This post is a book review. It is a book that should have a great impact on a great number of fields including that of Information Technology. If you like this post, I would like you to know that it is part of a series of book reviews for works that I think all Information Professionals should take a look at.

I am a big fan of Cory Doctorow and his large volume of fiction and non-fiction writing.  His personal website that he maintains can be found here.  It serves as a good index to his various works, but also contains blog posts on all sorts of thoughts, reviews, and comments of his. It is a good read.

Today, I would like to focus on one of his earliest, popular pieces of fiction.  It is called “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”.  It is a short story that has been collected into a number of published collections.  The collection of Cory Doctorow only stories that it is part of is called, Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present. 

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth is a fantastic read.  It is entertaining, informative, and thought provoking in a manner that few short stories can pull off.  It is a post-apocalyptic tale of a group of system administrators and information technology (IT) professionals who manage to survive the “end of the world” because they happen to be at work, in enterprise class server facilities at the time. The same positive pressure, air treated, high security facilities that host fortune 100 server farms happen to be the exact same types of places needed to live through the unspecified danger that decimates the human race. 

Cory Doctorow

So the first reason to recommend this story is that it is simply a well conceived, flawlessly executed, and darn fun short science fiction story.  It can be enjoyed over and over again from the angles of fiction writing, science and technology, and social survival.  It is a great story, full of well developed characters, doing interesting things to survive.  It is so good that it won the prestigious Locus Award for outstanding novelette.

The second reason that I like this story is its licensing.  If you are thinking that is a strange thing to mention in a story review, you would be correct.  Our Information Age has brought many wonders, but it has also brought brand new challenges when it comes to intellectual property protection. Cory Doctorow has licensed this story using  Creative Commons Licensing.  Of the many options, he has specifically applied the “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 1.0 Generic” license to it. Basically this means that you can read and distribute that story for free so long as you give credit and maintain its integrity.  Want proof?  Go here and read the entire story right now for free.  Better yet, search the web and find versions for iPods, Kindles, MP3 players, pdf, text, and nearly any other format.  If you are unfamiliar with these ideas of modern licensing, the  Creative Commons Licensing website is a must read and the quality of this story along with the fame that it has rightly bestowed to Mr. Doctorow are proofs of concept!

Finally, if you happen to be the sort of IT Professional who did not “come up” through the ranks of being a junior assistant to a system administrator and never worked in a true enterprise server farm, this is about as accurate of a depiction as you will find in print.  There is a real world to IT, just as there is to police, the military, government, and the health care professions.  Those other genres have tons of depictions in media, but mostly the IT world gets short changed.  Cory Doctorow nails the “scenery” of this story through his personal experiences working in them.  There is no better exposure to what it means to be an on-call system “guru” than this for those who have not lived it.  The interchange of characters, their dialogue, and thought patterns are well presented.  I recommend that you give it a read, especially if you have never done it personally, but now find yourself leading people who are system admins for a living.

I think that every Information Professional should give this story a read.  I expect that you will find an entertaining read that can still have immediate impact on your, your teams, and your organization’s success all while opening your mind to alternative methods of intellectual property licensing.

So what books and stories do you recommend for IT professionals?  Feel free to add your ideas in the comments section.

That is my Information Technology Thought of the Day (ITTOD) for August 3, 2009 ©Scott Coughlin

Image credits: Cory Doctorow

Special Thanks to Jim Baen’s Universe for hosting When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth in such a beautiful manner online.

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