I know, I know I keep linking to Shareable of late, but I promise I’ll stop… just as soon as they stop publishing stuff worth reading. Today’s extremely heart-felt recommendation is another Benjamin Rosenbaum story called “The Guy Who Worked For Money”, and while there are bits of it I’m not so keen on (some of the the characters feel a little 2D, for instance), it’s one of the most detailed fictional visions that I’ve ever read of a near-future society based on reputation rather than wealth.
It’s the sort of story that makes me think of how many revisions and changes I’ll now need to make to some of my own, in order to even come close to keeping up… and it’s the sort of story that takes a lot of interesting contemporary ideas about the socioeconomics of the future and strips them of their utopian gloss. It’s well worth the twenty minutes it’ll take you, so go and read it right now.
Via Kathryn Cramer at Tor comes news that Benjamin Rosenbaum has decided not merely to release his new Small Beer Press collection of short stories, The Ant King and Other Stories, as a free Creative Commons-licensed download, but also to openly invite people to create derivative works for the chance to win a signed copy of the physical book.
Here are the rules:
- Create a derivative work of any story in The Ant King and Other Stories
- Place it under the same license (you do this just by including a declaration to that effect on the work in its published form)
- Post a link to the work (or some kind of recording or representation of the work, like a youtube video if it’s a live performance, or a picture of it if it’s, like, a vase or something) in the comments to this blog entry.
- Derivative works can be translations, plays, movies, radio plays, audiobooks, flashmob happenings, horticultural installations, visual artworks, slash fanfic epics, robot operas, sequels, webcomics, ASCII art, text adventure games, roleplaying campaigns, knitting projects, handmade shoes, or anything else you feel like.
- On March 3, 2009 (that gives you six months), I will send signed (and extensively doodled-upon) hardcover copies of The Ant King and Other Stories to the creators of the three derivative works that I like the best.
- Obviously, other than what’s covered in the CC license, you retain all rights to your works, so if you’ve made, you know, House-Beyond-Your-Sky-themed coasters, you get to sell them or put drinks on them to keep rings off your coffee table or whatever. And if you want to actually sell the rights to reproduce the derivative work commercially, I will in all probability tell you that you can, unless you’re, like, a Hollywood studio. 🙂
Could be quite a fun project, no?
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