A gift or hard graft? - Bill Joy

The University of Michigan opened its new computer centre in 1971, in a low-slung building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor. The university's enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a vast, white-tiled room, looking, as one faculty member remembers, "like one of the last scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey". Off to the side were dozens of key-punch machines - what passed in those days for computer terminals. Over the years, thousands of students would pass through that white-tiled room - the most famous of whom was a gawky teenager named Bill Joy.

Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the computer centre opened, at the age of 16. He had been voted "most studious student" by his graduating class at North Framingham high school, outside Detroit, which, as he puts it, meant he was a "no-date nerd". He had thought he might end up as a biologist or a mathematician, but late in his freshman year he stumbled across the computing centre - and he was hooked.

From then......read more

The international takeover of French literature

The motives that guide the gaze of the literary world can be both unthinkingly loyal and randomly fickle. For while there are more sacred cows grazing on the lush pastures of literature's vast canonical steppe than there are dead ones hanging in Smithfield market, it doesn't take long for last year's big thing to fall off the shelves into the ignominy of remainderdom, replaced by a glut of more brightly coloured, aggressively marketed, bright young things. This can happen to whole countries as well as individual authors. Take France, for example. Before the award of this year's Nobel prize for literature to the Franco-Mauritian JMB Le Clézio, the names of very few French authors were spoken outside specifically francophone confines, Michel Houellebecq and, to a much lesser extent, Amélie Nothomb aside. A glance down the list of Nobel literature laureates shows that since Sartre was offered, and refused, the prize in 1964,only Claude Simon (1984) and now Le Clézio have bee......read more

Cory Doctorow: willing science fiction into fact

Cory Doctorow's office lies behind a featureless, black security door in a north London side street, deep in a converted post-industrial warehouse, down echoing corridors and concrete stairways. It's an appropriately "underground" headquarters for the activist-novelist, who is explaining to me why he's not interested in predicting the future using science fiction, but influencing it. "I'm a presentist," he says, smiling broadly as he leans back in his chair. "All science fiction writers, whether they admit it or not, are writing metaphorically about the present. To extrapolate the future is really to comment on the now." His latest novel, Little Brother, is a counter-cultural manual for modern youth, which follows a tech-savvy teen, Marcus, as he takes on a sinister Department for Homeland Security in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco. Full of handy tips for anyone trying to avoid the prying eyes of the state – use a metal wallet to carry your cards, hide your sensi......read more