Editorial

Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free

How Copyright Laws Are Broken,
and Why It Matters

BY AE

I am an editor of an online Canadian science fiction magazine that publishes its content under a Creative Commons license, and a refugee from the print publishing industry who found a home in the software industry. So naturally when Cory Doctorow talks about copyright laws and the way they have evolved in the age of the Internet, it is very relevant to my interests. Not everyone is convinced by Doctorow’s perspective, but (to paraphrase his promise in the introduction to Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free), even if he’s wrong, it’s in a well-informed and thought-provoking way.

This past weekend I had the honour of sitting on the jury for WordPlay 2014, an annual festival that celebrates writerly video games. Video games have incorporated text and prose almost since the beginning (“The princess is in another castle”), but the prevalence in games has waxed and waned.

Interactive Narrative and WordPlay

BY The Editors

This past weekend I had the honour of sitting on the jury for WordPlay 2014, an annual festival that celebrates writerly video games. Video games have incorporated text and prose almost since the beginning (“The princess is in another castle”), but the prevalence in games has waxed and waned.

AE #17

Letter from the Editors #17

BY D.F. McCourt and the AE staff

Four years. If AE were a person it would have just started junior kindergarten. But magazines grow up far faster than that, especially today. We say a ten-year old dog is seventy in “dog years” because, like a seventy-year-old human, that dog is starting to get within spitting distance of its life expectancy. If we apply that logic to magazines, AE is ancient. Only 20% of new periodicals survive to celebrate a fourth birthday, making us about 90 in magazine years.

Bleeding genres in myth, legend, and science fiction

Bleeding of Genres: Myth and Legend

BY J.J.S. Boyce

We’re all swimming in culture, all of the time. Humans are natural story-tellers. Even on an individual level we have those defining stories of the time we did X or saw Y. And any fictional world that is expected to be taken seriously, whose inhabitants are to be accepted as real people, must have its own stories and art and culture and political views. It’s not enough to make a passing mention of it. We need to see some of it.