For my Second Life friends: I’ll be talking about recent news from Linden Lab and the future of Second Life, with the totally awesome Paisley Beebe on Tonight Live at 6 pm PDT/Second Life Time today. Join us!

Robert A. Heinlein, author of Stranger in a Strange Land and more than 60 other books, was the greatest science fiction writer of the 20th Century, with an influence that went far beyond genre boundaries, according to William H. Patterson Jr., author of the new Heinlein biography.

During my interview with Patterson for my podcast, Copper Robot. I asked why Heinlein was important enough to rate a fat biography, 22 years after his death. “It’s not because he was a science fiction writer,” Patterson said. “He was an influential public figure in a lot of ways that people inside the science fiction community let drift out of consciousness.”

Read the rest of this post and listen to the interview on the Tor.com blog: Heinlein Biographer Tells All

Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, For the Win, travels from the industrial slums of India and China to posh American offices and into the fantasy world of online games. Writing the novel took Doctorow to new places as well.

Researching For the Win was different from his other books, according to Doctorow. Normally, he develops a passion for a subject and begins researching and blogging it on Boing Boing, a popular blog where he is one of the co-authors. Readers suggest other angles. “After some time, enough of this stuff crystallizes that I realize I’m writing a novel about it, and I end up writing the novel,” he said.

With For the Win, he started down that path, but realized he’d only just begun to research the subjects he needed, so he started a deliberate campaign, reading about 200 books on labor history, contemporary and historical China and India, histories of Mumbai, information about game theory, macroeconomics, neuroeconomics, and related subjects.

Read the rest of my post at Tor.com: Cory Doctorow on researching For the Win

Like much of the best science fiction, Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, For the Win, is set in the future, but its themes are rooted in the present day.

For the Win has the world as its canvas. Its characters start in the industrial slums of China and India, and the adventures take us from there to the posh corporate offices of America.

But the novel isn’t limited to the real world. Much of the action also takes place in cyberspace—the world of online, multiplayer games.

“It’s a book about gold farmers, who are people who do repetitive video game tasks in order to amass virtual wealth, which they then sell through the game market to players who are either too busy or to lazy to do those tasks themselves,” Cory said in an interview, “It’s about what happens when they form a trade union.”

Read the rest of my post at Tor.com, and listen to the interview: The digital revolution hits the slums of India and China. Cory Doctorow’s For the Win

We dedicated an episode of Copper Robot to discussing the life and work of Mark Twain, a week before the centennial of his death.

Twain’s voice is as alive and relevant today as it was when he was alive. That’s not always a happy thing, as when he spoke out against religious hypocrisy, bigotry, and American imperialism. We talked about Twain with two experts on his life and work.

Listen to the whole episode here:

MP3

Or watch the video below.

Why is Mark Twain still a giant today? Twain is “every virtue and vice in what we laughingly call the American character,” said one of our guests, David Sloane, an English professor at the University of New Haven and author of Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian. “He’s an egalitarian, he’s an absolute democrat, he’s entrepreneurial to a fault.”

Sloane quoted from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (link to Gutenberg free e-book edition) to make his point. “Pap always says, ‘Take a chicken when you get a chance, ’cause of you don’t ned one you can always find somebody who does, and a favor ain’t evern forgot.’ He is empathetic to others, ‘I reckon Jim was ‘mos white inside as I was.’ And egregiousness — he is always over the top. In fact, his motto is my motto: ‘Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you want afterward.’”

We talked about Twain’s life growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River, and how his frontier childhood affected the rest of his life and work.

“He spent a lot of his life critiquing smalltown America,” said our other guest, Harold Bush, a professor of English at St. Louis University, and author of Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age. “You might say he had a love-hate relationship with Hannibal and with Missouri the rest of his life. Depending on who he was talking to or what the topic of conversation was, he could say wonderful things about Missouri or he could say very terrible things about the slave system and small-mindedness.”

We discussed the changing focus on different elements of Twain’s work over the years. In the 1950s, you talked about the American heartland with regard to Twain, and social criticism and the awful towns along the Mississippi River that Twain portrays, Sloane said. By the 1980s, the character of Jim from Huck Finn figures prominently in Twain discussion, along with the related issues of race, and whether Twain is a racist.

Twain gets a lot of credit for enlightened views toward race. He praised African-Americans and counted many among his friends. But Nany Kayo, director of Virtual Native Lands in Second Life and a Cherokee in First Life, brought another perspective to our discusion, noting that Twain wrote scathingly about American Indians, shockingly so to present-day readers: “mark twain was a virulent racist against certain people. as a matter of fact,” Kayo said in text chat. She quoted from Roughing It, about Indians:

He is ignoble – base and treacherous, and hateful in every way. Not even imminent death can startle him into a spasm of virtue. The ruling trait of all savages is a greedy and consuming selfishness, and in our Noble Red Man it is found in its amplest development. His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts … The scum of the earth!

She added:

Mark Twain’s hatred of American Indians is well known among Natives and it becomes a divisive issue when Native American children are forced to read Mark Twain’s work, faced with praise of this writer as an American icon. It reinforces the impression that American Indians are not Americans.

We also talked about Sloane’s ancestry — in addition to being a scholar about Twain, Sloane is descended from another colossus of American history, Thomas Alva Edison. Sloane is writing a biography of his grandmother, Edison’s daughter Madeleine.

Watch the video of the episode:

Harold Bush and his Huck Finn avatar, by Rissa Maidstone of World2Worlds.

David Sloane and his Mark Twain avatar, also by Rissa.

Our friend Cory Doctorow, blogger at Boing Boing and Internet activist, returns Thursday to talk about his new novel, which goes on sale next week. For the Win is the near-future story of a group of “gold farmers,” the drudges who labor to make online games fun for wealthy players, and their fight against their gangster bosses.

WHEN: Thursday, May 13, noon Pacific/Second Life Time. SPECIAL DAY AND TIME

WHERE: The Copper Robot Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, or watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast afterward.

In addition to blogging and writing fiction, Cory is a journalist for the UK paper The Guardian and other outlets, and is an outspoken advocate for Internet rights and sensible intellectual property policy. We’ll talk to Cory about those things and more.

Cory’s previous novel, published last year, is Makers, which tells the story of a tight-knit group of hackers working to survive and thrive and stay happy in a near-future economic collapse. You can buy the book, or find interviews and other related information and merchandise, at the Makers Web page. We interviewed Cory about that book and more in December; read about it and listen to the interview here: “A cheery conversation with Cory Doctorow about the upside of economic collapse.”

Cory’s previous novel, Little Brother, was published in May 2008 and hit the New York Times bestseller list. Other books include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe, and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

Join us for what will surely be a lively and informative discussion. Bring your questions and comments for Cory; this isn’t just an interview, it’s a conversation.

Photo by NK Guy, nkguy.com

Linden Lab’s plans for Second Life are as visionary as ever — "to enhance and improve the human condition." But the company is working to marry those dreams to more practical goals for the immediate future.

"I’ll settle for a million active users by the end of the year," said Tom Hale, chief product officer for Linden Lab, which develops and operates Second Life. The service now has about 700,000 active users, who spend more than an hour per month logged in, up from 680,000 active users in February.

One million active users is a big goal, but it’s more modest than the dreams of the Second Life boom a few years ago, when Linden Lab founder Philip Rosedale talked about Second Life becoming bigger than the Web in 10-15 years. For example, see this 2008 video of Rosedale at TED Talks.

Read the rest, and listen to the podcast of the interview, at the Computerworld Tool Talk Blog: Linden Lab holds to grand plans for Second Life

Join us Wednesday on Copper Robot as we talk to Kristine Kathryn Rusch, an expert on surviving and thriving as a freelancer.

WHEN: Wednesday, April 28, 6 pm Pacific/Second Life Time

WHERE: The Copper Robot Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, or watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast afterward.

As the Great Recession grinds on, and opportunities for full-time employment remain scarce, more and more people are pulling up their socks and going into business for themselves. Our next guest on Copper Robot is an expert on the subject of self-employment — she’s been her own boss for almost all the past 30-plus years, as a writer of science fiction and nonfiction, publisher, and owner of a small retail shop. For more than a year, she’s been posting her tips and tricks for surviving and thriving as a freelancer at the The Freelancer’s Survival Guide.

The Guide isn’t just for writers — far from it. It’s for accountants and architects and retail owners and anybody else going into business for themselves. It covers a wide range of subjects, including finances, negotiations, time management, managing employees, health, and staying sane.

Kristine writes mystery, romance, science fiction, and fantasy, under her own name as well as Kristine Grayson for romance, and Krist Nelscott for mystery.

She is the former editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science fiction. Before that, she and Dean Wesley Smith started and ran Pulphouse Publishing, a science fiction and mystery press in Eugene. She lives and works on the Oregon coast.

Join us Wednesday at 6 pm to celebrate the life and work of Mark Twain, a week before the centenary of his death. Twain is a figure famous around the world as a jolly old man with a halo of white hair, bushy mustache, and white suit. But like a lot of famous people from history, people don’t really know Mark Twain.

Twain wasn’t just a funny guy with an impish sense of humor. His humor was cutting and powerful, often directed against religious hypocrisy and American imperialism. More than a century after his death, his satire still seem contemporary–often unfortunately so.

We’ll spend an hour talking about Mark Twain and why he’s still relevant today, with two experts on the man and his work.

WHEN: Wednesday, April 14, 6 pm Pacific/Second Life Time

WHERE: The Copper Robot Theater, World2Worlds Island in Second Life, or watch the live video on the Web, or listen to the podcast afterward.

Our two guests:

David Sloane is an English professor at University of New Haven, and author of Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian, along with other books about Twain and American humor. He is a great-grandson of Thomas Edison, and is working on a book about his grandmother, Madeleine Edison.

Harold Bush is a professor of English at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of his Age. He’s currently working on a book about Mark Twain and imperialism.

(Thanks to New World Notes for the excellent Twain photo!)

What if President Obama could talk regularly to ordinary people and scientists to ask them about issues? That’s the vision of ThinkTank, an open source project to use a technique called "crowdsourcing" to get answers to America’s problems.

ThinkTank’s server software is available to everyone, not just people whose address is 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s designed to let a user put out a question on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media, and collect and curate responses. Users can then separate responses by category, note the source of the information, and collate the comments into useful knowledge, said Gina Trapani, project director at Expert Labs’, the not-for-profit developing the project.

Gina is a blogger, author, developer of productivity tools, and founding editor of Lifehacker. She currently blogs at Smarterware. She hosts the This Week in Google podcast with Leo Laporte and Jeff Jarvis. Her most recent book is The Complete Guide to Google Wave.

I interviewed Gina on Copper Robot recently.

Read the rest and listen to the interview: Gina Trapani crowdsources for the White House