The dynamic duo of Science Fiction (Cory Doctorow and Charlie Stross) are writing their next creation, “Unwirer,” using a blog to keep track of the process.
The story’s already sold. It will be published in ReVisions when it’s finished.
Here’s how they describe the story:
…is an alternate history in which the copyright industry’s 1995 bid at the National Information Infrastructure hearings to redesign the Internet was successful. Now, America labors under a kind of MiniTel hell, where every online transaction costs a few cents and you can only field a website with the phone company’s permission. Meanwhile, the French IT giant Be, Inc., has launched a global revolution with the first WiFi AP, and American guerrilla networkers are running through the hills on the US side of the Canadian and Mexican borders, establishing meshed access-points, working to provide end-to-end meshed IP from sea to shining sea.
Here’s a clip from the story itself:
He’d lost his job and spent the best part of six months inside before his attorney plea-bargained them down, from a twenty years-to-life infoterrorism stretch to second degree tarriff evasion. The judge sentenced him to time served plus two years’ probation, two years in which he wasn’t allowed to program a goddamn microwave oven, let alone admin the networks that had been his trade. Prison hadn’t been as bad for him as it could have been — unwirers got respect — but while he was inside Janice filed for divorce, and by the time he got out he’d lost everything he’d spent the last decade building — his marriage, his house, his savings, his career. Everything except for the unwiring.
It was this experience that had turned him from a fun-loving geek into what $NAME [[need credible name for Chairman of the FCC]] called “one of the information terrorists undermining our homeland’s security.” And so it was with a shudder and a glance over his shoulder that he climbed the front steps and put his key in the lock of the house he and Dan rented.
