My second trade paperback coming out this month. It's entitled Installing Linux on a Dead Badger (And Other Oddities) and it is illustrated by DE Christman and Malcolm McClinton. The title story is a revised, expanded version of the node of similar name. It also contains 11 other humor stories, 9 of which are in the same "universe" as the title story and which contain sociological extrapolations of the fictional technology described therein. Which is a real fancy way of saying I took the idea and ran with it a bit more.
Once upon a time, a newbie posted instructions for installing Linux on painfully obsolete hardware here. I don't remember who snarked on the poor noder's writeup, but someone posted a malicious softlink to a new nodeshell: How to install Linux on a dead badger. That amused me, and set my mental gears a' spinning. How would you install Linux on a dead badger? What flavor would you use? And what would you do with a SuSE-powered mustelid?
By the time I returned to the nodeshell, an editor bent on tidying up the nodegel had deleted it. So I recreated the shell and posted my writeup. It did pretty well here, so I revised it and sent it to the articles editor at Strange Horizons. He published it. And then it got Slashdotted, a bright spot in an otherwise terrible week.
So my thanks go out to all the noders who encouraged that first writeup, and to the anonymous noder whose shell sparked my imagination. Consequently, the book's dedication reads like so:
All deft words are dedicated to Linux users around the world.
All daft words are dedicated to Everything's hot inner beauty.
All white space is dedicated to the eye of the beholder.
Thanks, everyone!
August 2, 2009 update: The anonymous noder who created the 'shell was really ReiToei! Thanks, dude!