Next weekend's first SciBarCamp is now full, with well over 100 confirmed attendees.  The event's happening at Hart House, which is a magnificent location in the heart of Toronto (the University of Toronto takes up a square mile of the downtown core).

Fear not if you were hoping to come but were unable.  We want this event to be the first of a regular series.  Just make sure you follow the news at the SciBarCamp website, and sign up early!

SciBarCamp's deliberately vague schedule

The program for SciBarCamp will be decided in a collaborative way involving all participants on the opening night (Friday night).  This is when all the talks and discussions will be scheduled.

The start and finish times for each day have been decided, and are set out below.  The opening event on Friday night will be integral to the whole weekend, so please plan to attend on this night as well as on the rest of the weekend.

SUNDAY, March 16, 9:00am to 5:00pm

What more's to be said?  Hugo nomination season was brief this year; it's highly likely as a result that you wield disproportionate power if you nominate and vote because nomination numbers are always very low.  Literally, every single nomination counts for this award, and books can get on the ballot with as few as 30 nominations.

Nomination for this award is perhaps the most concretely effective thing you can do to support the career of writers you like.  Of course I'm shamelessly cadging for Queen of Candesce here, but there's plenty of other award categories that would benefit from your opinion, such as best short story, best novella, dramatic screenplay etc. 

That said, if you're not already a member of Denvention, you're out of luck. I suspect this sort of draconian membership is part of the reason the nomination numbers are so low (doubtless there's a flame-ridden discussion thread about that around somewhere)--but hundreds of people who could nominate don't, and I'm sure many of them intend to but are caught with their pants down when the deadline passes. 

As reported over at The Art Department, Stephan Martiniere, my cover artist for the Virga books, has won the Spectrum Silver Award for book covers, for his cover art for City Without End by Kay Kenyon. The art director was Lou Anders, who just bought a short story of mine.

Napoleon was denounced as dangerously liberal when he introduced a law forbidding husbands from beating their wives with any wooden implement thicker than their thumb. Even the most hide-bound American conservative is traitorously liberal by the standards of 200 years ago.  In fact, the history of these past two centuries could be seen as the record of humanity being dragged, kicking and screaming, out of a nightmare of violence and hatred inconceivable to us now--while at every stage, there's been people desperately trying to drag us back.

This long war--the real long war, and the only one--has its set-backs.  It's up to each generation to re-invent civilization, to reaffirm it and to fight once again against fear, prejudice and easy solutions. Often, the weapon of enlightenment for a generation is a book.  Sometimes, those books are just so much damned fun to read that you forget, for a while, that their purpose is deadly serious.

Little Brother is huge fun.  It's nominally a "young-adult" novel (whatever that means) but it doesn't condescend to its readership.  People die in this story. People--good people, whom we cheer for--are tortured.  Not everything turns out okay.  But there's also triumph here, and it's our triumph, because Little Brother is a novel that is also a resistance-fighter's toolkit, a manual for subversives, and an inspiration.  There is probably no book more likely to be banned and burned this summer than Little Brother.  Every kid should read it.

Want specifics?  Well, the story begins with San Francisco's Bay Bridge being blown up by terrorists.  Four thousand people are killed, and a small group of high school students is rounded up in a random sweep by the Department of Homeland Security, and treated very, very badly.  One of them, Marcus Yallow, vows revenge when they're released, because his best friend Darryl has not been released.  He hasn't even been acknowledged to be missing.  He's just gone.  (Is this likely?  Ask Maher Arar.)

The book is the story of Marcus's (successful) war to take down the DHS.  If that were all, Little Brother would still be a great read, a wonderful revenge fantasy against the stupidities of the past eight years.  The thing is, that Little Brother doesn't just show Marcus taking down the DHS; it shows how he does it.  How you could do it.

This is where Little Brother leaves fictional territory, and becomes the kind of book that gets banned.  It teaches kids how to spoof government security measures.  It teaches them how to become invisible to the DHS's spying eyes.  It unlocks the secrets of cryptography, hacking, and disinformation.  It gives all these tools to you.  More importantly, it gives all these tools to your kids.

I'm old enough to remember previous salvos in the long war.  Back in 1974 Alan Wingard published The Graffiti Gambit, about a TV-signal hacker who scrawls graffiti across the faces of politicians as they're giving speeches on TV.  It's a grim book:  our hero's arrested, tortured, and eventually lobotomized by the Feds.  I was about 12 when I read it, the same age many of Cory's readers are going to be.  If you're under 25 today, Little Brother will serve as a good introduction to what's been going on all these years--updated for the 21st century.

If you'd like another perspective on the book, from someone who is under 25, check out Madeline Ashby's review.   She's more qualified than me to talk about the impact this novel is going to have.  Check out her comments, and then order your copy.

I used the catch-phrase "technology is legislation" in my novel Lady of Mazes, to express the idea that technology does an end-run around law.  Now, an Australian judge is saying just this, and more:  that technological objects will increasingly encapsulate deliberately-crafted legal structures in their very design.  He says:

"We are moving to a point in the world where more and more law will be expressed in its effective way, not in terms of statutes solidly enacted by the parliament...but in the technology itself--code."

He's nearly right; except for having it backward, that is.  What he's describing has similarities to my idea of the tech locks, which are socially-imposed limits on technology expressed in the technology itself, not in laws that surround it.  Judge Kirby is focusing on computer code here, but the principle is actually more general than that;  in the future, his idea implies we may have a legal system that operates not according to what's allowed, but according to what's possible.  If criminal use of a particular technology is simply not possible, then that's the same as having a law against that use. 

I think most people would prefer to live in a world where things are possible if not allowed, rather than the nightmare scenario of a world where many things simply can't be done.

However, Kirby is wrong about one crucial thing.  Laws will not be expressed in their effective form through code; code does and will continue to effectively create law--without reference to the legal system.  Groups like the record companies and the RIAA are finding out this out now.  Their people are trying to design devices that by design can only be used legally.  Digital Rights Management (DRM) is an example of this kind of pixie-dust sprinkled on technologies that are inherently a-legal.  Kirby is wrong when he imagines that law can be embodied in code, because code is inherently elastic; it's more like water than iron, because it partakes in a basic fact of nature:  that our definitions of things aren't the things themselves. 

Computer code relies on this fact.  Its identifications are all contingent, all temporary, all local.  As Brian Cantwell Smith points out in On the Origin of Objects, types ("can this kind of variable contain a text string or only integers?") are impossible to hard-code into a computer.  And if you can't even dictate that something is always and only an integer, how can you enforce any kind of higher-level legal structure in code?

Technology is legislation, but it can't be controlled on the level that Kirby is talking about.  Any attempt to do so can only result in Orwellian, and unintentionally hilarious, results (again, the entire current state of the music industry is both).

Thanks to Walter Derzko over at SmartEconomy for bringing this one to my attention.

Not surprisingly, I can't get through on Bakka's phone line; but I don't think they've been caught up in the disaster.  Bakka Phoenix is Toronto's oldest SF bookstore, kind of a Mecca for SF travelers.  It's where Cory Doctorow worked before he published his first novel; myself, Peter Watts, and many other Canadian SF writers have held book launches and signings there.

A six-alarm fire is one level below the maximum on Toronto's scale.  I'm not sure what seven would look like, but this one involves over 100 firefighters, a dozen fire trucks, and essentially an entire downtown city block on fire.

The big problem is the cold and wind chill; I just saw a picture of a fire ladder completely encased in ice up against the side of a building.  Whatever they spray freezes instantly, so the storefronts, streets and sidewalks in the area are quickly turning into a glacial mess.  There's also a lot of smoke and transit chaos--just not a good place to be right now.

I wish the best for everybody affected; nobody's died, which is a blessing, but many people are homeless and local businesses may be devastated.  It's very sad.