A long time ago, after I started reading Boing Boing, I delved into Cory Doctorow’s personal website craphound to listen to a few podcasts. Actually, I treated his older material like audiobooks, as they were released before I ever knew about them, and I simply used a podcast aggregation too to organize and download all the material easily. That was one of the things that got me started listening to podcasts a few years ago.
Things were going well for a while, but then he started reading “The Hacker Crackdown“. While this is an important book for real life hackers and the culture of hacking, I quickly grew bored with this material. This I tolerated for a few weeks, until finally I gave up caring about the minutiae of the different cracking rings and the dated terminology. I went off to discover different podcasts, which is ultimately for the best.
Low and behold, 30 weeks later, Craphound.com is back in my podcasting queue once again as there is a new science fiction novella being read week by week. This story, True Names, is about Post-Singularity Entities fighting for all the available computational cycles left before the Entropic death of the universe. In other words, really interesting speculative science fiction just like I used to enjoy.
A lot of Cory Doctorow’s speculative short fiction is Post-Singularity, Cyberpunk sort of stuff. I can take my Science Fiction is a lot of different flavors, but this story still feels somewhat fresh for me. If you want most Post-Singular podcasts from the same author, try this, or this (with mechs!). As long as Cory Doctorow’s pumping out the Creative Commons stories, I’ll probably be around to listen to them.
