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books, books they loved and wanted to share. (The 80-hour figure comes from my own attempt to do this -- I\'m sure that rippers get faster with practice.)

I thought to myself that 80 hours\' free promotional effort would be a good thing to have at my disposal when my books entered the market. What if I gave my readers clean, canonical electronic editions of my works, saving them the bother of ripping them, and so freed them up to promote my work to their friends?

After all, it\'s not like there\'s any conceivable way to stop people from putting books on scanners if they really want to. Scanners aren\'t going to get more expensive or slower. The Internet isn\'t going to get harder to use. Better to confront this challenge head on, turn it into an opportunity, than to rail against the future (I\'m a science fiction writer -- tuning into the future is supposed to be my metier).

The timing couldn\'t have been better. Just as my first novel was being published, a new, high-tech project for promoting sharing of creative works launched: the Creative Commons project (CC). CC offers a set of tools that make it easy to mark works with whatever freedoms the author wants to give away. CC launched in 2003 and today, more than 160,000,000 works have been released under its licenses.

My next column will go into more detail on what CC is, what licenses it offers, and how to use them -- but for now, check them out online at creativecommons.org. 

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The Progressive Apocalypse and Other Futurismic Delights

(Originally published in Locus Magazine, July 2007)

Of course, science fiction is a literature of the present. Many\'s the science fiction writer who uses the future as a warped mirror for reflecting back the present day, angled to illustrate the hidden strangeness buried by our invisible assumptions: Orwell turned 1948 into Nineteen Eighty-Four. But even when the fictional future isn\'t a parable about the present day, it is necessarily a creation of the present day, since it reflects the present day biases that infuse the author. Hence Asimov\'s Foundation, a New Deal-esque project to think humanity out of its tribulations though social interventionism.

Bold SF writers eschew the future altogether, embracing a futuristic account of the present day. William Gibson\'s forthcoming Spook Country is an act of \"speculative presentism,\" a book so futuristic it could only have been set in 2006, a book that exploits retrospective historical distance to let us glimpse just how alien and futuristic our present day is.

Science fiction writers aren\'t the only people in the business of predicting the future. Futurists -- consultants, technology columnists, analysts, venture capitalists, and entrepreneurial pitchmen -- spill a lot of ink, phosphors, and caffeinated hot air in describing a vision for a future where we\'ll get more and more of whatever it is they want to sell us or warn us away from. Tomorrow will feature faster, cheaper processors, more Internet users, ubiquitous RFID tags, radically democratic political processes dominated by bloggers, massively multiplayer games whose virtual economies dwarf the physical economy.

There\'s a lovely neologism to describe these visions: \"futurismic.\" Futurismic media is that which depicts futurism, not the future. It is often self-serving -- think of the antigrav Nikes in Back to the Future III -- and it generally doesn\'t hold up well to scrutiny.

SF films and TV are great fonts of futurismic imagery: R2D2 is a fully conscious AI, can hack the firewall of the Death Star, and is equipped with a range of holographic projectors and antipersonnel devices -- but no one has installed a $15 sound card and some text-to-speech software on him, so he has to whistle like Harpo Marx. Or take the Starship Enterprise, with a transporter capable of constituting matter from digitally stored plans, and radios that can breach the speed of light.

The
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