News from the North

Uh-oh. According to Canada's Criminal Code, 163. (1) Every one commits an offence who (b) makes, prints, publishes, distributes, sells or has in his possession for the purpose of publication, distribution or circulation a crime comic. Definition of “crime comic” (7) In this section, “crime comic” means a magazine, periodical or book that exclusively or substantially comprises matter depicting pictorially (a) the commission of crimes, real or fictitious; or (b) events connected with the commission of crimes, real or fictitious, whether occurring before or after the commission of the crime. ( source ) ( commentary )

Well, this is wacky: my article Blood, Bullets, Bombs and Bandwidth was recently cited in Culture Machine , which is apparently an "international open-access journal of culture and theory, founded in 1999." Piracy as a Business Force , Adrian Johns, CM 2009. (PDF) ( Browser-friendly version )

Next summer (winter in the Southern Hemisphere) the entire world will descend into a flag-waving, horn-honking, vuvuzela -blowing orgiastic frenzy for the World Cup. There will also probably be some fantastic games played by some of the world's finest athletes. So for those of you who like the idea of soccer but don't really follow it, in honour of today's draw that partitioned the World Cup teams into groups, I give you my group-by-group, team-by-team breakdown and analysis, to use as a kind of Bluffer's Guide. Don't thank me. No, really. Especially not by name. Just remember that you heard it here first. Group A South Africa - "Bafana Bafana", aka The Boys, are probably the weakest host team in the history of the World Cup. The host team has never failed to progress beyond the group stage. Until now. Mexico - A decent team, headlined by defender Rafael Márquez of Barcelona and young striker Carlos Vela of Arsenal, but they struggled to convince in the...

Since I have a rather personal interest in the Vertigo Crime line, I went out to look for a list of all its extant and forthcoming books: but to my surprise, no such list existed. (Vertigo Crime doesn't even have its own subpage on the Vertigo web site yet, oddly.) So here's what repeated Googling taught me, recorded so that you don't have to repeat my slightly tedious research. Click on a cover to go to a book's Amazon page, if one exists. Title Cover Release Date Author/Artist Notes Dark Entries August 25, 2009 Ian Rankin / Werther dell'Edera Rankin is one of the world's foremost mystery authors. Filthy Rich August 25, 2009 Brian Azzarello / Victor Santos Filthy Rich hit the New York Times bestseller list. Luna Park November 17, 2009 Kevin Baker / Danijel Zezelj This looks awesome. Also, Grand Theft Auto IV -esque. The Chill January 12, 2010 Jason Starr / Mick Bertilorenzi A supernatural sexual serial killer. Bronx Kill March 9, 2010 Peter Milligan / James ...

This here looks suspiciously like a cover: I think I really like it. I also think I like that it's coming out in hardcover. (I was expecting paperback.) But I do not like their innovative spelling of my name . Sigh. Ah well. At least they got it right on the actual cover, and they do generally (though not always) fix this sort of thing before the actual publication date. eta: aha, it's on Amazon.com as well as those .ca sites above. Go forth and pre-order your little hearts out! Meanwhile, I intend to commence the rewrite-to-editorial-order of Beasts of New York next week. (Reductive surgery, but otherwise no major changes.) Oh, and Invisible Armies hardcovers are on sale from Amazon.com, for a presumably limited time, for the bargain price of $4.46 . ( etaa: said price has now skyrocketed back to $19.96. If you snoozed, you losed!)

I am pleased to announce that Beasts of New York , my epic Homeric-quest fantasy novel about a squirrel in Central Park, which I released online under a Creative Commons license a couple of years ago, will be published onpaper next year by The Porcupine's Quill , a very cool Canadian literary press whose founders were recently awarded the Order of Canada for their "important and enduring contribution to Canadian literature." BoNY has been doing well online, too; it's been downloaded a respectable 6,000 times from Feedbooks and Manybooks (with no publicity whatsoever save for word-of-mouth - it wasn't even me who put it up on either site) and has, to my surprise, become my most-popular and highest-rated book on Goodreads .

I've been doing some writing: my rather contentious latest Maisonneuve column, What's Wrong With Africa , and my debut Wired UK blog post, From Dragons To Smartphones . I've been doing some programming, and the BBC (among others) has a nice writeup of the project I'm working on . I've also been doing some travelling, in Iceland, which is a good place to contemplate the infernal: See, they even provide a bench. Mine very own Icelandic saga: Two days ago I travelled through flickers of sunlight to the site of the world's oldest parliament as told in the sagas. (The history/folk tales that all Icelanders know. Their language has changed so little that they can still read the sagas in the original. I haven't read any, myself - though I am eyeing the collected English-language version sold in all the bookstores here - but I get the distinct impression from my Lonely Planet that the Iceland of the sagas was an extremely bloody place, and that appearing in one pr...

Below is a travel piece I wrote after my trek to Ciudad Perdida last year. The Washington Post initially offered to publish it, but then stopped responding to my emails - I think they laid off their travel editor or something. I forgot all about it until it popped up in an unrelated mail search. So here ya go: In Search of the Lost City I blame Steven Spielberg. When I arrived on Colombia's Caribbean coast and learned that the remains of an ancient city lay hidden deep in the nearby jungle, visions of Indiana Jones began to dance in my head. A few days later I found myself trekking for six days along steep, muddy, snake- and insect-infested trails, fording whitewater rivers and crossing countless stepping-stone bridges, drinking the river water and sleeping in hammocks, all just to reach and return from the thousand-year-old ruins known as Ciudad Perdida. The lost city languished untouched for centuries until 1973, when it was rediscovered by treasure hunters. Two years later, af...