I've just posted the first installment of a podcast reading of a new novella that I co-wrote with Hugo- and Nebula-nominee Benjamin Rosenbaum. The story's a big, 32,000-word piece called "True Names" (in homage to Vernor Vinge's famous story of the same name), and it involves the galactic wars between vast, post-Singularity intelligences that are competing to corner the universe's supply of computation before the heat-death of the universe.

Ben and I will be reading the story in weekly installments, taking turns as our schedules allow. The reading is Creative Commons licensed — Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial — and the story itself will be published this fall in Fast Forward 2, Lou Anders' followup to his knockout 2007 anthology, Fast Forward (regular Boing Boing readers will remember Paul Di Filippo's Wikiworld story from that volume). Lou's given us permission to post the story's text simultaneous with the book's publication, under the same Creative Commons license.

I had a nearly illegal amount of fun working on this story with Ben, who is a gonzo comp-sci geek with a real flair for phrasing, and I hope you'll enjoy hearing it as much as we enjoyed writing it!

Link, Podcast feed