which reprints dozens of classic works of philosophy and politics in some of the most gorgeous packages I've ever seen. Link to volume one, Link to volume two, Link to volume three, Penguin Great Ideas on Amazon (via Making Light)

Sf author Thomas M Disch committed suicide at his apartment on July 4. Patrick Nielsen Hayden's eulogy paints a picture of a man who was brilliant, noble, foolish, difficult and angry. I only knew him through his fiction, from which I learned a great deal. Patrick writes:

I certainly read him; his SF novels of the 1960s and 70s, particularly Camp Concentration and 334, had an enormous impact on me. But “least read” may be true: according to publishing legend, his SF masterpiece On Wings of Song had a 90% return rate in its 1980 Bantam paperback edition. Despite that, he went on to hit bestseller lists with his 1991 horror novel The M.D. Just as unexpectedly, his children’s book The Brave Little Toaster was adapted into a popular Disney cartoon.

He could be hard to take, both in person and in his public interactions with the SF world. He played the game of literary politics hard, and sometimes lost badly. He frequently seemed to have no patience for his allies, much less his enemies. Of his other career, as noted poet Tom Disch, I can’t say much, except that to my mind the poetry was often good. In his later years he wrote a blog; after he began to post frequently on the depravity of Muslims and immigrants, I became unable to keep reading it.

The Disch I prefer to remember was no nicer than that, but much smarter: a brittle and brilliant ironist with a bright wit and no optimism whatsoever.

Link

I'm giving a public reading and talk in Seattle this Tuesday as part of the excellent Clarion West reading series, through which all six instructors do free appearances (you can meet the Clarion West students at these, too!). There's also a public party on Friday.

Where: University Book Store, 4326 University Way NE in Seattle
When: Tuesday, July 8, 7PM

Link

Jim sez, "MiniBooksExpo is a neat matchmaker service for publishers who want to get review copies to interested bloggers and bloggers who want to review books. It's Canadian, and it's a model I'd like to see more of as an occasional reviewer and an indie publisher." Link (Thanks, Jim!)

Clarion West's Nisi Shawl writes,

Thanks for Your Generous Response to Clarion West Dorm Burglary

Due to the swift and generous response of the SF community, Clarion West has now received nearly enough money to replace the four student laptops stolen July 4 from rooms at the workshop residence. Clarion West staff, volunteers, and students all express their thanks for your very timely help. They especially want to thank BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow, Jay Lake, and many more for their generosity and for alerting others to the need for money and laptops. Donations began coming in from around the world just hours after the theft.

"If we collect funds that are much in excess of the cost of replacing the stolen computers, we will return them proportionally to the donors," said workshop administrator Leslie Howle. "The use of PayPal makes this relatively easy to do." She added, "We are all overwhelmed, and the students are immensely grateful. They were devastated by this theft, and it's been amazing to see the community rally to support them."

Link