CANR
WORK TITLE: Walkaway
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 7/17/1971
WEBSITE: http://www.craphound.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: Canadian
LAST VOLUME: CANR 252
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born July 17, 1971, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; became naturalized British citizen, August 12, 2011; married Alice Taylor, 2008; children: Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor.
EDUCATION:Attended four universities, including the University of Waterloo.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, blogger, and activist. OpenCola, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and San Francisco, CA, cofounder, 1999—; Electronic Frontier Foundation, London, England, outreach coordinator, then director of European affairs, 2002-06, fellow, 2006—; University of Southern California Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy, Los Angeles, CA, Fulbright Chair, beginning c. 2007; University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, independent studies scholar in virtual residence, 2009—; Open University, England, visiting professor. Coeditor of blog, Boing Boing. Also presents writing workshops. Serves on boards of directors and advisory boards, including those of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Open Rights Group, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc., and Onion Networks; also serves on the conference committee for the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.
MEMBER:Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (Canadian regional director, 1999).
AWARDS:John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer, Hugo Awards, 2000; Nebula Award nomination for best novelette, Science Fiction Writers of America, 2004, for OwnzOred; Nebula Award nomination for best novel, 2005, for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; Hugo Award nominee, 2006, for story “I, Rowboat”; Pioneer Award, Electronic Frontier Foundation, 2007; John W. Campbell Memorial Award, 2009; Prometheus Award, 2009; Sunburst Award, 2009; White Pine Award, 2009, and Libertarian Futurist Prometheus Award for best novel, 2013, both for Pirate Cinema; Prometheus Award for Best Novel, and Copper Cylinder Young Adult Award, both 2014, both for Homeland.
WRITINGS
Also author of novelette, OwnzOred. Coeditor of the Boing Boing blog. Contributor of stories, articles, reviews, and interviews to periodicals, including Wired, Salon.com, Speculations, Mindjack Web site, On Spec, Toronto Globe and Mail, Asimov’s, Locus, Realms of Fantasy, New York Times, and Science Fiction Age.
SIDELIGHTS
Cory Doctorow writes science fiction and nonfiction about technology, both of which he was exposed to at an early age by his father, a math and computer science teacher. Doctorow noted on his Web site that he learned to use a keyboard before he learned cursive writing. He began selling his short fiction at seventeen and has had continued success with his stories.
Doctorow says that he is obsessed with two things—trash and Walt Disney. He and his friends make livings from reassembling computers from discarded parts and creating sculptures and other items from flea market and yard sale finds. His Disney obsession may come from the fact that, when he was a child, his grandparents took him to the Florida theme park during his Christmas visits. He noted on his home page that “garbage and Disney appear in almost everything I write.”
Doctorow has cowritten how-to books, one on publishing science fiction and the other, Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools, a guide to setting up and maintaining an Web log, like his own Boing Boing. The book advises on real-time editing versus uploading files. Online reviewer Deborah Lynne Wiley wrote that the authors “do a good job of explaining the benefits and disadvantages of each and provide descriptions of a number of freeware and shareware desktop clients and hosting services.” The authors begin with basics and add sophistication as the book progresses.
Doctorow is also a digital rights activist and an outreach coordinator with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, described on their Web site as “a group of passionate people—lawyers, volunteers, and visionaries—working in the trenches, battling to protect your rights and the rights of Web surfers everywhere. The dedicated people of EFF challenge legislation that threatens to put a price on what is invaluable; to control what must remain boundless.” The description on the site maintained that rights must be protected “because being able to share ideas and information is the reason the Web was created in the first place!”
The flagship product of OpenCola, founded by Doctorow and John Henson, is file sharing and search engine technology that resides on the user’s hard drive and accesses the hard drives of other OpenCola users, keeping track of searches and links and making them available to others with the same interests. The best information rises to the top through sheer numbers of hits, gaining whuffie points.
“Doctorow’s dream is that OpenCola’s technology will help the millions of artists who can’t afford to publicize themselves in a worldwide market,” wrote Mark Frauenfelder in Industry Standard. “He believes OpenCola will make it possible for any arbitrary piece of media to find its audience.” Frauenfelder went on to explain that “OpenCola also supports the ‘tip protocol’ a la Stephen King, where users download material and pay for it on the honor system, and the unfortunately named ‘street-performer protocol,’ where a creator releases a work into the public domain after a certain amount of money has been ‘thrown into the hat’ by any number of customers.”
Tim Pratt wrote for the Strange Horizons Web site that with his stories and his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow has “appeared at the vanguard of a trend within science fiction that’s so bleeding- edge it doesn’t even have a stupid nickname yet. (Singularitypunk anyone? How about PostHumanism?)”
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is set in the late twenty-first century after the ascension of the Bitchun Society. In this postmonetary world, whuffie points are everything, gained for good will and contributions to the public good. There is no death. In this wired world, minds are backed up frequently, so that if the body dies, a cloned one, specially grown for them, is programmed with their last backup.
One-hundred-year-old Jules works at Disney World, which is run by groups of young people with communications devices implanted in their inner ears and brains. Jules is killed for the fourth time when he opposes the remaking of his station, the old-style Haunted Mansion, by a group that wants to replace its animatronics, converting it into a virtual-reality attraction like they did at the Hall of Presidents, and where visitors can now become Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Other characters include Keep A- Movin’ Dan and Jules’s girlfriend, Lil.
New York Times Book Review contributor Taylor Antrim wrote that the story’s “ad-hocracies of ‘twittering Pollyannic castmembers’ who smoke ‘decaf’ crack and congratulate one another on ‘Bitchun’ ideas offer a knowing, gently satiric view of a once-ascendant digital culture. And the impressively imagined world of the novel is tricked out in lively prose.”
Rick Kleffel reviewed the novel for the Agony Column Web site, noting that Doctorow “sprinkles his prose with just the right number of Unix-derived terms.” “Doctorow’s debut is a sci-fi ride worth lining up for,” commented Noah Robischon in Entertainment Weekly.
Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, is about a man in a secret society of members who help each other find jobs and who sabotage other tribes. Doctorow told Katherine Macdonald, who interviewed him for the Strange Horizons Web site, that the novel “is based on the idea that before the Internet and universal end-to-end communication came along, you were pretty much stuck with being friends with the people who lived near you.” Doctorow went on to note: “But with the advent of the Internet, you can be friends with people who think like you, even if they don’t live near you.”
Doctorow has made his fiction and nonfiction available in a variety of formats through his Web site. As he notes, six of nine stories from his collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More, as well as Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and other works, are available through download under a license developed by the Creative Commons project, which allows distribution of creative work in a manner similar to the free/open source software movement. The works of a range of artists may be copied and used for noncommercial purposes with proper attribution. “It’s a great project,” commented Doctorow, “and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
In his third novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Doctorow tells the strange story of Alan, whose parents are a mountain and a washing machine, and whose brothers are Russian dolls and an island. When Alan moves to a strange community, he meets Mimi, his next door neighbor, who actually has wings. In order to be accepted as normal, Mimi has her wings clipped regularly by her sadistic boyfriend Krishna, who soon begins to suspect that Alan is not normal either.
“This chimera of a novel takes a plot with … geek appeal … and combines it with a touching family tale built out of absurdist elements,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. Colleen Mondor, writing on the Bookslut Web site, called Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town “a piece of original art that should be read and enjoyed and endure in both the science fiction and literary canons.” Mondor added that “This kind of work does not come along all too often; in fact I doubt you will ever see anything like it.”
Doctorow presents six stories, some previously published and some new, in his book Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present. “This collection shows a stunning talent coming into his own,” noted Regina Schroeder in Booklist. “Overclocked” in the collection’s title is a technical term referring to operating a computer processor faster than it is rated for, often leading to a malfunction. In his stories, Doctorow presents tales of people coping with advanced technology as well as stories of artificial intelligence (AI), such as the tale “I, Rowboat,” in which a boat’s AI debates Asimovism, the religion of AIs. In the apocalyptic “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” a handful of system analysts struggle to keep the Internet going after a global catastrophe caused by terrorists.
Devon Thomas, writing in the Library Journal, called Overclocked “a thought- provoking and fun collection.” In a review on the Agony Column Web site, Kleffel commented that the author “makes sure to give each story a fairly powerful emotional understory.”
In 2008 Doctorow published the young adult novel (though widely read by adults) Little Brother. In the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco in the near future, the Department of Homeland Security overreacted by turning the city into a police state. Most rights are taken away in the name of security, and individuals begin to disappear for questioning. High-school student Marcus plans to rebel against this treatment and restore the Bill of Rights by using the Internet and other technologies to disturb the government’s system of control.
In an interview with Julian Bennett Holmes in Publishers Weekly, Doctorow explained how a fit of inspiration and his regular blogging combined to create the perfect match for creating this story: “I had a flash of inspiration, and I went home and wrote the book in eight weeks, from the day I started to the day I finished. Technically it’s a very research-intensive book—there’s a lot of factual and technological material in it—but everything there, I had already written about on Boing Boing. So I’d been collecting this stuff on Boing Boing without knowing what it was for.” In an interview with Sarah Weinman on the eMusic Web site, Doctorow discussed the central message of security in his novel, recalling that “if you believe in security problems, think the world is unsafe, and that it’s okay to kill civilians to make a point, then it’s all the more important not to have false confidence. An incorrect view of security is very dangerous because it sets you up to fall into a trap of thinking that every incremental new thing of security makes you safer, leaving you to walk down this road where things get harder and harder for everyone, but not safer.”
Farah Mendlesohn, reviewing the novel on the Strange Horizons Web site, remarked that “Doctorow is already a very well-known author, but this is by far his best book yet. Little Brother hosts a careful and accreted argument, not all of which I agree with and (looking at the degree to which so many of my students have dispensed with privacies my generation take for granted) not all of which I suspect matters to teens (but the generational differences and understandings of these relationships are also an element of the argument).” Mendlesohn further explained: “In other words, it is a polemical book, and all the better for it. In the past I’ve regarded Doctorow as very much an ideas mill, without the bite that makes a really fine writer. Little Brother —angry at the way we regard the young, intolerant of America’s and Britain’s historical intolerance to its own youth—has all the bite and passion one could need.”
A contributor writing on the Dangerous Beauty Web site opined: “The whole of Little Brother is clever, immediate, observant, instructive, harrowing, sometimes funny (I so want to work a teen sex comedy into my next thriller now), and full of heart. The emotional component is noteworthy, because many thrillers flat-out lack it, while Doctorow’s book has it in abundance. I’ll be thinking about Little Brother for a long time.” Rob H. Bedford, writing on the SFFWorld Web site, mentioned that “Doctorow’s novel is scary because it resonates so much with the real world; personal freedoms are sacrificed in order for our own ‘safety.’ Doctorow evokes both Orwell and Philip K. Dick in the sense of paranoia, but Doctorow (obviously) brings a more modern sensibility to the fore.” Bedford added that this novel “will only further reinforce Cory Doctorow’s presence as one of the visionaries of free speech advocacy and great storytelling in the 21st Century.”
A contributor writing on the Book Smugglers Web site had mixed views on the account, citing: “Despite my sizable gripes with Little Brother, I still found myself wonderfully entertained and I burned through this book in two days. I’d recommend everyone read it for the information about internet security alone! And to be fair, the actual plot is entertaining in itself. It’s a fast paced techno-thriller and an empowering tale, albeit a little too fairy tale to be true. At the end of the day, I was entertained AND schooled by Little Brother, and would certainly recommend it despite its shortcomings as a work of fiction.” Laura Lehman, reviewing the novel for Bella Online, noted that the novel’s premise “is the balance between security and privacy and Doctorow does an excellent job showing how people react to the strictures of paranoia.” Lehman pointed out, however, that “the explanations of certain technologies jarred me out of the story, but not enough to give a bad review.”
Reviewing the novel in Wired, John Baichtal claimed that “ Little Brother is at once a warning against a dark future, along with a training manual for defeating that darkness if it occurs.” A contributor writing on the King of the Nerds Web site commented: “ Little Brother is an important work of modern fiction that while marketed towards the teen crowd remains a relevant and worthwhile read for people of all ages. In fact I would argue that it could provide some excellent dinner table conversation for families looking to bond and connect over excellent fiction.” The critic summarized that “this is a fantastic thought provoking read that all readers should pick up and read at least once.”
Doctorow returns to adult science fiction with Makers, reimagining the near future as a utopia for high- tech communal start-ups. Garage-lab inventors Perry and Lester are at the heart of the action, creating New Work, a band of small bankers across the country ready to bankroll micro-projects. This financing project interests blogger Suzanne, who follows their exploits, which soon lead to the production of 3-D printing. Perry and Lester’s printer allows them to turn out all sorts of actual products, some of which are theme park rides that soon bring the lawyers of the Walt Disney Company down upon them.
While a Kirkus Reviews contributor found this offering “uncharacteristically bland and disappointing,” other reviewers had a much higher assessment of Makers. A Publishers Weekly writer termed this “one of the most brilliant reimaginings of the near future.” Similarly, Booklist writer Regina Schroeder noted: “Doctorow’s talent for imagining the near future is astonishing, and his novels keep getting better.” Library Journal reviewer David Keymer also termed this a “well- written, well-conceived novel.” Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction reviewer Charles De Lint added further praise for this novel, writing: “There’s a lot of story here … but because of Doctorow’s skill as a writer, it’s completely accessible without ever losing the dense layers of all that inventive detail. Makers is smart and funny and tragic … [and] beautifully written.”
Doctorow again writes for the young adult audience in For the Win, a novel that takes on, as Horn Book contributor Roger Sutton noted, the “real-world economic implications of computer game currencies.” Here, through a number of story lines, Doctorow looks at youthful gamers in places like China and India who farm or mine virtual gold that is sold for real money to First World gamers. Then Big Sister Nor, in Singapore, organizes these underpaid works as the Webblies, or Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web, putting a new wrinkle in the game.
Sutton felt that Doctorow’s “enthusiasm for his subject is contagious,” but that his novel ultimately “suffers from too many characters.” A similar mixed assessment came from a Kirkus Reviews contributor who concluded: “Fans, future bankers and future gametechs will be in heaven; those without interest will skim or give up by the halfway mark.” No such complaints came from Booklist reviewer Daniel Kraus, who declared, “Doctorow is indispensable.” Kraus further noted: “It’s hard to imagine any other author taking on youth and technology with such passion, intelligence, and understanding.” Further praise for the novel was offered by School Library Journal writer Chris Shoemaker, who wrote: “Full of action and information, this is a solid, if occasionally soapbox-worthy, narrative.”
Doctorow teams up with fellow writer Charles Stross for Rapture of the Nerds, a novel that is “mind-bendingly entertaining but almost impossible to explain,” according to Booklist reviewer David Pitt. It is a dystopic and rather dark late twenty-first century with the sun partly obscured by molecular machinery in outer space. At the heart of this tale is Huw Jones, who is called for Tech Jury Service, in which humans judge the usefulness or potential danger of new inventions. Huw’s service takes an unsuspected turn, when he is possessed by an alien intelligence. This begins a journey and struggle that propels this “wildly imaginative story,” as Pitt further described the novel. A Publishers Weekly reviewer similarly felt that this book moves at “light speed with a light touch,” and delivers a “frothy cocktail of technological speculation and a wide variety of geeky in-jokes.”
In Pirate Cinema Doctorow takes on the criminalization of internet activity. Sixteen-year-old Trent McCauley lives in a dystopian near-future England and has one grand obsession: making movies from bits and pieces of films he has downloaded. Such activity is illegal, and three strikes earn the entire household a year without the internet. When Trent is caught for the third time, he is so shamed that he runs off to London, attempting to fend for himself. There he falls in with a group of activists protesting yet tighter government control and criminalization of internet activity. A Kirkus Reviews contributor felt this novel is just right for “computer-savvy kids who like to think.” A Publishers Weekly reviewer also dubbed this “down-and-dirty tale of technological guerrilla warfare … a winner” for fans of Doctorow’s work.
Doctorow has also written nonfiction works, including Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future and Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century. In the former title, the author “proves he’s smart, funny, and good at accessibly boiling down issues he’s passionate about,” according to Booklist reviewer Schroeder. Here he writes on topics from free speech and universal access to information to copyright and the comparison of Wikipedia to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
More essays drawn from his blog entries are served up in Doctorow’s Context, including a critique of Apple, a discussion of creating Internet real-time theater, and intellectual freedom. “With straight-arrow succinctness, Doctorow makes the complicated accessible throughout this great little guidebook,” noted a Publishers Weekly reviewer, who further dubbed Context a “GPS for the digital age.”
Characters from Little Brother return in Doctorow’s 2013 book, Homeland. At Burning Man, Marcus unexpectedly runs into his old friend Masha, who passes along a drive with thousands of incriminating information about the government and corporations. Soon after, Carrie Johnstone kidnaps Masha. Marcus begins working for a man campaigning for a seat in the California Senate. He must find away to release Masha’s files without his new employer finding out. A writer in Kirkus Reviews called the book “outstanding for its target audience, and even those outside Doctorow’s traditional reach may find themselves moved by its call to action.” A Publishers Weekly critic suggested: “Doctorow fills his novel with cutting-edge technology, didactic progressive messages, [and] strong and somewhat snarky characters.”
In Real Life is a graphic novel written by Doctorow and illustrated by Jen Wang. A talented gamer named Anda is recruited to play a game called Coarsegold. She is encouraged to kill off specific characters in the game. A Chinese boy named Raymond plays one of those characters. Anda and Raymond begin interacting directly, and Anda inspires Raymond to stand up to his employers. Booklist critic Sarah Hunter described In Real Life as “a surefire hit for readers everywhere, especially girls.” “Readers are left with a story that’s both wholly satisfying as a work of fiction and serious food for thought,” asserted a contributor to Kirkus Reviews. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called the book “a heartfelt and of-the-moment story.” Amanda MacGregor, writer in School Library Journal, remarked: “The subject matter will have a built-in audience, and the appealing artwork will move this off tire shelves, but readers may ultimately find [the] story unsatisfying.” Kelly Thompson, contributor to the Comic Book Reviews website, commented: “Doctorow and Wang have created a socially relevant, heartfelt and emotionally engaging story about a female gamer that will likely inspire and encourage generations of awesome girls.”
Doctorow includes essays on how to use the Internet in Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age. A contributor to California Bookwatch described the book as “lively, engrossing, contemporary and hard-hitting.” Referring to Doctorow, Library Journal writer, Henrietta Verma, commented: “His nonstop barrage of hard-won information-age wisdom is for everyone who consumes copyrighted material today.” A critic in Kirkus Reviews stated that the book should be “required reading for creators making their ways through the new world.”
A young man called Hubert, Etc. lives in Canada in the near future in Walkaway. He and his friends consider joining a community of walkaways, people who have chosen to leave organized society. In an interview with a contributor to the Locus website, Doctorow stated: “Walkaway is an ‘optimistic disaster novel.’ It’s about people who, in a crisis, come together, rather than turning on each other. Its villains aren’t the people next door, who’ve secretly been waiting for civilization’s breakdown as an excuse to come and eat you, but the super-rich who are convinced that without the state and its police, the poors are coming to eat them.” A reviewer in Publishers Weekly remarked: “Doctorow … expects more patience for superfluous eccentricities than many readers may be able to provide.” However, Regina Schroeder, contributor to Booklist, suggested: “The sweeping epic … despite some difficult-to-read but entirely believable character trauma—is ultimately suffused with hope.” A Kirkus Reviews writer described the book as “a truly visionary techno-thriller that not only depicts how we might live tomorrow, but asks why we don’t already.” Jason Sheehan, reviewer on the National Public Radio website, commented: “The philosophy is fascinating and, somehow, rarely dull—because it, like Walkaway culture, revolves around sharing, fierce debate and open-sourced best practices. It is world-as-lesson-as-world.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, April 15, 2005, Regina Schroeder, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, p. 1440; February 15, 2007, Regina Schroeder, review of Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, p. 46; April 1, 2008, Cindy Dobrez, review of Little Brother, p. 48; September 1, 2008, Regina Schroeder, review of Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, p. 16; November 1, 2009, Regina Schroeder, review of Makers, p. 28; May 1, 2010, Daniel Kraus, review of For the Win, p. 84; August 1, 2012, David Pitt, review of Rapture of the Nerds, p. 41; January 1, 2013, Cindy Dobrez, review of Homeland, p. 100; September 15, 2014, Sarah Hunter, review of In Real Life, p. 47; February 1, 2017, Regina Schroeder, review of Walkaway, p. 31.
California Bookwatch, March, 2015, review of Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age.
Entertainment Weekly, March 7, 2003, Noah Robischon, review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, p. 76.
Horn Book, July 1, 2008, Jonathan Hunt, review of Little Brother; May- June, 2010, Roger Sutton, review of For the Win, p. 80; May-June, 2013, Jonathan Hunt, review of Homeland, p. 81.
Inc., June 30, 2001, Alessandra Bianchi, “Taking a Page from Science Fiction,” interview with Doctorow.
Industry Standard, October 30, 2000, Mark Frauenfelder, “Nouveau Niche,” p. 118.
InternetWeek, January 10, 2003, Mitch Wagner, “Expert: Alleged Wi-Fi Risks Are Nonsense; Contrary to Popular Wisdom, Cory Doctorow, Coauthor of the Boing Boing Web log, Says That the Popular Networking Standard Is As Safe As Warm Milk”; January 24, 2003, Mitch Wagner, “Reader Poll: Wi-Fi Can Be Safe and Useful, but Must Be Deployed with Care; We Didn’t Make a Lot of Friends with Our Recent Article Interviewing Digital Rights Activist Cory Doctorow, Who Said the Alleged Security Risks of Wi-Fi Wireless Network Are Myths, and Wi-Fi Is in Fact As Safe As Warm Milk.”
Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 2002, review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, pp. 1662-1663; September 8, 2003, review of A Place So Foreign and Eight More, p. 60; January 1, 2004, review of Eastern Standard Tribe, p. 18; March 1, 2005, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, p. 266; December 15, 2006, review of Overclocked, p. 1248; April 1, 2008, review of Little Brother; September 1, 2009, review of Makers; April 1, 2010, review of For the Win; September 15, 2012, review of Pirate Cinema; January 1, 2013, review of Homeland; July 15, 2014, review of Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free; September 1, 2014, review of In Real Life; January 15, 2017, review of Walkaway.
Kliatt, July 1, 2008, Paula Rohrlick, review of Little Brother, p. 12.
Library Journal, February 1, 2003, Devon Thomas, review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, p. 122; April 15, 2005, Jackie Cassada, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, p. 78; February 15, 2007, Devon Thomas, review of Overclocked, p. 117; October 15, 2009, David Keymer, review of Makers, p. 69; September 15, 2011, Kate Gray, review of Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century, p. 92; December 1, 2014, Henrietta Verma, review of Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, p. 128.
Library Media Connection, November- December, 2008, Amy Hart, review of Little Brother, p. 77.
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May-June, 2010, Charles De Lint, review of Makers, p. 34.
Magpies, March, 2009, Anne Briggs, review of Little Brother, p. 40.
New York Times Book Review, March 9, 2003, Taylor Antrim, review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, p. 19; September 14, 2008, Austin Grossman, review of Little Brother, p. 17.
Online, March-April, 2003, Deborah Lynne Wiley, review of Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools, p. 77.
Publishers Weekly, December 16, 2002, review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, pp. 49-50; January 19, 2004, review of Eastern Standard Tribe, p. 57; March 7, 2005, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, p. 54; December 11, 2006, review of Overclocked, p. 51; April 14, 2008, review of Little Brother, p. 55; May 29, 2008, Julian Bennett Holmes, author interview; September 7, 2009, review of Makers, p. 33; August 29, 2011, review of Context, p. 54; July 16, 2012, review of Rapture of the Nerds, p. 151; August 27, 2012, review of Pirate Cinema, p. 79; December 17, 2012, review of Homeland, p. 61; August 25, 2014, review of In Real Life, p. 107; January 23, 2017, review of Walkaway, p. 61.
Reading Time, May, 2009, Lee Finkelstein, review of Little Brother, p. 30.
School Library Journal, May 1, 2008, Chris Shoemaker, review of Little Brother, p. 121; October 1, 2008, review of Little Brother, p. 71; July, 2010, Chris Shoemaker, review of For the Win, p. 86; October, 2012, Eric Norton, review of Pirate Cinema, p. 130; March, 2013, Erie Norton, review of Homeland, p. 154; September, 2014, Amanda MacGregor, review of In Real Life, p. 154.
This, September- October, 2008, John Degen, review of Little Brother, p. 43.
Time Out Chicago, June 18-24, 2009, review of Little Brother.
Wired, September 26, 2008, John Baichtal, review of Little Brother.
ONLINE
10 Zen Monkeys, http: / /www.10zenmonkeys.com/ (February 8, 2007), “When Cory Doctorow Ruled the World,” interview with author.
Agony Column, http:// trashotron.com/agony/ (October 14, 2003), Rick Kleffel, review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; (February 11, 2007) Rick Kleffel, review of Overclocked.
Bella Online, http:// www.bellaonline.com/ (July 21, 2009), Laura Lehman, review of Little Brother.
Boing Boing, http:// www.boingboing.net/ (October 9, 2012), author profile.
Bookslut, http:// www.bookslut.com/ (August 22, 2007), Colleen Mondor, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Book Smugglers, http: / / thebooksmugglers.com/ (February 2, 2009), review of Little Brother.
Comic Book Reviews, http://www.cbr.com/ (October 20, 2014), Kelly Thompson, review of In Real Life.
Comics Grinder, https://comicsgrinder.com/ (November 6, 2014), review of In Real Life.
Cory Doctorow Website, http:// www.craphound.com (August 8, 2017).
Creative Commons Project, http://creativecommons.org/ (October 14, 2003), author profile.
Dangerous Beauty, http://divalea.livejournal.com/ (January 19, 2008), review of Little Brother.
Edge World Question Center, http://www.edge.org/ (August 22, 2007), “Cory Doctorow,” profile of author.
Electronic Frontier Foundation, http://www.eff.org/ (August 22, 2007), brief profile of author.
eMusic, http:// www.emusic.com/ (May 23, 2008), Sarah Weinman, author interview.
EW.com, http:// www.ew.com/ (July 15, 2005), Noah Robischon, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Fantasy Bookspot.com, http:// www.bookspotcentral.com/ (August 22, 2007), review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Fischbowl, http:// thefischbowl.blogspot.com/ (May 18, 2009), author interview.
Flight into Fantasy, http://www.flightintofantasy.com/ (February 16, 2009), review of Little Brother.
IT Conversations, http://www.itconversations.com/ (August 22, 2007), author profile.
January, http:// januarymagazine.com/ (August 22, 2007), Andi Shechter, “Weirdly Delicious,” review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
King of the Nerds, http://kingofthenerds.com/ (June 26, 2009), review of Little Brother.
Locus, http://www.locusmag.com/ (July 16, 2017), author interview.
National Public Radio Online, http://www.npr.org/ (April 27, 2017), Jason Sheehan, review of Walkaway.
Neil Gaiman Journal, http://journal.neilgaiman.com/ (December 22, 2007), Neil Gaiman, review of Little Brother.
New England Science Fiction Association Web site, http://www.nesfa.org/ (August 22, 2007), Elisabeth Carey, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
O’Reilly Network, http:// www.oreilly.com/ (February 27, 2003), Richard Koman, “Cory Doctorow’s Bitchun’ World: P2P Gone Wild.”
Reason, https://reason.com/ (May 25, 2017), Katherine Mangu-Ward and Todd Krainin, author interview.
Sarah Davies, http:// sarahdavies.cc/ (July 15, 2009), Sarah Davies, review of Little Brother.
SFFWorld, http:// www.sffworld.com/ (April 22, 2008), Rob H. Bedford, review of Little Brother.
SF Reader.com, http:/ / www.sfreader.com/ (August 22, 2007), Jack Mangan, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
SFRevu, http:// www.sfrevu.com/ (July 1, 2005), Christine Fisher, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; (January 1, 2007) Ernest Lilley, “Interview: Corey Doctorow”; (January 28, 2007) Ernest Lilley, review of Overclocked.
SF Signal, http:// www.sfsignal.com/ (May 31, 2008), review of Little Brother.
SF Site, http:// www.sfsite.com/ (August 22, 2007), Matthew Cheney, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Strange Horizons, http://www.strangehorizons.com/ (March 31, 2003), Tim Pratt, review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Katherine Macdonald, interview with Doctorow; (April 2, 2008) Farah Mendlesohn, review of Little Brother.
Sydney Morning Herald Online, http://www.smh.com.au/ (May 26, 2017), James Bradley, review of Walkaway.
SyFy, http:// www.syfy.com/ (September 18, 2006), John Joseph Adams, Information Want to Be Free—and so Does Writer Cory Doctorow, Who Celebrates the New Technologies that Will Change Science Fiction Forever”; (August 22, 2007) Paul Di Filippo, review of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Technology & Society, http://www.techsoc.com/ (October 14, 2003), Curtis D. Frye, review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
USC Center on Public Diplomacy Web site, http:// uscpublicdiplomacy.com/ (August 22, 2007), faculty profile of author.
Wired Blog Network, http://wired.com/ (May 1, 2007), Dylan Tweney, “Metacrap and Flickr Tags: An Interview with Cory Doctorow.”
WorldChanging, http:/ / www.worldchanging.com/ (July 30, 2005), Alex Steffen, “Cory Doctorow: The World Changing Interview.”*
Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow portrait by Jonathan Worth 2.jpg
Born July 17, 1971 (age 46)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation Author, blogger
Genre Science fiction, postcyberpunk
Notable works
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
Little Brother
Notable awards
John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer
John W. Campbell Memorial Award
Prometheus Award
Sunburst Award
Spouse Alice Taylor (m. 2008)
Children 1 daughter (Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow)
Website
craphound.com
Cory Efram Doctorow (/ˈkɒri ˈdɒktəroʊ/; born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British[2] blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.[3][4][5]
Contents [hide]
1 Life and career
1.1 Other work, activism, and fellowships
2 Fiction
3 Nonfiction and other writings
4 Opinions on intellectual property
5 In popular culture
6 Awards
7 Bibliography
7.1 Fiction
7.1.1 Novels
7.1.2 Graphic novels
7.1.3 Collections
7.1.4 Short fiction
7.1.5 Not yet published
7.2 Non-Fiction
8 References
9 External links
Life and career[edit]
Doctorow was born in Toronto, Ontario. His father was born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan.[6] Although he is an admirer of acclaimed novelist E.L. Doctorow, the two are of no known relation, contrary to popular belief; the surname "Doctorow" is somewhat common among Jewish people of Eastern European descent.[7][8] In elementary school, Doctorow befriended Tim Wu.[9] He received his high school diploma from the SEED School, and attended four universities without attaining a degree.[10][not specific enough to verify][11] He later served on the board of directors for the Grindstone Island Co-operative in Big Rideau Lake in Ontario.[citation needed]
In June 1999, he co-founded the free software P2P company Opencola with John Henson and Grad Conn. The company was sold to the Open Text Corporation of Waterloo, Ontario, during the summer of 2003.[3]
Doctorow at Open Rights Group's 2006 meeting in London.
File:Cory Doctorow on the Open Rights Group.webm
Doctorow, a member of the Open Rights Group's Advisory Council speaks about how he got involved in digital rights.
Doctorow later relocated to London and worked as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years,[3] helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before leaving the EFF to pursue writing full-time in January 2006. Upon his departure, Doctorow was named a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[3] He was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, sponsored jointly by the Royal Fulbright Commission,[12] the Integrated Media Systems Center, and the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. The professorship included a one-year writing and teaching residency at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, United States.[3][13] He then returned to London, but remained a frequent public speaker on copyright issues.
In 2009, Doctorow became the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario.[14] He was a student in the program during 1993–94, but left without completing a thesis. Doctorow is also a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the United Kingdom.[14] In 2012 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University.[15]
Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008,[16] and together they have one daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born in 2008.[17] Doctorow became a British citizen by naturalisation on 12 August 2011.[2]
In 2015, Doctorow decided to leave London, moving to Los Angeles for feeling disappointed of London's "death" from Britain's choice of Tory government - He claims on his blog "But London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for corrupt global elites who turn neighbourhoods into soulless collections of empty safe-deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging the feckless criminality of the finance industry. These two facts are not unrelated."[18] He rejoined the EFF in January 2015 to campaign for the eradication of digital rights management (DRM).[19]
Other work, activism, and fellowships[edit]
He served as Canadian Regional Director of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 1999.
Together with Austrian art group monochrom he initiated the Instant Blitz Copy Fight project, for which people from all over the world are asked to take flash pictures of copyright warnings in movie theaters.[20][21]
On October 31, 2005, Doctorow was involved in a controversy concerning digital rights management with Sony-BMG, as told in Wikinomics.[22]
As a user of the Tor anonymity network for more than a decade during his global travels, Doctorow publicly supports the network, and furthermore, Boing Boing operates a "high speed, high quality exit node."[23]
Doctorow was the keynote speaker at the July 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference.[24]
Cory Doctorow at the Singularity Summit at Stanford in 2006
Fiction[edit]
Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old and sold several stories followed by publication of his story "Craphound" in 1998.[25]
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow's first novel, was published in January 2003, and was the first novel released under one of the Creative Commons licences, allowing readers to circulate the electronic edition as long as they neither made money from it nor used it to create derived works. The electronic edition was released simultaneously with the print edition. In March 2003, it was re-released with a different Creative Commons licence that allowed derivative works such as fan fiction, but still prohibited commercial usage. It was nominated for a Nebula Award,[26] and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel in 2004.[27] A semi-sequel short story named Truncat was published on Salon.com in August 2003.[28]
Doctorow's other novels have been released with Creative Commons licences that allow derived works and prohibit commercial usage, and he has used the model of making digital versions available, without charge, at the same time that print versions are published.
His Sunburst Award-winning short story collection[29]A Place So Foreign and Eight More was also published in 2004: "0wnz0red" from this collection was nominated for the 2004 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.[30]
Doctorow (left) pictured at the 2006 Lift Conference with fellow Boing Boing contributor Jasmina Tešanović (centre) and cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling (right).
Doctorow released the bestselling novel Little Brother in 2008 with a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike licence.[31] It was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2009.[32] and won the 2009 Prometheus Award,[33] Sunburst Award,[34] and the 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award.[35]
His novel Makers was released in October 2009, and was serialized for free on the Tor Books website.[36]
Doctorow released another young adult novel, For the Win, in May 2010. The novel is available free on the author's website as a Creative Commons download, and is also published in traditional paper format by Tor Books. The book concerns massively multiplayer online role-playing games.[37]
Doctorow's short story collection "With a Little Help" was released in printed format on May 3, 2011. It is a project to demonstrate the profitability of Doctorow's method of releasing his books in print and subsequently for free under Creative Commons.[38][39]
In September 2012, Doctorow released The Rapture of the Nerds, a novel written in collaboration with Charles Stross.[40]
Doctorow's young adult novel Pirate Cinema was released in October 2012. It won the 2013 Prometheus Award.[41]
In February 2013, Doctorow released Homeland, the sequel to his novel Little Brother.[42] It won the 2014 Prometheus Award (Doctorow's third novel to win this award).
Nonfiction and other writings[edit]
Doctorow's nonfiction works include his first book, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (co-written with Karl Schroeder and published in 2000), and his contributions to Boing Boing, the blog he co-edits, as well as regular columns in the magazines Popular Science and Make. He is a contributing writer to Wired magazine, and contributes occasionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the Boston Globe. In 2004, he wrote an essay on Wikipedia included in The Anthology at the End of the Universe, comparing Internet attempts at Hitchhiker's Guide-type resources, including a discussion of the Wikipedia article about himself.
Doctorow contributed the foreword to Sound Unbound: Sampling Digital Music and Culture (The MIT Press, 2008) edited by Paul D. Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky. He also was a contributing writer for the book Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century.[43]
He popularized the term "metacrap" by a 2001 essay titled "Metacrap: Putting the torch to seven straw-men of the meta-utopia."[44] Some of his non-fiction published between 2001 and 2007 has been collected by Tachyon Publications as Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future.
His essay "You Can't Own Knowledge" is included in the Freesouls book project.[45]
He is the originator of Doctorow's Law: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit."[46][47][48][49][50]
Opinions on intellectual property[edit]
File:Cory Doctorow talks at ORGCon 2012 talks about the UK Government’s Draft Communications Data Bill.ogv
Doctorow talks at the Open Rights Group event ORGCon 2012 about the UK Government's Communications Data Bill 2012
Doctorow believes that copyright laws should be liberalized to allow for free sharing of all digital media. He has also advocated filesharing.[51] He argues that copyright holders should have a monopoly on selling their own digital media and that copyright laws should not be operative unless someone attempts to sell a product that is under someone else's copyright.[52]
Doctorow is an opponent of digital rights management and claims that it limits the free sharing of digital media and frequently causes problems for legitimate users (including registration problems that lock users out of their own purchases and prevent them from being able to move their media to other devices).[53]
He was a keynote speaker at the 2014 international conference CopyCamp in Warsaw[54] with the presentation "Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free."[55]
In popular culture[edit]
Cory Doctorow wears a red cape, goggles and a balloon as he receives the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, spoofing an xkcd webcomic in which he is mentioned.[56]
The webcomic 'xkcd' occasionally features a partially fictional version of Doctorow who lives in a hot air balloon up in the "blogosphere" ("above the tag clouds") and wears a red cape and goggles, such as in the comic "Blagofaire".[57] When Doctorow won the 2007 EFF Pioneer Award, the presenters gave him a red cape, goggles and a balloon.[58]
The novel Ready Player One features a mention of Doctorow as being the newly re-elected President of the OASIS User Council (with Wil Wheaton as his Vice-President) in the year 2044, saying that, "...those two geezers had been doing a kick-ass job of protecting user rights for over a decade."[59]
The comedic role-playing game Kingdom of Loathing features a boss-fight against a monster named Doctor Oh who is described as wearing a red cape and goggles.[60] The commentary before the fight and assorted hit, miss and fumble messages during the battle make reference to Doctorow's advocacy for Open-Source sharing and freedom of media.
Awards[edit]
File:Entrevista a Cory Doctorow.webm
Doctorow, interviewed in 2015 by CCCB.
2000 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer[61]
2004 Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
2004 Sunburst Award for A Place So Foreign and Eight More
2006 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "I, Robot"
2007 Locus Award for Best Novelette for "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth"
2007 The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award[62]
For Little Brother
2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award[63]
2009 Prometheus Award[33]
2009 Sunburst Award[34]
2009 White Pine Award[64]
For Pirate Cinema
2013 Prometheus Award[33]
For Homeland
2014 Prometheus Award[33]
Bibliography[edit]
In chronological sequence, unless otherwise indicated
Doctorow in his office
This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.
Fiction[edit]
Novels[edit]
Down and out in the Magic Kingdom. Tor. 2003. ISBN 0-7653-0436-8.
Eastern Standard Tribe. Tor. 2004. ISBN 0-7653-0759-6.
Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. Tor. 2005. ISBN 0-7653-1278-6.
Little Brother. Tom Doherty Associates. 2008. ISBN 0-7653-1985-3.
Makers. Tor. 2009. ISBN 0-7653-1279-4.
For the Win. Tor. 2010. ISBN 0-7653-2216-1.
The Rapture of the Nerds. Tor. September 2012. ISBN 0-765-32910-7.(with Charles Stross)
Pirate Cinema. Tor. October 12, 2012. ISBN 0-7653-2908-5.
Homeland. Tor. February 5, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7653-3369-8.
Walkaway. Tor. April 25, 2017. ISBN 0-7653-9276-3.
Graphic novels[edit]
In Real Life. Illustrated by Jen Wang. First Second. October 14, 2014. ISBN 978-1596436589.
Collections[edit]
A place so foreign and eight more. Four Walls Eight Windows. 2003. ISBN 1568582862.
Overclocked: stories of the future present. Thunder's Mouth Press. 2007. ISBN 1560259817.
With a little help. Cor-Doc Co. 2009. ISBN 9780557943050.
Other instance: With a little help. CreateSpace. 2011. ISBN 9781456576349.
Short fiction[edit]
Title Year First published in Reprinted in
0wnz0red 2002 ? A place so foreign and eight more. Four Walls Eight Windows. 2003. ISBN 1568582862.
Truncat[65] 2002 ? The Bakka anthology. Bakka Books. 2002. ISBN 0973150831.
I, Row-Boat 2006 Flurb: a webzine of astonishing tales 1 (Fall 2006) Overclocked: stories of the future present. Thunder's Mouth Press. 2007. ISBN 1560259817.
Scroogled 2007 Radar (Sep 2007) With a little help. Cor-Doc Co. 2009. ISBN 9780557943050.
When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth 2008 ?? Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse. Night Shade Books. 2008. ISBN 9781597801058.
True names (with Benjamin Rosenbaum) 2008 Anders, Lou, ed. (2008). Fast forward 2. Pyr. ISBN 9781591026921. Kessel, John; Kelly, James Patrick, eds. (2012). Digital rapture: the singularity anthology. Tachyon. ISBN 9781616960704.
There's a great big beautiful tomorrow / Now is the best time of your life 2010 Strahan, Jonathan, ed. (2010). Godlike machines. Science Fiction Book Club. ISBN 9781616647599. Doctorow, Cory (2011). The great big beautiful tomorrow. PM Press. ISBN 9781604864045.
Chicken Little 2009 With a little help. Cor-Doc Co. 2009. ISBN 9780557943050. Hull, Elizabeth Anne, ed. (2011). Gateways. Tor. ISBN 9780765326621.
Lawful interception 2013 TOR.COM
Car Wars 2016 Deakin University[66]
Not yet published[edit]
/usr/bin/god (novel)[67]
Non-Fiction[edit]
Doctorow, Cory; Schroeder, Karl (2000). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. Alpha. ISBN 0028639189.
Doctorow, Cory; et al. (2002). Essential blogging. O'Reilly. ISBN 0596003889.
Doctorow, Cory (February 1, 2004). "Ebooks : neither E, nor books". Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 2014-12-05. Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004.
— (2005). "Wikipedia : a genuine H2G2, minus the editors". In Yeffeth, Glenn. The anthology at the end of the universe : leading science fiction authors on Douglas Adams' The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. BenBella. ISBN 9781932100563.
— (2008). Content : selected essays on technology, creativity, copyright, and the future of the future. Tachyon. ISBN 9781892391810.
— (2010). "You can't own knowledge". Freesouls. Retrieved 2014-12-05.
— (Jan 2010). "Close enough for rock 'n' roll". Locus (588): 29.
— (2011). Context : further selected essays on productivity, creativity, parenting, and politics in the 21st Century. Tachyon. ISBN 9781616960483.
— (2014). Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age. McSweeney's. ISBN 9781940450285.
Hi. I’m Cory Doctorow, and like everyone with a personal website, mine is horribly, terribly out of date. I’m revising this bio on 14 March 2017. If today is more than six months since then, you can assume that most of this is no longer valid and shouldn’t be used in, oh, say, the program book of a conference or a newspaper article. Email me and I’ll send you something up to date.
Last update 14 March 2017
GPG key ID: 0x1FC237AF (this fingerprint is mirrored in my Twitter bio/@doctorow)
GPG key fingerprint: 0BC4 700A 06E2 072D 3A77 F8E2 9026 DBBE 1FC2 37AF
Download key: https://craphound.com/doctorow.gpg
Gallery of publicity photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/sets/72157622138315932/
ONE SENTENCE:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist — the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of many books, most recently WALKAWAY, a novel for adults, IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE, a book about earning a living in the Internet age, and HOMELAND, a YA sequel to LITTLE BROTHER. H
ONE PARAGRAPH:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of WALKAWAY, a novel for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE, the nonfiction business book INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE, and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER and novels for adults like RAPTURE OF THE NERDS and MAKERS. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.
FULL LENGTH:
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to many magazines, websites and newspapers. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; he is also a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
His novels have been translated into dozens of languages and are published by Tor Books, Titan Books (UK) and HarperCollins (UK). He has won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.
His three latest books are WALKAWAY, a novel for adults (2017); IN REAL LIFE, a young adult graphic novel created with Jen Wang (2014); and INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE, a business book about creativity in the Internet age (2014).
His latest young adult novel is HOMELAND, the bestselling sequel to 2008’s LITTLE BROTHER. His latest novel for adults is RAPTURE OF THE NERDS, written with Charles Stross and published in 2012. His New York Times Bestseller LITTLE BROTHER was published in 2008. His latest short story collection is WITH A LITTLE HELP, available in paperback, ebook, audiobook and limited edition hardcover. In 2011, Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays, called CONTEXT: FURTHER SELECTED ESSAYS ON PRODUCTIVITY, CREATIVITY, PARENTING, AND POLITICS IN THE 21ST CENTURY (with an introduction by Tim O’Reilly) and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called CORY DOCTOROW’S FUTURISTIC TALES OF THE HERE AND NOW. THE GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW, a PM Press Outspoken Authors chapbook, was also published in 2011.
LITTLE BROTHER was nominated for the 2008 Hugo, Nebula, Sunburst and Locus Awards. It won the Ontario Library White Pine Award, the Prometheus Award as well as the Indienet Award for bestselling young adult novel in America’s top 1000 independent bookstores in 2008; it was the San Francisco Public Library’s One City/One Book choice for 2013. It has also been adapted for stage by Josh Costello.
He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, and serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Open Technology Fund and the Metabrainz Foundation.
On February 3, 2008, he became a father. The little girl is called Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, and is a marvel that puts all the works of technology and artifice to shame.
QUOTED: "Walkaway is an ‘optimistic disaster novel.’ It’s about people who, in a crisis, come together, rather than turning on each other. Its villains aren’t the people next door, who’ve secretly been waiting for civilization’s breakdown as an excuse to come and eat you, but the super-rich who are convinced that without the state and its police, the poors are coming to eat them."
Cory Doctorow: Bugging In
— posted Sunday 16 July 2017 @ 11:41 am PDT
Cory Efram Doctorow was born July 17, 1971 in Toronto, Canada. He attended alternative schools and worked at SF specialty store Bakka Books, but dropped out of high school at 17 and briefly moved to Mexico to write. He dropped out of four universities in two years, and worked as a CD-ROM programmer, website designer, volunteer in Central America, CIO for a film company and an ad agency, founder of a software company, and finally began working for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights organization with an emphasis on technology. He married Alice Taylor in 2008, and they have a daughter.
Doctorow made his first semi-pro sale at 17, and his first professional story, ‘‘Craphound’’, appeared in Science Fiction Age in 1998. He attended Clarion in 1992, and has since been an instructor there. He won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1999, and novelette ‘‘0wnz0red’’ was nominated for a Nebula in 2004. ‘‘I, Robot’’ (2005) was a Hugo and British SF Award finalist, and won a Locus Award, as did ‘‘When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth’’ (2006) and ‘‘After the Siege’’ (2007).
First collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003) won the Sunburst award in 2004, and more short work was collected Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (2007) and With a Little Help (2010). PM Press published The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (2011) as part of their Outspoken Authors series. Other stories were adapted as comics in Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (2008).
Locus Award-winning first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom appeared in 2003, followed by near-future SF Eastern Standard Tribe (2004) and urban fantasy Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005). His bestselling YA Little Brother (2008) won the Campbell Memorial Award, Prometheus Award, and Sunburst Award, and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. It was also adapted as a stage play. YA sequel Homeland appeared in 2013, and a sequel for adults, Crypto Wars, is in progress. Other novels include Makers (2009), For the Win (an expansion of story ‘‘Anda’s Game’’), and Pirate Cinema (2012). His newest book is near-future optimistic SF Walkaway.
He has collaborated with Charles Stross on several stories, including ‘‘Unwirer’’, ‘‘Flowers from Al’’, and ‘‘Jury Service’’ and its sequel ‘‘Appeals Court’’, which formed the basis for novel The Rapture of the Nerds (2012). With Benjamin Rosenbaum he collaborated on Hugo and Nebula finalist ‘‘True Names’’ (2008). Graphic novel In Real Life, created with Jen Wang, appeared in 2014.
With Karl Schroeder he wrote non-fiction The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (2000), and some of his essays were collected in Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (2008). Follow-up Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century appeared in 2011. Business and creativity book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free came out in 2014. He is a contributor to popular blog Boing Boing, ‘‘a directory of wonderful things,’’ and co-edited anthology Tesseracts Eleven with Holly Black (2007).
Doctorow was European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation until 2006, when he quit to write full time. He is a special consultant to the EFF now. He serves on the boards of various organizations related to technology and literature. He was named the 2006-2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy, and did a one-year writing and teaching residency at USC (2006-07). He received an honorary doctorate in computer science from Open University, where he is a visiting professor. He is also an MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate. He lives in Burbank CA.
Interview design by Francesca Myman, author photo by Liza Groen Trombi. Read the complete interview in the July 2017 issue of Locus Magazine.
Excerpts from the interview:
‘‘Walkaway is an ‘optimistic disaster novel.’ It’s about people who, in a crisis, come together, rather than turning on each other. Its villains aren’t the people next door, who’ve secretly been waiting for civilization’s breakdown as an excuse to come and eat you, but the super-rich who are convinced that without the state and its police, the poors are coming to eat them.
‘‘In Walkaway, the economy has comprehensively broken down, and so has the planet. Climate refugees drift in huge, unstoppable numbers from place to place, seeking refuge. The world has no jobs for most people, because when robots do all the work, the forces of capital require a few foremen to boss the robots, and a few unemployed people mooching around the factory gates to threaten the supervisors with if they demand higher wages. Everyone else is surplus to requirements.
‘‘But just because you’re useless to the rich and powerful, it doesn’t follow that you’ll lie down in a ditch somewhere to take yourself off the game-board. The ‘useless’ people declare the system to be the problem and walk away from it, forming a kind of parallel, bohemian society that uses software and automated manufacturing techniques to build a post-scarcity world on the fringes of the terminal phase of late-stage capitalism.
‘‘This is harmless enough for the powers that be, so it’s a relatively stable relationship – until, that is, the scientists who’ve been working on a moonshot project to create practical immortality treatments for the 0.1% decide to take their work to the walkaways – then, as the rich figure out they’ll have to spend eternity with us, all out war breaks out.
‘‘It’s a book about the struggle between people who think other people are the problem (the rich) and people who think other people are the solution (everyone else).”
*
‘‘Awareness of self-deception is a tactic that’s deployed very usefully by a lot of people now. It’s at the core of things like cognitive behavioral therapy – the idea that you must become an empiricist of your emotions because your recollections of emotions are always tainted, so you have to write down your experiences and go back to see what actually happened. Do you remember the term Endless September? It’s from when AOL came on to the net, and suddenly new people were getting online all the time, who didn’t know how things worked. The onboarding process to your utopian project is always difficult. It’s a thing Burning Man is struggling with, and it’s a thing fandom is struggling with right now. We were just talking about what it’s like to go to a big media convention, a San Diego Comic-Con or something, and to what extent that’s a new culture, or it’s continuous with the old culture, or it’s preserving the best things or bringing in the worst things, or it’s overwhelming the old, or whatever. It’s a real problem, and there is a shibboleth, which is, ‘I don’t object to all these newcomers, but they’re coming in such numbers that they’re overwhelming our ability to assimilate them.’ This is what every xenophobe who voted for Brexit said, but you hear that lament in science fiction too, and you hear it even about such things as gender parity in the workplace.”
*
‘‘For me, I live by the aphorism, ‘fail better, fail faster.’ To double your success rate, triple your failure rate. What the walkaways figured out how to do is reduce the cost of failure, to make it cheaper to experiment with new ways of succeeding. One of the great bugaboos of the rationalist movement is loss aversion. There is another name for it, ‘the entitlement effect’: basically, people value something they have more than they would pay for it before they got it. How much is your IKEA furniture worth before and after you assemble it? People grossly overestimate the value of their furniture after they’ve assembled it, because having infused it with their labor and ownership, they feel an attachment to it that is not economically rational. Sunk cost is another great fallacy. You can offer somebody enough money to buy the furniture again, and pay somebody to assemble it, and they’ll turn you down, because now that they have it, they don’t want to lose it. That was the wisdom of Obama with Obamacare. He understood that Obamacare is not sustainable, that basically letting insurance companies set the price without any real limits means that the insurance companies will eventually price it out of the government’s ability to pay, but he also understood that once you give 22 million people healthcare, when the insurance companies blew it up, the people would then demand some other healthcare system be found. The idea of just going without healthcare, which was a thing that people were willing to put up with for decades, is something they’ll never go back to. Any politician who proposes that when Obamacare blows up that we replace it with nothing, as opposed to single payer – where it’s going to end up – that politician is dead in the water. ”
*
‘‘Getting back to the availability heuristic, what I want is for people to be able to vividly imagine that the heroism in the moment of disaster is to avert catastrophe by bugging in instead of bugging out. Because the heroic story, in a lot of traditional science-fiction, is that when disaster strikes, the hero runs to the hills. The hero bugs out of town, and defends a small group of people from the ravening hordes. It’s The Road. It’s John Wyndham. The reality is that power plants have been failing for a long time, and the people who ran to the hills during the blackout didn’t fix the power plant. It’s the people who ran to the power plant who fixed the power plant. Those are the heroes. I want to give people the intuition that what the right sort of person does is look after their neighbors, that’s what stops disasters from turning into catastrophes. I really want this book to be an intervention in the world. I want it to be something that’s easy to call to mind in the moment where your heart is thundering and things are going terribly wrong, to realize what you do in that situation is help out. Mr. Rogers said when there’s a disaster, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ If you ever take a first aid class, 99% of that first aid class is the knowledge that everyone else is going to assume that someone else is going to take care of a problem, and the realization that the perfect person doing the perfect thing is less important than any person doing something. Even if you know a small amount about looking after someone, you should rush forward. Be prepared to get out of the way if someone says, ‘I’m a doctor,’ but rush forward.”
*
‘‘Later on this tour I’m going to stop at Reason Magazine, which is part of the Cato Institute. I’ve talked with those guys a lot before, and we have a lot in common, and a lot of places where we differ. Like with Occupy, I think you should never over-specify your values. Walkaway plants some flags that are unequivocal in terms of how I stand on some issues where I have deep and probably irreconcilable differences with some of my allied people in the libertarian camp. I speak as a guy who’s won three Prometheus Awards! I have a lot of respect for elements of libertarianism, but I also have some gaps. I don’t dispute that libertarianism works well, I dispute whether it fails better than collectivism. I think libertarianism has some really grotesque failure modes. This is what I’m planning to dig into when I talk to them. I keep having dialogues in my head where I try to Iron Man their best arguments and think about what my best arguments will be. Do you know the term ‘Iron Man?’ It’s the opposite of a Straw Man argument, so when you’re having a dispute with someone else, and you say, ‘Can we stop, and I’m going to tell you what I think your best argument is for your position, and you tell me if I have it right?’ It’s a way of advancing the debate beyond exploiting bugs in how the person has expressed themselves, and trying to come to common ground so that you can argue about substance. The one thing I love about libertarians is that they often overlap with the rationalist movement. Rationalism is not without its flaws, but it’s a very powerful force for improving the world.”
*
‘‘I’m working on a third Little Brother book now, for adults, called Crypto Wars. Paramount has the film rights to the first one. I’m doing some screenwriting for the first time. I’d always resisted screenwriting, because everything I’ve ever written that’s fiction has been published, and screenwriting is the last scene of Indiana Jones, over and over again, the most amazing thing anyone’s ever done, and it’s in a warehouse somewhere, and no one’s allowed to know it exists. My agent was able to cut a deal where even if no one turns this stuff into a movie, I could turn the writing into books and stories. Russ Galen is the agent. He’s amazing. He’s also the agent for Philip K. Dick, Norman Mailer, and Arthur C. Clarke, and there are a remarkable number of PKD and Arthur C. Clarke movies where he’s an executive producer, so he’s got a lot of experience. It’s through a media company I like, a fairly new one that’s done some incredible work, so I’m happy to be doing it. After that, I don’t know what I’ll do. I sell books after I’m finished, partly out of superstition that if I sell the book and can’t finish it, that would be a problem, but also because in general my career has just gone up, and the longer I wait to sell a book, the more I can get for it.’’
Cory Doctorow on Cyber Warfare, Lawbreaking, and His New Novel 'Walkaway'
The novelist, activist, and BoingBoing founder on cyber warfare, Uber-style reputation economics, and what he's likely to get arrested for someday.
Katherine Mangu-Ward & Todd Krainin | May 25, 2017
Cory Doctorow, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Little Brother, and Makers, is a three-time Prometheus Award winner, an honor bestowed on the best works of libertarian science fiction. In his most recent book, Walkaway, the super rich engineer their own immortality, while everyone else walks away from the post-scarcity utopia to rebuild the dead cities they left behind.
Reason Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward spoke with Doctorow about cyber warfare, Uber-style reputation economics, and that most overused and poorly understood of sci-fi themes: dystopia.
Edited by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Mark McDaniel and Krainin.
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This is a rush transcript—check all quotes against the audio for accuracy.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Do you think that the underlying conditions of free speech as it is associated with dubious technologies, are they getting better or worse?
Cory Doctorow: There is the—there is a pure free speech argument and there's a scientific argument that just says you know it's not science if it's not published. You have to let people who disagree with you—and who dislike you—read your work and find the dumb mistakes you've made and call you an idiot for having made them otherwise you just end up hitting yourself and then you know your h-bomb blows up in your face, right?
And atomic knowledge was the first category of knowledge that scientists weren't allowed to freely talk about—as opposed to like trade secrets—but, like, scientific knowledge. That knowing it was a crime. And so it's the kind of original sin of science. But there's a difference between an atomic secret and a framework for keeping that a secret and a secret about a vulnerability in a computer system. And they're often lumped together.
I was on a family holiday. We were on like a scuba resort in the Caribbean, in a little island called Roatan in Honduras. And there was this family of D.C.-area spooks. Like multigenerational. And Grandpa what had been like with USAID when the tanks rolled on Hungary and in Budapest. And all of the kids worked for undisclosed three-letter agencies. And so we're like sitting in in the pool one day and talking about cyberweapons and cyberwar.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Like you do. On vacation.
Cory Doctorow: On vacation. That's what I do. That's my idea of a good time. So the guy said like, "Well what about cyber weapons? Like why shouldn't we develop cyberweapons? Why shouldn't we a cyberwar?" And I said, "There's a difference between a secret bomb and a secret vulnerability in a computer operating system."
Because if I invent the h-bomb, it may be unwise. But keeping the physics of the h-bomb a secret does not make Americans more vulnerable to atomic attack than disclosing it. Maybe it would help them at the margins build slightly better bomb shelters. But it's really—it's not the same thing as me discovering a vulnerability in Windows and saying, "It would be great if I could attack former Soviet bloc countries or countries in Middle East or jihadis or drug runners by keeping this vulnerability a secret and assuming that nobody else discovers that vulnerability and uses it to attack the people I'm charged to protect." That mistake calls into question the whole scientific enterprise. Because we really only know one way to make computers secure and that is to publish what we think we know about why they're secure now and see what dumb mistakes our enemies and friends can locate and help us remediate.
And so you end up in this place where these vulnerabilities—that you are blithely assuming won't be independently rediscovered by your adversaries and exploited against you and yours—end up getting exploited against you and yours. And not just by state actors but by petty criminals, too. And this is one thing we're learning after the Vault 7 leaks. It's that a lot of those vulnerabilities were independently rediscovered and weaponized not just by governments and by military contractors who serve them, but by like, you know, dumb-dumbs who have crappy little identity theft rackets.
Right, you know, I guess maybe in in the Reasonverse it's a function of an imperfect market that the person who discovers the vulnerability that could be used by someone who could make millions with it, ends up migrating to a dumb-dumb who makes hundreds with it. And if we had better markets for these vulnerabilities, maybe we'd have a more efficient marketplace. And maybe it would only be exploited by people seeking high-value targets instead of targets of opportunity, where you're just looking for, you know, scanning all of ipv4 for people who've got CCTVs—
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Or maybe the highest bidder would be the person who actually wanted to close that vulnerability, at least in some cases?
Cory Doctorow: Well, except that would be a state, right? And states, so far, are bidding on these vulnerabilities just to exploit them. Like, that would be great. And this is the crux of the argument: Keeping security vulnerabilities a secret is itself a recipe for being exploited. It means that the only people—like a lot of contraband dysfunctions—the only people who end up knowing that secret are people who are weaponizing it and not the people against whom it's being exploited, until it becomes so widespread in an exploit that it can no longer be denied.
So Mirai, the Internet of Things worm, now is very widely known because it was very widely exploited. And before that it was a cozy secret among dumb-dumbs and creeps who used it for denial of service and blackmail.
So this is particularly salient because we only know how to make one kind of computer, and that's the general-purpose computer that can run all the programs. And we have computers that are now at the center of all of our policy problems because computers at the center of all of our life, every element of our life. So in theory, we could maybe solve all of our automotive problems by changing which programs the computers and the cars can run: Don't let it run the program that runs over children, right?
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Right.
Cory Doctorow: And in theory we can fix maybe some of our aviation security problems. And we can fix some of our child pornography problems. And like, all the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse: the mafia, child porn, terrorism, and organ— Oh, I always forget the fourth. Mafia, child porn, terrorism, and—not money laundering. Goodness me!
Katherine Mangu-Ward: I don't know, man.
Cory Doctorow: And, and–
Katherine Mangu-Ward: And famine! Just throw a regular old-school—
Cory Doctorow: Dollar sign, bar!
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Old-school horsemen in there.
Cory Doctorow: Right. YouTube buffering. I'm sure ya know. That's one of the 10 plagues of Passover, I think.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Yeah I know it is, it's right after the lice and before the death of the first born.
Cory Doctorow: That's right, yeah. So this belief that we can solve our problems by making computers that correspond to a theory object that doesn't exist anywhere in theory which is the computer that runs all the programs except for the one you don't like, involves necessarily a prohibition on disclosing defects in the design of that computer that might let you run the forbidden program. And that means that security vulnerabilities fester in those devices.
And we have a perfect storm of terribleness in which the constellation and devices that we are designing to control what kinds of programs we can run is monotonically expanding. And the ways in which those devices can harm us is also montonically expanding. And our ability to report security defects in those and continuously improve them, is contracting.
And this is catastrophic! Right? And so I think that we can leave aside the philosophical argument about whether we should or shouldn't have free speech or what its limits are. And we can go to a purely utilitarian argument that just says: If you don't want bad firmware loads being over-the-air updated into your pacemaker, your car, the CCTV in your bedroom, and the toaster that could burn down your house, you know, we need to have a robust culture of investigation and discovery and disclosure of security defects in those products. And that is just not compatible with cyberwar, digital rights management, crypto backdoors, anything else that requires controls on which programs computers can run.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: It almost sounds like something that's analogous to the problems with monocropping, right? Like, there's this one type of computer, it's everywhere, and we have now elaborate pesticides, and we have elaborate herbicides, and we have controls over who can plant what when and who has the intellectual property on which seeds. But on some fundamental level the problem is just it's all the same kind of thing and therefore vulnerable to a single apocalyptic event. Is that fair or is that the overworking the analogy?
Cory Doctorow: I think it is a little, because although we don't know for sure what other computer architectures might exist the only one that we've really been able to scale up and and make good is this Turing complete von Neumann machine. And there are some smart people at the Media Lab where where I have an appointment who think that maybe we could do other things. But—
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Unlike, say, corn, where we have already a thousand indigenous varieties we could be using instead. Maybe there really is just the one computer and we have to be cool with that.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, well, it's kind of like, maybe we just have one physics. And if only we had lots of different physics then nuclear bombs wouldn't always work, right? And so if Turing completeness is like latent in the fabric of the universe—which seems to be this weird thing where like we try to design toy computing environments that just do a few things and they inevitably turn out to be bootstrappable into the full suite of Turing completeness—you know, like, maybe that maybe it is there, right? Like Magic: The Gathering is Turing complete, right?
Katherine Mangu-Ward: You really know how to speak to our viewers.
Cory Doctorow: That's right! That's right!
Katherine Mangu-Ward: That's great.
Cory Doctorow: You need a big deck. And a long time. But you could run Photoshop on it.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: That's probably just true because we're actually all living in a simulation that was created to be—that that's the condition they're testing here, right?
Cory Doctorow: I am of the stripe of science fiction writer that thinks that all of those things are useful metaphors and dangerous assumptions about reality.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: What's the danger in making that assumption about reality? I mean I don't actually have a strong view one way or the other on this question. But I am intrigued by your use of the word danger there.
Cory Doctorow: First of all the arguments seem to me to have that the reek of collegiate mind-game logic games, right? Like, I had a roommate and a dear friend—actually one of the people Walkaway is dedicated to—Eric Stewart, who died unexpectedly a few years ago without any proximate cause, just didn't wake up one morning. But he was very clever. And in high school one day he sat down and said, "So the universe is infinitely prolonged, right, it goes on forever."
And I'm like, "That's what I'm understanding."
And he said, "We have finite life spans."
And I said, "Yeah."
He said, "Anything finite divided by something infinite is zero."
I'm like, "All right."
He said, "Therefore the probability of us being alive at this moment is zero."
I'm like, "Okay."
"And the only thing that is nonzero when divided by infinity is infinity."
I'm like, "Yeah."
He's like, "Therefore we have infinitely prolonged lives and we are immortal."
I'm like, "Can't argue with your reasoning but I don't think it's true."
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Is it not fair to say, though, that maybe your not your target demographic but your de facto demographic is in fact, like, dudes who would like to have their mind blown by late-night conversations in dorms? Is that an unfair Cory Doctorow stereotype? Those are your guys! Right?
Cory Doctorow: No, no, no. I'm all for having the conversation. But I think that it's the difference between having a thought experiment and a religious faith, right? Thought experiments are cool and interesting. And, like, I think science fiction has this great signature move which is that it reaches into the world and it plucks a single technology out that is part of this complex matrix of technologies that are affecting our lives. And it imagines a world in a bottle where that one technology is the central fact. And where everything else, if it's present, is just garnish around the edges. And by magnifying it in this comic way, right, this is caricature way, it surfaces some of the latent emotional and, you know, moral questions around the technology that are otherwise kind of hard to tease out from the from the from that big matrix.
It's like when the doctor goes and swabs your throat and then, you know, rubs it in a petri dish and leaves it for the weekend. What she looks at on Monday is not an accurate model of your body. It's a usefully inaccurate model of your body in which one thing is blown up as a diagnostic tool to let us understand it. You know, it's the physicist imagining the perfectly spherical cow on a frictionless surface and uniform density, right? Not because we have perfectly spherical cows or frictionless surfaces or uniform density. But that's a good first approximation for testing all your ideas against.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: And assuming that the cow is a sphere is a useful and positive thing to do when you're writing science fiction and maybe slightly less so in actual practices.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, eventually there's chewily weird reality.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: This book, is it a prequel or is it related in some way to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom? It seems like a similar universe. Has the political takeaway that you would want people to get out of those two different books shifted between them at all? Either because your views have changed or because kinds of facts on the ground have changed?
Cory Doctorow: So I think that science fiction is not predictive any meaningful way.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: It's certainly not great at it.
Cory Doctorow: I always say we're Texas marksmen: We fire the shotgun into the side of the barn and draw the target around the place for the pellets hit. Just ignore all those science fiction stories that never came true.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Yeah.
Cory Doctorow: But I also think that prediction is way overrated. I like what Dante did to the fortune tellers. He put them in a pit of molten shit up to their nipples with their heads twisted around backwards weeping into their own ass cracks for having pretended that the future was knowable, right? If the future is knowable then it's inevitable. And if it's inevitable, why are we even bothering? Why get out of bed if the future is going to happen no matter what we do, except I guess you're foreordained to.
Right, so I'm not a fatalist. The reason I'm an activist is because I think that the future at least in part is up for grabs. I think that there are great forces that produce some outcomes that are deterministic or semideterministic. And I think that there are other elements that are up for grabs. And I think that the forces are the result of the elements that are up for grabs, that's, you know, the parts that we intervene and become unstoppable forces later that then we can dance through other mechanisms and other interventions.
And so I think what science fiction does is not predictive, but sometimes diagnostic. Because across all the science fiction that has been written and is being written, and all the stuff that's being greenlit by editors or has been greenlit by editors, and all the stuff that readers can find and raise up or ignore—there's a kind of natural selection at work. Where the stuff that, like, resonates with our aspirations and fears about technology and our futures, that stuff gets buoyed up by market forces, by the marketplace of ideas, and becomes a really excellent tool for knowing what's in the minds of the world.
So the book itself considered on its own is a good way to know what's in the mind of the writer. The books would succeed tell you what's in the mind of the world. And if there's a lot of this stuff kind of coming to a prominence at this moment, I think it does say something about the moment that we live in, that there's a certain amount of pessimism. There's a fear that we are being stampeded towards a mutually distrustful internally divided future where we end up attacking each other rather than pulling together. I think even the most cynical person understands that if civilization collapses and you run for the hills that you aren't going to be a part of rebuilding it, right? That the people who are the part of rebuilding or the people who run to the middle and kind of get the power plant working again reopen the hospital and get the water filtration plant working again.
And so that mood of distrust and anger zero-sumess— although I just read an article this morning about how zero-sum doesn't mean zero-sum and that von Neumann who coined the term had this very specialized definition that we all use wrong, but I couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean because it was five in the morning and I'd only gotten five hours' sleep. But this notion that my game is your loss and that there's not enough to go around and this big game of musical chairs and the chairs are being removed at speed, is a is a theme in a lot of the science fiction that's prominent right now.
So Walkaway is in some ways a prequel to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I certainly reread Down on the Magic Kingdom with a pen and a highlighter and some post-its and made tons of notes before I started work on Walkaway and I have a whole file of themes that I wanted to pick up.
Some of that is understanding that I've come to and you know the 15 plus years since I wrote it. And some of it is wanting to respond back to the people who read Down at the Magic Kingdom as a utopia and who didn't understand that that there were dystopic elements. It was a very mixed future. And that reputation economics have the same winner-take-all problem that Pikettian rate of growth is always less than the rate of return on on capital problem, that produces you know insane runaway wealth disparity and dysfunction with, like, misallocation of resources. Literally, because in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom your ability to, like, run Disney World is based on how much esteem people hold you in. And so literally you can walk in and start handing out tickets. And if the people treat your tickets as though they're the right tickets then you get to be the czar of Disney World, which is the premise of the book.
And so you get these crazy resource misallocations get all these other problems and that it's papered over with meritocracy—which I'm sure you know was claimed as a satirical term to describe the delusion that the reason that you have so much and everyone else has so little it's because you're better than them. Right? And, and—
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Yet I'm sure you get all the time people coming up and saying to you, "Oh my God, you basically predicted Uber's reputational system!"
Cory Doctorow: Yeah.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: And you know, certainly while you weren't alone in thinking about those reputation mechanisms, and as you mentioned Charlie Stross has—
Cory Doctorow: Yeah.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: —a bunch of great stuff in his books about how that might look.
Cory Doctorow: Well, and I stole that from Slashdot karma.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Right. So it feels it feels both normal and dystopian to people simultaneously.
Cory Doctorow: But I think Uber is normal and dystopian for a lot of people, too. Like, I think all the dysfunctions of Uber reputation economics, where there's it's one-sided. I can tank your business by giving you an unfair review. Where you have this kind of weird mannered kabuki in some Ubers where people are like super-obsequious to try and get you to five-star them. And all of that other stuff that's actually characteristic Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I probably did predict Uber pretty well with what would happen if there are these reputation economies, which is that you would quickly have a have and a have-not. And the haves would be able to, in a very one-sided way, allocate reputation to have-nots or take it away from them, without redress without rule of law, without the ability to do any of the things we want currency to do. So it's like, it's not a store of value, it's not a unit of exchange, it's not a measure of account. Instead this like it's just it's a pure system for allowing the powerful to exercise power over the powerless.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: And yet isn't the positive spin on that: Well yeah, but the way we used to do that allocation was just by punching each other in the face?
Cory Doctorow: Well, that's one of the ways we used to. I was really informed by a book by David Graeber called Debt: The First 5,000 Years, where he points out that like the anthropological story that we all just used to punch each other in the face all the time doesn't really match evidence. That there's certainly some places where they punch each other in the face and there's other places where they just kind of got along. Including lots of places where they got along, like, through having long arguments or through like guilting each other.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: I don't know. I'm feeling like five stars on the Uber is better than the long arguments or the guilt.
Cory Doctorow: Well, that's because you don't have to drive Uber for a living and you've never had to worry that tomorrow you wouldn't be able to.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: That's certainly true.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Talk to me a little bit about the universe that Walkaway exists in. And in particular, I'm interested in its quasi-anarchic properties and what exists of the law and then the people who are operating outside of it, how that interaction works.
Cory Doctorow: So the mainstream Walkaway world what's called Default, which is a term I stole from from Burning Man, the default world is one in which the rule of law is entirely tilted to the favor of a small cadre of super-wealthy people who have game-rigged the system. And everybody else—the 99 percent—either is in this very precarious position where some of them are needed to make the automated systems go and some of them are needed to make sure that the people who do the work don't get too uppity because they can always be fired. And then everyone else is kind of surplus to requirements.
And a lot of them walk away, a lot of them, because they can escape-hatch into a kind of bohemian demimonde where they move into brownfield sites left behind by toxic post-industrial implosion. They use drones to find the leftovers of the civilization that had once been there. And then they use software from the U.N. High Commission on refugees to figure out how to recombine that to build a kind of fully automated luxury communist civilization, where they just you know you go on a scavenger hunt you find all the stuff and you build a huge Dr. Seussian amazing luxury hotel that anyone can stay in and that anyone can be the Tsar of and that anyone can can kind of contribute to. And it's built sort of like a wiki where people add things and people remove things and you can see who added what and who removed what and you can decide kind of collectively through deliberation and sometimes through you know shitty arguments and sometimes through very reasonable arguments. And one of the things that a lot of the walkaway culture aspires to is is that kind of rationalist mode of argument where we're talking things over rigorously front iron man each other's arguments is the best way to kind of win one over and decide what the best thing to do is and not just how to win.
And it's pretty stable because it turns out the Default doesn't mind having an escape hatch. Bohemias are cute, right? I mean there's a reason that loads of fast fashion places and designers go to Burning Man to make notes on what to knock off for the runway next year. Because Bohemia is a cool thing to mine. Grunge went from like, you know, Seattle's seedy underground to Sears in six months. Bohemians are cute. They're living labs. But then a group of scientists who've been working in Default figuring out the secrets of practical immortality for the super-rich decide that they don't really want to be complicit in helping the human race speciate into these infinitely prolonged God-like humans while the rest of us who are just mayflies receding in their rearview mirror.
So they engage in a Promethean act. They steal the secrets of immortality, which they after all discovered, bring them to the rest of us and then the super-rich realized that they're going to have to spend the rest of eternity with people they think of as being unworthy and that triggers the Hellfire missiles and all-out war.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: This is an analogy to open-source software development. And probably the phrase open-source is one that people use incredibly widely without really understanding what it means. People use it to just mean "vaguely collaborative."
Cory Doctorow: Right.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: It has a soft meaning.
Cory Doctorow: Spooks use it to mean just "stuff in the newspaper."
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Right. Open source, it has it has a whole separate meeting which is just stuff people generally know.
Cory Doctorow: Mm-hmm.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: I know you're a part of that community—you're stuck in there quite deep—so how much of it is a metaphor? And let's not work too hard to make the parallel.
Cory Doctorow: So I actually I'm working at whatever the thing that underpins screen open source software is, which I think is like Coasian coordination. So I think that, like, abundance is this triangle. And up here is what we want. Right, so Keynes, you know, wrote that paper in 1930: Our grandchildren will struggle to fill their three-day work weeks because they will be able to produce all the things that humanity could reasonably want. And he grossly underestimated the elasticity of our demand. And now you have people like Marie Kondo making a cottage industry out of like convincing us that really all we want is like a single smooth river rock that reminds us of our mother—
Katherine Mangu-Ward: And gives us joy.
Cory Doctorow: And makes us feel joy. So how much you want is obviously elastic. And it can go up and it can go down, right? And so that's one of the parameters on abundance that we have to think about.
And then over here is, like, how much we can make. So 3-D printing, automation, all that stuff. And both of those have seen significant changes in the last couple of decades. Marketing, A/B splitting, new additive manufacturing tools, automated milling, robotics, all of those have been profound changes in our world.
But all of the real action is over in this other corner, which is in logistics. And then that's like getting the stuff that people want to the people who want it after you've made it. And figuring out how to remake it. And figuring out what happens to it when we're done with it.
So Bruce Sterling wrote this very influential essay in the mid-2000s called Shaping Things, published by MIT press, where he posits an object called a Spime. And a Spime is a good, an object that is immaterial, it exists as information until someone needs it and then it's manufactured. But it's manufactured and designed in a way to gracefully decomposed back into the material stream when its duty cycle is over. And it's manufactured in a way so that it's use generate data about its efficacy and ways that it can be improved, so that every time it's made anew, it's better. And Spimes are a really provocative answer to the question of like how we can realize the Promethean project of both the heterodox right and heterodox left. You know, letting every peasant live like a lord. As opposed to insisting either, on the left, that every lord should be made to look like a peasant—or on the right, that lords and peasants are an inevitable fact of the world and there will always be lords and always be peasants maybe we incentivize people by having that difference.
The way that we get every peasant to live like a lord in a planet that only has one planet's worth of material, is that we find better ways to connect the material that people need with the people who have it and where it is at any given moment. So that rather than, like, everybody having to own a car, we have cars that are services. But we also have completely negotiable moment-to-moment things that you might need a car for. And so when there aren't cars available, the things that you can do instead of being in a car are brought to the fore.
So Google runs this data center in Belgium in a place where two thirds of the time it's so cool that they don't need the air conditioning and the other third of the time they just turn it off. And their file system is so good at migrating data away from places that are shutting down and into places where it's running that it doesn't really matter. You know, a lot of places that do aluminum smelting, because it's so energy intensive, they use aluminum smelting as a kind of battery. They say well we need to smelt so many tons of this year and when we have lots of solar or lots of wind or lots of tidal power we don't have anything to use it for so we smelt the the aluminum men and not at the moment when other people are trying to turn on their lights to run their air conditioning or run their Google data centers.
That kind of coordination where, like, at the moment that something is needed it's and at the moment where it's cheap to do it it's done, is characteristic of, like, efficient market hypothesis its characteristic planned economy theory. It's the thing that everyone is kind of shooting for. And it's the thing that free and open-source software has given us is the ability to coordinate ourselves very efficiently without having to put up with a lot of hierarchy to late bind why we're doing things or whether we're all on the same side. To be able to take things that we've done together where we've reached a breaking point and split them in two and have each of us pursue it in our own direction without having to pay too high a cost or even have a lot of acrimony. That's like that's the free software world I'm trying to imagine. Like, what would it mean be like to build skyscrapers the way we make encyclopedias and the 21st century?
Katherine Mangu-Ward: So you're over there imagining this world. But the place where the kind of social and political panic or preoccupation is happening is really, it's in that other corner of your triangle, it's in the logistics corner where were where the robots are going to come and take away our jobs.
Cory Doctorow: That's the manufacturing corner.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Right. Sorry, the manufacturing corner. Where we're currently culturally perseverating is over there.
Cory Doctorow: Sure.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: This idea that it turns out people don't want leisure on some kind of deep level is the thing that I'm particularly hearing on the right. Conservatives are doubling down on [the idea] that there's value in work. There's value in difference. There's value in, as you say, maybe those differences incentivize people. And there's a conservative version of the panic about the robots are taking our jobs. Then there's a liberal version of the panic about the robots are taking our jobs, which is: what's going to happen to the truck drivers when all those are automated? But why is that the thing we're panicking about now?
Cory Doctorow: Well, because I think that we tend to worried a lot about the first-order effects. And the second- and third-order effects tend to come a little too late. Gardner Dozois very famously said that the job of a science fiction writer shouldn't be to just think of the car in the movie theater and invent the drive-in but also infer the sexual revolution.
But I say to Gardner: Once you've inferred the sexual revolution, maybe you could spare a moment to think that the sexual revolution happening in cars meant that, for the first time, people had a reason to carry government-issued ID. Which was to get laid, right? And that like the shibboleth of "papers please" which historically has been like a marker of, you know, descent into totalitarian misery became an everyday thing. And that today a lot of the database nation is the progeny of that strange moment where technology and social mores came together thanks to movie theaters and cars and the sexual revolution and give us all driver's licenses. Science fiction writers do like to think past the first-order effect of what would it mean if there weren't a lot of truck driving jobs.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Is it fair to say that science fiction writers are doing the same thing as a good economist or a good political economist in thinking about unintended consequences?
Cory Doctorow: It's not just unintended consequences because I think making all truck drivers into desperate xenophobic populists who vote for strongman leaders was not the intended consequence of the self-driving car project, right? And yet that's the fear of what our political moment reflects.
It's more like the job of a science fiction writer is to, not even necessarily to map the territory, but to point out that there's territory to be mapped. There is a game we play when we argue about policy or tell stories and the game is "What's in the Frame?"
So there's this famous science fiction story called "The Cold Equations" [by Tom Godwin]. I don't know if you know it. It's taught in engineering schools all the time. And it's about a spaceship pilot who's piloting a small craft full of vaccine to a planet where there is a potential world-killing plague. And if he doesn't get the vaccine there, everybody on the planet will die. And there is a young girl who stowed away on his ship and when he discovers her he is aghast. Because he knows that the ship doesn't have any extra fuel. It has no autopilot. It can only land if he pilots it. If there's any excess weight it will crash. And without all of that, everyone in the planet will die. And that's why he has to shove that girl out the airlock. And they spend 15 pages trying to figure out why they don't have to shove her out the airlock. And then he shoves are at the airlock
Katherine Mangu-Ward: It sounds like a sexier version of the trolley problem, right?
Cory Doctorow: It is, it's just another sexy version of the trolley problem.
And what's out of the frame here is that the author is set up the rules of this thought experiment. And the author decided that autopilots weren't a thing. That reserve fuel wasn't a thing. That sending colonists with a supply of vaccine wasn't a thing, right? All of that stuff is out of frame.
So I think that science fiction is about pointing out in some ways that there are things that are out of the frame that don't properly belong out of the frame, whose ruling out is arbitrary—or customary, which another way of saying the same thing.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: When I saw the title of the book, before I had even seen the illustration on the cover or anything, I immediately thought of "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."
Cory Doctorow: Sure, yeah.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: And wondered if that was getting at this incredibly poetic kind of Ursula Le Guin scenario about, When do you have to fully disengage from society because it's based on an immoral premise? I wondered if that would be what this book was going to be doing. I think in a way it is. Was that an influence on you at all?
Cory Doctorow: Sure. I think the connection is that— So, the book was originally called Utopia, OK? And its thesis is that a utopian society, as we started saying, is one that fails gracefully, not necessarily one that works well. And I sent it to Kim Stanley Robinson for a quote. And Stan read it and gave me a wonderful quote. And then said, "And by the way I don't understand why this book isn't called Walkaway." And I was like, "You're totally right!" And I asked my editor and my agent. And they were like "Stan is totally right." And so we changed the title to Walkaway. But Stan might have been thinking of Le Guin's story.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Last question: When you go to jail, what is it going to be for?
Cory Doctorow: What will the charge be or why will they...?
Katherine Mangu-Ward: I like that you asked that distinction and you may answer either way.
Cory Doctorow: So you know, I have lots of different kinds of privilege that I think has kept me in reasonably out of harm's way. Not just being like a white middle-class articulate dude with half a million Twitter followers. But also, like, working at a civil liberties law firm filled with lawyers whose numbers I write on my arm before I cross borders, you know.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Your answer can just be "I'm invincible, man."
Cory Doctorow: No. You know what I worry about a lot? Because I'm a dirty foreigner. I'm a Canadian on a green card. And as we heard in the Supreme Court this week, it is virtually impossible to not have some way in which you are technically violating immigration rules when you are on a green card crossing borders, whatever. Just that you know as the justices at the Supreme Court asked, like, if it says list all your known aliases. If I forget a childhood nickname, does that mean that I can be deported or jailed for for immigration fraud? And the state's position was yes, that is, at any, regardless of whether or not the omission is material, the act of omission itself violates the statute and qualifies you.
And given the highly arbitrary nature of borders, and the very deep antipathy towards the people who cross them, from many of the people whose job it is to inspect those people who cross them, that's the place where I have the most worry. I really do worry a lot about that because I cross the border all the time.
And I worry that I don't know what I would do if I were required to decrypt my devices. I have a certain amount of purging I do before I cross borders to not so to be able to decrypt my devices if I if I'm made to. But then you know there's this hole on known area which is like what about making you log into your cloud services? And if you don't have the password, what about calling the people who have the password and saying Mr. Doctorow doesn't get at an immigration detention until you give us the password to his thing that he's left with you for safekeeping to change and then give to him so he can change it back when he gets out of immigration detention?
Those are all things—those are, like, unknown unknowns, right? It's a complete black hole I think by design the government has not pursued cases where those questions have come up where it looks like the courts would find that they were acting unconstitutionally because they want to see that ambiguity flourishing. Because it they have so much leverage over you and you're at the border that that ambiguity really works in your favor. I mean after the Muslim ban, one of the things that immediately emerged when people said "What should you do if...?" was like nobody knows. Nobody even knows for sure.
So now I do ridiculous things, like I have there's a form I think it's called the g28. So border guards have discretion as to whether to allow your council to see when you're in border detention. But that discretion goes away and becomes an obligation if this form has been signed and left with your lawyer before you cross the border. But it has to be on green paper.
And so I have signed many copies of this and left it in our paralegals filing cabinet at EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation]. And I always let a lawyer know before I cross, and I always let them know when I'm on the other side. And I hope that they check their phone. And if they see that many hours have gone by and they haven't heard for me to try and call me. And if they don't hear from me again they go and they get one of these green forms. I bought a ream of green paper to print these green forms. And they bring it down to the border to see if that's where I am.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: That's maybe advice for all of our viewers here, I don't know. Get a lawyer on retainer and a lot of green paper.
Cory Doctorow: Yeah, and a lot of green paper. A ream of green paper. I have some leftovers. My kid drew on a lot of it but I still have some leftovers.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: Thank you very much, Cory Doctorow, for talking to us about your new novel, Walkaway.
Cory Doctorow: My pleasure.
Katherine Mangu-Ward: For Reason, I'm Katherine Mangu-Ward.
QUOTED: "The sweeping epic ... despite some difficult-to-read but entirely believable character trauma—is ultimately suffused with hope."
Walkaway
Regina Schroeder
113.11 (Feb. 1, 2017): p31.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Walkaway.
By Cory Doctorow.
Apr. 2017. 384p. Tor, $24.99 (9780765392763).
In a world where scarcity is artificial--thanks to the ability to 3-D print food, clothing, and shelter--the hyper-rich zottas are only getting richer, and there's no advancement in the workforce. So, the disenfranchised and unsatisfied simply ... walk away. This has varying degrees of success, and as communities grow and develop new ways of thriving, the inhabitants of the "default" mode grow increasingly threatening. We follow these developments primarily through the viewpoints of a young woman, born a zotta, who calls herself Iceweasel; a young man with so many names he goes by Etcetera; his friend, Seth; and Limpopo, who is one of the architects of a particularly successful approach to Walkaway. The powers-that-be in default periodically destroy too-successful Walkaway communities, but when the Walkaways find a way to cheat death through computing--which is the last out-of-reach dream of the zottas--the violence increases. Doctorow's characters are all rough edges and awkwardness, with challenging and conflicting viewpoints, in a way that makes them memorable and engaging. One of the interesting thematic things Doctorow does here is to engage with the "reputation economy" concepts of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003). The sweeping epic, which covers decades of Walkaway life--despite some difficult-to-read but entirely believable character trauma--is ultimately suffused with hope. --Regina Schroeder
Schroeder, Regina
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Schroeder, Regina. "Walkaway." Booklist, 1 Feb. 2017, p. 31. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA481244826&it=r&asid=0ed908bf0718834a5a5e1d46cadd4ec8. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A481244826
QUOTED: "Doctorow ... expects more patience for superfluous eccentricities than many readers may be able to provide."
Walkaway
264.4 (Jan. 23, 2017): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Walkaway
Cory Doctorow. Tor, $26.99 (384p) ISBN 978-07653-9276-3
Doctorow (Homeland) expects more patience for superfluous eccentricities than many readers may be able to provide in this unengaging novel set in 2071. For example, his opening sentence begins with the name of a character ultimately referred to as Hubert, Etc., whose full name is 22 names long because his parents decided, for no logical reason, to give him as his middle names the "top twenty names from the 1890 census." There's also awkward prose ("The beer was where the most insouciant adolescents congregated, merry and weird as tropical fishes"), odd phrases that sound clunky rather than plausibly futuristic ("authoritarian enclobberments"), and goofy aliases (Gizmo von Puddleducks, Zombie McDingleberry). Collectively, these authorial indulgences--along with underdeveloped world building and unmemorable characters-serve mainly to distance readers from his creative premise: a near-future where the rich are on the verge of achieving immortality, a development that one character fears spells the "end of morality," and rebels, known as walkaways, attempt to create a functioning gift economy. (Apr.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Walkaway." Publishers Weekly, 23 Jan. 2017, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479714177&it=r&asid=1e87385e019d1abb14e17275a3226e94. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479714177
QUOTED: "a truly visionary techno-thriller that not only depicts how we might live tomorrow, but asks why we don't already."
Doctorow, Cory: WALKAWAY
(Jan. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Doctorow, Cory WALKAWAY Tor (Adult Fiction) $24.99 4, 25 ISBN: 978-0-7653-9276-3
Doctorow (Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, 2014, etc.) offers a counterintuitive alternate (possible?) future in this gritty yet hopeful sci-fi epic.Inspired by Rebecca Solnit's A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Doctorow offers meticulous worldbuilding and philosophizing about how the world just around the corner might be. In an age of makers, 3-D printers, mobile fabricators, and endless food sources, the book asks what life would be like--or should be like--in a post-scarcity, post-employment world. The short answer is the rich have gotten insanely richer and everyone else has chucked it--walking away from society to live communally in environmentally gutted rural areas and dead cities. Our entry into this new societal framework is multinamed Hubert, known as Hubert, Etc., his pal Seth, and their new friend Natalie Redwater, the daughter of a member of the 1 percent. In the wilds of Canada, they fall in with a tech-savvy barkeep, Limpopo, who explains the precarious, money-less walkaway culture to the newbies: "In theory, it's bullshit. This stuff only works in practice." It's a world where identity, sexuality, and perception are all fluid, enlivened by fiercely intellectual debates and the eternal human collisions that draw people together. Visually and culturally, it's also a phantasmagorical scene with beer made from ditch water, tactical drone fleets, and the occasional zeppelin or mech--all technology that exists today. The tense situation escalates when the walkaways discover a way to scan and preserve consciousness online--if the body is gone, does perception remain? What threat might a tribe of immortal iconoclasts present to their capitalist overlords? Much of the novel focuses on Natalie (now "Iceweasel"), who is kidnapped by her father's mercenaries. Doctorow sticks the landing with a multigenerational saga that extends this tale of the "first days of a better nation" to a thrilling and unexpected finale. A truly visionary techno-thriller that not only depicts how we might live tomorrow, but asks why we don't already.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Doctorow, Cory: WALKAWAY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242502&it=r&asid=c8d1f78cd8bdd8329ee51662dd247a3f. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242502
QUOTED: "lively, engrossing, contemporary and hard-hitting."
Information Doesn't Want to be Free
(Mar. 2015):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com
Information Doesn't Want to be Free
Cory Doctorow
McSweeney's
9781940450285, $22.00, www.mcsweeneys.net
Information Doesn't Want to be Free: Laws for the Internet Age considers the present and future of copyright issues in the digital age and considers the problems, special challenges, opportunities, and new models evolving from digital information. The discussion comes from an author and modern philosopher who focuses on the kinds of regulation, rules, and new intermediaries at work in the digital environment. Chapters consider such disparate topics as leaky digital locks, benefits and drawbacks to making money on art that is loved, and acknowledging and understanding piracy in the digital age. The result is a powerful discussion that should be in any computer and many a social issues collection: lively, engrossing, contemporary and hard-hitting.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Information Doesn't Want to be Free." California Bookwatch, Mar. 2015. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA405924946&it=r&asid=4d4b2492a3f546c75459eb6bec9e1384. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A405924946
QUOTED: "His nonstop barrage of hard-won information-age wisdom is for everyone who consumes copyrighted material today."
Doctorow, Cory. Information Doesn't Want To Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
Henrietta Verma
139.20 (Dec. 1, 2014): p128.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Doctorow, Cory. Information Doesn't Want To Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age. McSweeney's. 2014.164p. ISBN 9781940450285. $25. tech
Doctorow (Pirate Cinema; Little Brother; Rapture of the Nerds) mentions so many past careers in this title that he's hard to describe. Suffice to say that his history makes him an authority on the creation, sale, distribution, and consumption of various kinds of artistic media. Here the author distills the benefit of his experiences into three laws, to wit: digital locks are not for the benefit of the creators of the material they "protect"; "Fame Won't Make You Rich, But You Can't Get Paid Without It"; and "Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, People Do." Much of the material will make readers more conscious of facts they already had some awareness of: that record companies rip off artists, for example. Doctorow will also make all but the most savvy consumers aware of outrages they had no idea about--for example, that those companies deduct from artists' royalties for "breakage" (physical damages caused by shipping), even when they sell digital music. VERDICT Each of the miniessays and lengthy sidebars Doctorow offers in support of his laws is an education in itself. The entries are perfect for standalone examinations in library science classrooms, where students will take away an important lesson: copyright is broken, given that computers work by creating copies (opening a web page, for example, creates a copy of it on the user's hard drive). Mainly, though, his nonstop barrage of hard-won information-age wisdom is for everyone who consumes copyrighted material today--which is everyone.--Henrietta Verma, Library Journal
Verma, Henrietta
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Verma, Henrietta. "Doctorow, Cory. Information Doesn't Want To Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age." Library Journal, 1 Dec. 2014, p. 128. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA392478263&it=r&asid=2c64c58da239291703d43f53bb148203. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A392478263
QUOTED: "a surefire hit for readers everywhere, especially girls."
In Real Life
Sarah Hunter
111.2 (Sept. 15, 2014): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* In Real Life. By Cory Doctorow. Illus. by Jen Wang. Oct. 2014. 192p. First Second, paper, $16.99 (9781596436589). 741.5. Gr. 7-10.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
While in programming class, Anda is invited to join a girls-only fighting guild in a new MMORPG, and she jumps at the chance. Soon, she's recruited by another player for paid missions to exterminate gold farmers, low-level players who use the game for profit. It all seems like good, honest fun until she talks to one gold farmer, Raymond, a teen in China who is also playing the game, but for him, it's a job, and his working conditions are unsafe. Anda encourages Raymond to foment a strike, but it doesn't go well. Guilt-ridden, she attempts to find other ways to help, and she becomes more in tune with global injustice and labor issues in the process. Doctorow's story brilliantly ties together real-world economic and labor issues in the context of an online game, and he emphasizes the implications of actions taken in the gaming world that many players may take for granted. Wang's gorgeous, jewel-toned panels give lively, expressive shape to both chubby Anda's real life in Colorado and the fantastical battles in the game. The combination of girls-only gaming; gorgeous, stylized artwork; and a meaningful, sophisticated message about online gaming makes this a surefire hit for readers everywhere, especially girls.--Sarah Hunter
Hunter, Sarah
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hunter, Sarah. "In Real Life." Booklist, 15 Sept. 2014, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA385404363&it=r&asid=f3faba6f99dcc1330baf1f9a52c26880. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A385404363
QUOTED: "Readers are left with a story that's both wholly satisfying as a work of fiction and serious food for thought."
Doctorow, Cory: IN REAL LIFE
(Sept. 1, 2014):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Doctorow, Cory IN REAL LIFE First Second (Children's Fiction) $17.99 10, 14 ISBN: 978-1-59643-658-9
Online gaming and real life collide when a teen discovers the hidden economies and injustices that hide among seemingly innocent pixels.Anda, a shy, overweight gamer and a recent transplant to Flagstaff, Arizona, is beyond excited when a guest speaker in one of her classes invites her to join in playing a massive multiplayer online role-playing game called "Coarsegold." With her parents' approval, Anda joins the presenters' guild, a group of girls playing the game as girl avatars. Once in "Coarsegold," Anda--known online as Kalidestroyer--is confronted by another guild member named Lucy, who asks her if she'd be interested in earning "real cash." When she accepts, she's pulled into a world of real-money economies where workers "play" the game, garnering items they can then sell for actual money to other players. Doctorow takes a subject that many people probably haven't considered (unless they've already read his For the Win, 2010) and uses the fictional frame to drive home a hard truth: that many of the games we play or items we buy have unseen people tied to them, people who have their own struggles. Through Wong's captivating illustrations and Doctorow's heady prose, readers are left with a story that's both wholly satisfying as a work of fiction and serious food for thought about the real-life ramifications of playing in an intangible world. Thought-provoking, as always from Doctorow. (Graphic fiction. 12-16)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Doctorow, Cory: IN REAL LIFE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2014. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA380746543&it=r&asid=96ccd5155e97dc49332e22be717c8e10. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A380746543
QUOTED: "a heartfelt and of-the-moment story."
In Real Life
261.34 (Aug. 25, 2014): p107.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
In Real Life
Cory Doctorow, illus. by Jen Wang. First Second, $17.99 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-1-59643-658-9
In a heartfelt and of-the-moment story, Doctorow draws on his technology acumen and activism to portray the intricacies of 21st-century global citizenry, while also touching on what it means to be a gamer (particularly a female one). After joining the massively multiplayer online game Coarsegold, Arizona high schooler Anda meets Raymond, a boy from China who works as a "gold farmer," collecting in-game resources to be sold for real-world cash (a concept Doctorow explored in-depth in 2010's For the Win). Initially, Anda is led to believe that Raymond and his ilk are corrupting the game, but after she discovers their tenuous economic circumstances and poor living conditions, she begins urging Raymond to demand better treatment. It's a noble cause, but it comes with potential consequences for both Raymond and Anda. Characters come to life through Wang's (Koko Be Good) fluid forms and emotive faces, and her adroit shift in colors as the story moves between the physical and gaming worlds is subtle and effective. Ages 12--up. Author's agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"In Real Life." Publishers Weekly, 25 Aug. 2014, p. 107. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA380525252&it=r&asid=028efabe854ecb54bed1cd88686948d3. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A380525252
QUOTED: "required reading for creators makingtheir ways through the new world."
Doctorow, Cory: INFORMATION DOESN'T WANT TO BE FREE
(July 15, 2014):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Doctorow, Cory INFORMATION DOESN'T WANT TO BE FREE McSweeney's (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 9, 9 ISBN: 978-1-940450-28-5
In his best-selling novel Ready Player One,Ernest Cline predicted that decades from now, Doctorow (Homeland, 2013,etc.) should share the presidency of the Internet with actor Wil Wheaton.Consider this manifesto to be Doctorow's qualifications for the job.The author provides a guide to the operation of the Internetthat not only makes sense, but is also written for general readers. Usingstraightforward language and clear analogies, Doctorow breaks down the complexissues and tangled arguments surrounding technology, commerce, copyright,intellectual property, crowd funding, privacy and value--not to mention thetricky situation of becoming "Internet Famous." Following a characteristicallythoughtful introduction by novelist Neil Gaiman, rock star Amanda Palmer offersa blunt summary of today's world: "We are a new generation of artists, makers,supporters, and consumers who believe that the old system through which weexchanged content and money is dead. Not dying: dead." So the primary thesis ofthe book becomes a question of, where do we go from here? Identifying the Web'sconstituents as creators, investors, intermediaries and audiences is just thefirst smart move. Doctorow also files his forthright, tactically savvyarguments under three "laws," the most important of which has been well-broadcast:"Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you and won't giveyou the key, that lock isn't there for your benefit." These aren't thewild-eyed proclamations that arose from the Occupy movement or the hysteriathat seems to surround Edward Snowden, whom Doctorow touches on only brieflyhere. Instead, the author advocates for a liberalized system of copyright lawsthat finally admits that the Internet, for all its virtues and diversepurposes, is nothing but one great big copy machine, and it's not going away.Doctorow has spoken and written on these issues many timesbefore but never quite so persuasively. Required reading for creators makingtheir ways through the new world.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Doctorow, Cory: INFORMATION DOESN'T WANT TO BE FREE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 July 2014. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA374693203&it=r&asid=66ac4473d939adb4c627f90b2c357ac7. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A374693203
Homeland
Jonathan Hunt
89.3 (May-June 2013): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp
Homeland
by Cory Doctorow
High School Tor Teen 396 pp.
2/13 978-0-7653-3369-8 $17.99 g
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Three years after the events of Little Brother (rev. 7/08), Marcus Yallow drops out of Berkeley, struggles to find a job during the recession, and attends Burning Man in the Nevada desert. There he runs into former nemesis Masha, who entrusts him with more than 800,000 files of government corruption. When Masha is kidnapped later in the festival, Marcus is left to decide what to do with the incendiary material. Meanwhile, Marcus begins to work as a webmaster for the campaign of the charismatic Joe Noss, an independent political candidate for the California State Senate. Marcus has a lot on his plate: working during the day on the campaign, spending his nights sifting through the files, juggling new and old personal relationships, getting arrested--and trying to do the right thing through it all. Once again, Doctorow delivers a brazen, polemical novel that riffs on a dozen contemporary issues such as privacy rights, political corruption, and grass-roots reform. All of the storytelling elements--plot, character, setting--serve the higher purpose of provoking readers to think about, and act on, the injustice in the world around them, and the myriad digressions into politics, history, and technology further contribute to the novel's unique strengths.
Most of the books are recommended; all of them are subject to the qualifications in the reviews. g indicates that the book was read in galley or page proof. The publisher's price is the suggested retail price and does not indicate a possible discount to libraries. Grade levels are only suggestions; the individual child is the real criterion. * indicates a book that the editors believe to be an outstanding example of its genre, of books of this particular publishing season, or of the author's body of work. For a complete key to the review abbreviations as well as for bios of our reviewers, please visit www.hbook.com/horn-book-magazine.
Hunt, Jonathan
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hunt, Jonathan. "Homeland." The Horn Book Magazine, May-June 2013, p. 81. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA329366174&it=r&asid=1fd3daa96e8600936088b3b2128e3ea7. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A329366174
Homeland
Cindy Dobrez
109.9-10 (Jan. 1, 2013): p100.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Homeland.
By Cory Doctorow.
Feb. 2013.400p.Tor Teen, $17.99 (9780765333698). Gr. 8-12.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Marcus is back in this sequel to the crossover thriller Little Brother (2008).While attending the Burning Man festival, Marcus receives a USB drive from a hacker, Masha, with more than 800,000 incriminating government documents, and she advises Marcus to publish the material if anything happens to her. Meanwhile, a contact at the festival recommends Marcus to California Senate Independent candidate Joe Noss as a webmaster, and he has his first real job, but can he fulfill his promise to Masha and keep his new position? Doctorow sends readers into a world of Darknet secret websites, Occupy protests, kidnapping and interrogation, and hacking. The narrative is threaded with geek teen culture, economic problems, election strategy, corporate greed, government conspiracies, and privacy issues, and technology nerds will eat this for breakfast with a cup of really good coffee-Marcus says cold-pressed is the only way to go. Libraries are going to want to "pwn" multiple copies to meet demand, and hope that readers take up the activism call to use their "skillz" for good.--Cindy Dobrez
HIGHDEMAND BACKSTORY: Doctorow's international following is already lining up for this long-awaited sequel.
Dobrez, Cindy
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dobrez, Cindy. "Homeland." Booklist, 1 Jan. 2013, p. 100. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA315919048&it=r&asid=fa03a77b5449d58a629af11769c9f9e5. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A315919048
QUOTED: "Outstanding for its target audience, and even those outside Doctorow's traditional reach may find themselves moved by its call to action."
Doctorow, Cory: HOMELAND
(Jan. 1, 2013):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Doctorow, Cory HOMELAND Tor (Children's Fiction) $17.99 2, 5 ISBN: 978-0-7653-3369-8
Doctorow strikes a successful balance between agenda and story in his newest near-future, pre-dystopian thriller. Marcus Yallow is at a loss; he's dropped out of college because of finances and struggles to find employment in a terrible recession. Through a lucky encounter and thanks to his reputation as a technological guru and activist--a reputation left over from Little Brother (2008)--Marcus lands a job as webmaster for an independent politician campaigning as a reformer. Even as Marcus works to effect change through legitimate channels, he grapples with an ethical quandary. Frenemy Masha has given him some confidential information as insurance to release should anything happen to her--which it does. He's tasked with sorting through the massive potential leak, making sense of the secrets revealed, and coming up with a method of release that is credible, will attract notice and won't be linked back to him. After all, the secrets contained reveal large-scale privacy breaches and government corruption that involves military contractors like the intimidating figures following Marcus around. Such nerd-favorite icons as 3-D printers, Wil Wheaton and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic serve as in-jokes, but the concise explanations of real-world technology and fast pace make it accessible to less technologically savvy readers. Outstanding for its target audience, and even those outside Doctorow's traditional reach may find themselves moved by its call to action. (afterwords, bibliography) (Science fiction. 13 & up)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Doctorow, Cory: HOMELAND." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2013. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA313326106&it=r&asid=a78008a6312e3df16a91dfed47865077. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A313326106
QUOTED: "Doctorow fills his novel with cutting-edge technology, didactic progressive messages, [and] strong and somewhat snarky characters."
Homeland
259.51 (Dec. 17, 2012): p61.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Homeland
Cory Doctorow. TorTeen, $17.99 (400p)ISBN
978-0-7653-3369-8
In this rousing sequel to Little Brother, Marcus has gone to college, dropped out, and is looking for a job--no easy task in this near-future America's worsening recession. While attending the spectacular Burning Man festival, Marcus and his girlfriend run into Masha, a secret agent he met three years earlier; she hands him a data stick filled with governmental and corporate dirty secrets, telling him to release it if she disappears. Immediately thereafter, she is kidnapped by Carrie Johnstone, the uber-competent mercenary who is determined to reacquire the data stick and protect her clients. Returning to San Francisco, Marcus finds his dream job working for an honest politician and must decide whether to make public the explosive data, while dodging Johnstone and her goons. As always, Doctorow fills his novel with cutting-edge technology, didactic progressive messages, strong and somewhat snarky characters, and discursions that reflect his passions (a Wil Wheaton cameo? instructions on cold brewing coffee? why not?). Fans of Little Brother and the author's other stories of technophiliac hacktivism ought to love this book. Ages 13-up. Agent: Russell Galen, Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency. (Feb.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Homeland." Publishers Weekly, 17 Dec. 2012, p. 61. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA312724722&it=r&asid=192ddf4bc53f56a51d34ae45422758cc. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A312724722
QUOTED: "The subject matter will have a built-in audience, and the appealing artwork will move this off tire shelves, but readers may ultimately find [the] story unsatisfying."
Doctorow, Cory. In Real Life
Amanda MacGregor
60.9 (Sept. 2014): p154.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
DOCTOROW, Cory. In Real Life. illus. by Jen Wang. 192p. First Second. Oct. 2014. pap. $17.99. ISBN 9781596436589.
Gr 9 Up--Anda begins playing Coarsegold Online, a massive multiplayer game, after a gamer specifically looking for girls to play as female characters visits her school. Immediately adept at the game, Anda meets a player who tells her she can make money by killing characters farming for gold. These farmers sell gold to players, allowing them to essentially cheat at the game by quickly buying items they have not earned. Anda meets Raymond, a Chinese teen who works as a gold farmer. She learns about his real life--he works long days and has no health coverage. She encourages him to demand health care or strike, a choice that ends up having real-world ramifications. The narrative toggles between the in-game story and real life. The illustrations of the game are vibrant and dynamic, contrasting well with the muted browns and drab greens of Anda's reality. A detailed introduction by Doctorow about games, economics, politics, and activism serves to ensure readers "get" the story. The author attempts to tackle these large issues and others (like gender and privilege) but only does so superficially. The writing can feel heavy-handed, with the message overpowering Anda's voice. The problematic notion of a white character speaking for and trying to save minority characters (that all look identical) is addressed, but the too tidy ending makes that issue, and many others, feel oversimplified. The subject matter will have a built-in audience, and the appealing artwork will move this off tire shelves, but readers may ultimately find tire story unsatisfying.--Amanda MacGregor, formerly at Apollo High School Library, St. Cloud, MN
MacGregor, Amanda
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
MacGregor, Amanda. "Doctorow, Cory. In Real Life." School Library Journal, Sept. 2014, p. 154. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA381406780&it=r&asid=a0084e7a5a13798661c3d308572633b5. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A381406780
Doctorow, Cory. Homeland
Erie Norton
59.3 (Mar. 2013): p154.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2013 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/
DOCTOROW, Cory. Homeland. 400p. bibliog. Tor. 2013. Tr $17.99. ISBN 978-0-7653-3369-8; ebook $9.99. ISBN 978-1-4668-0587-3.
Gr 9 Up--Doctorow picks up the story of Marcus Yallow, two years after the events of Little Brother (Tor, 2008). Marcus and Ange are attending the Burning Man event in Nevada's Black Rock Desert, enjoying the myriad oddities there, when Marcus is approached by Masha. He had never expected to see her again and is even more surprised by her reason for contacting him. She gives him a flash drive containing the key to unlock more than 800,000 files that document numerous acts of governmental and corporate skullduggery and asks him to make them public if anything happens to her. Before Burning Man ends, Masha is snatched by Marcus's nemesis, Carrie Johnstone, and some rent-a-goons. As if this isn't enough, Marcus also meets the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation playing D & D, with Wil Wheaton of "Star Trek" fame as game master. One of the EFF founders gives Marcus a lead on a job working as webmaster for Joseph Noss, an independent candidate running for the California Senate. When he arrives back in San Francisco, he has to figure out how to release the incriminating documents without compromising his job. While Doctorow is known as a sci-fi writer, none of the science or technology here is fictional so the story hits close to home. The author combines excitement, romance, humor, and geekery with challenging questions for readers. Anyone concerned about the future of information should read this book.--Erie Norton, McMillan Memorial Library, Wisconsin Rapids, WI
Norton, Erie
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Norton, Erie. "Doctorow, Cory. Homeland." School Library Journal, Mar. 2013, p. 154. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA321335483&it=r&asid=9ee307b915d6978248acfac6c8a59e93. Accessed 25 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A321335483
QUOTED: "the philosophy is fascinating and, somehow, rarely dull — because it, like Walkaway culture, revolves around sharing, fierce debate and open-sourced best practices."
In 'Walkaway,' A Blueprint For A New, Weird (But Better) World
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April 27, 20177:00 AM ET
JASON SHEEHAN
Walkaway
Walkaway
by Cory Doctorow
Hardcover, 379 pages purchase
Here's the thing I love about Cory Doctorow: No one is weirder than he is.
And I don't mean run-of-the-mill weird. I don't mean personally weird (though he might be, I don't know him), but as a writer? Super-weird in the best possible way. And he's deep-weird, not gimmicky-weird. Weird in the sense that he has done the math, calculated the forking paths, and is presenting to you a world which isn't just amusing and borderline plausible, but a dispatch from next Tuesday.
His novels read less like speculation than prediction — a hardcore nerd's careful read on technology and biology and entropy, impeccably sourced and, in their own way, as real and present and hopeful as the augury of a Bizarro World Cassandra with carpal tunnel and grease under her nails.
Walkaway is his newest, and it is remarkable. It's one of those books that I don't want to describe at all, because doing so would ruin the new car smell of stepping into a fresh-off-the-lot universe. It would sour the joy of getting face-punched over and over again by the utopian/dystopian ideas, theories, arguments and philosophies that Doctorow lays down. It would, in short, wreck the fun.
But let's do this, okay? I'm going to tell you the basics. Because going in, there are some things you should know. Walkaway is, as the title suggests, a story of abandonment. Of giving up an old thing for something new, risky and beautiful. In the near future, the world (more specifically, Canada) is a mess. Global ecological catastrophes, refugee crises, out of control wealth disparity — it's all come true. Basically take the front page of any newspaper today, fast forward by a decade or so, and you're at home in Walkaway.
Sci-Fi's Cory Doctorow Separates Self-Publishing Fact From Fiction
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Sci-Fi's Cory Doctorow Separates Self-Publishing Fact From Fiction
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Picking The Locks: Redefining Copyright Law In The Digital Age
You Don't Have To Be A 'Nerd,' But It Helps
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Enter Hubert, Etc. (so-called because of his 19 middle names) and his buddy Seth. They're both poor, slightly over-the-hill scenesters refusing to give up on the tatters of their fading youth. Borderline survivors of a post-scarcity world and a gig economy gone full-tilt dysto, they show up at a "Communist Party" being thrown by Natalie, renegade daughter of a super-rich family (zottarich in Doctorow-ese) who is an expert at taking over old industrial spaces, sweet-talking the mothballed machinery into operation, adding a DJ and some 3D printers and making a free-for-all rave of it.
The cops come. Drones descend. Bad things happen. Natalie, Etcetera and Seth flee and, in short order, decide that they're sick of The Man and The Man's rules and they're just gonna, you know, walk away.
They're not the first. Doctorow's world is one where most people live in "Default" — as in the default reality of cities, bills, jobs, whatever. But in between these spirit-crushing bastions of old thought and old rules are a million miles of everything else. Fields. Wildflowers. Entire abandoned cities left to rot. And in Doctorow's fantasy, it is into these spaces that all the world's smart people and capable people and pissed-off people have gone.
"The point of Walkaway is the first days of a better nation," says one of Doctorow's characters. Says many of them, actually. That's the recurring belief-system on which the book runs. It is the story of precisely this — what comes after the slow-burn apocalypse we all secretly fear is coming, how it will work, how it will all go wrong and how it will get made right again with drones, wet printers and elbow grease. It's like the Genesis story of a world not yet here, but maybe dangerously close. After the flood, this is how we rebuilt ...
And yes, it sometimes reads like a series of philosophical set-pieces stitched together with drone fights and lots of sex. Like a Michael Bay movie if all the explosions were emotional. But the philosophy is fascinating and, somehow, rarely dull — because it, like Walkaway culture, revolves around sharing, fierce debate and open-sourced best practices. It is world-as-lesson-as-world. An anti-Atlas Shrugged. An origami argument that unfolds into a novel.
By my own (admittedly poor) math, it presents roughly ten thousand new, mind-bending and ground-breaking ideas per page. There are words in here that only otherwise exist in insular pockets of the maker/hacker/open source/thingiverse sub-sub-culture. In terms of its geek heroism, epic, generational scope and high stakes (only the survival of the human race, after all, and possibly the cure for death), the only literary comparison I can make is to Neal Stephenson's hard science disaster masterpiece, Seveneves, but Walkaway is more human. More squishy and close to home.
It's the story of a utopia in progress, as messy as every new thing ever is, told in the form of people talking to each other, arguing with each other and working together to solve problems. It's all about the deep, disturbing, recognizable weirdness of the future that must come from the present we have already made for ourselves, trying to figure out what went wrong and what comes next.
Jason Sheehan knows stuff about food, videogames, books and Starblazers. He is currently the restaurant critic at Philadelphia magazine, but when no one is looking, he spends his time writing books about giant robots and ray guns. Tales From the Radiation Age is his latest book.
Walkaway review: Cory Doctorow's science fiction crammed with ideas
James Bradley
SCIENCE FICTION
Walkaway
Cory Doctorow
Head of Zeus, $29.99
Part of science fiction's raison d'etre has always been the exploration of possible futures. In recent years that has often meant darkness and despair, post-apocalyptic and post-breakdown wastelands filled with ravening zombies or survivalists battling it out in the ruins of the present.
Yet in one respect the culture's passion for dystopias has run counter to technological and economic change. Recent years have seen a boom not just in sharing economies, but the first intimations of a society in which automation will make work unnecessary – or at least unavailable – for many.
Walkaway, writer and intellectual Cory Doctorow's first novel for adults since 2009's Makers, drops the reader into a disturbingly plausible version of this post-scarcity future, a place where runaway climate change has rendered large parts of the planet uninhabitable, 3D printing and automation mean "enough" has become an elastic concept, and what remains of society is divided between super-rich capitalists, the zottarich, or zottas, and the rest of us.
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http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/walkaway-review-cory-doctorows-science-fiction-crammed-with-ideas-20170522-gwae09.html
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.
Walkaway by Cory Doctorow.
For those who are not zottas, life in such a world is bleak, a fight to hang onto whatever they can. And so for many the answer is not to try harder but to give up on "default" society and become walkaways, participants in a money-free anarchistic gift economy that inverts the failures of communism. As one of the characters declares at one point, "It doesn't work at all in theory … This stuff only works in practice".
It's a life Walkaway's central characters – Hubert Etc (the Etc is for brevity: in an example of the sort of playfulness readers will find either hilarious or tiresome, Hubert's parents gave him the top 20 names from the 1890 census), Seth and Natalie, the daughter of a zotta clan – find themselves thrust into when a raid on a party turns nasty, and the three of them decide to disappear.
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It's a decision that leads them into the orbit of older walkaway, Limpopo, and before long, enmeshes them in the discovery of a technology capable of indefinitely extending life – or at least some semblance of it – by uploading a version of the subject's consciousness into an AI.
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For the zottas such a technology is insanely attractive, the key to removing the one remaining brake on their omnipotence. And so, as the walkaways try to make sense of the implications of such a technology, the zottas do their best to steal it, attacking walkaway settlements and generally maiming and killing anybody foolish enough to get in their way.
Although it becomes a little repetitive at times, the novel's depiction of the struggle between those who want to build a better world and those who see it as their right to take whatever runs along well oiled lines.
Yet the real point of Walkaway isn't the plot or the explosions, it's the ideas that burst from every page. Many of these are the sort of mind candy near-future science fiction excels in – "transgenic jesus microbes" that turn ditchwater (or urine) into beer, self-assembling buildings, flocking drones – but they're only the framework for a series of much larger questions about social organisation and economics, and what a world that worked for all rather the few might look like.
Many will have arguments with the assumptions built into these questions, or find fault with their Panglossian tendency to defer hard questions about the limits of growth or the provision of basic services to those unable to provide for themselves. Yet at a point in history when, to borrow the late Mark Fisher's memorable phrase, "capitalism seamlessly occupies the horizons of the thinkable", it's exciting to hear them asked at all, and even more enlivening to encounter a writer prepared to look forward and imagine not the end of the world, but something that bears a passing resemblance to utopia.
James Bradley is a guest at Sydney Writers Festival. swf.org.au
QUOTED: "Doctorow and Wang have created a socially relevant, heartfelt and emotionally engaging story about a female gamer that will likely inspire and encourage generations of awesome girls."
In Real Life
10.20.2014
by Kelly Thompson
in Comic Reviews
Comment
In Real Life
STORY BY
Cory Doctorow
ART BY
Jen Wang
COLORS BY
Jen Wang
LETTERS BY
Jen Wang
COVER BY
Jen Wang
PUBLISHER
First Second
2014-10-15
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Filed under “could not possibly be more relevant” given the current controversy in gaming, Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang’s “In Real Life” is a beautifully illustrated and charming look at one young gamer girl’s life. The messages and tone are heartfelt and entirely without cynicism, a welcome change from the Gamergate-related headlines that have dominated the recent news cycle.
Doctorow has crafted an utterly charming story about a relatable, average girl gamer who learns a lot when she encounters the harsh realities of the very real world though her unreal online gaming life. The book makes no issue of the fact that our heroine is a girl — in fact the story has little to do with gender, and the ways in which it does touch gender are wonderfully refreshing. The story and its lead character, Anda, are sweet, but stay just this side of saccharine. There are lessons to be learned but Doctorow deftly avoids the “after school special” trap into which a lesser writer might have fallen.
Wang is the perfect artist for this project. An immensely talented illustrator, Wang has an obvious animation background that shows in the energy, craft, and movement she brings to her character design and storytelling. Easily at home both in Anda’s real life and in her more creative game life, Wang maximizes the contrasts between the two worlds but also manages to root everything nicely so the book still feels like one consistent volume. Excelling particularly at character expressions and body language, Wang brings a real emotional heart to the story. Anda’s design is a total breath of fresh air as she doesn’t fall into the narrow traditional western beauty standard, and the design really helps in both Anda’s relatablity and her believability — namely as a girl that might want for some escape from real life.
Wang plays nicely with layout, keeping things just innovative enough to keep readers on their toes, but not overdoing it. As a result the storytelling feels simple and effortless. The colors are a vibrant and fluid watercolor look that is not only stunning, but also creates the best contrasts between Anda’s two worlds. Anda’s real world is an appropriately subdued palette and grounded in reality, whereas her game life is a vivid smorgasbord of reds and purples, greens and blues.
There’s nothing cynical or mean about this book, it’s a genuine and passionate comic, enthusiastic about its subject matter and devoted to its message. That said, it does feel like Doctorow could have dug a little deeper. Some added complexity and layers would have leveled the work up from merely great to exceptional or even important.
In the end, Doctorow and Wang have created a socially relevant, heartfelt and emotionally engaging story about a female gamer that will likely inspire and encourage generations of awesome girls.
NOVEMBER 6, 2014 · 4:28 AM ↓ Jump to Comments
Graphic Novel Review: Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang’s IN REAL LIFE
Comics-InRealLife
“In Real Life” is one of this year’s most intriguing graphic novels as it raises questions not asked often enough. A New York Times bestselling graphic novel written by Cory Doctorow and drawn by Jen Wang, it is the story of Anda, a gamer, who discovers a black market system through the friendship she makes with, Raymond, a poor boy in China. The focus is on what exploited people must do in order to survive and what can be done to help them rise up and out of their circumstances. But it’s also about the avatars we use to hide from the world. As is clearly depicted here, Anda has problems with the real world and her place in it.
In-Real-Life-Cory-Doctorow-Jen-Wang
I’m not sure that we ever fully resolve Anda’s issues. The fact remains that Anda is not totally comfortable in her own skin. It appears that she’s stuck enjoying being her avatar much more than not being her avatar. This is not exactly the theme of the book but this sticky issue overlaps into the main plot about the turmoil that Raymond is going through as a “gold farmer” within the virtual world of Coarsegold Online. You see, if you have the money but can’t spare the time to be bothered with the details, you can hire someone like Raymond to make all the effort required, such as learn how to capture magical feathers, to make you a champ in the world of Coarsegold Online. In this way, you can feed your ego, and your self-esteem, if you can afford it and you’re so inclined.
As Doctorow explains in the book’s introduction, the topic up for discussion is economics and how it affects your life, much more than you might think. Throughout, we find all the characters are seeking something and willing to barter, cheat, and kill (virtual killing) to get what they want. Anda is our vulnerable main character, a high school freshman. Her family recently moved and uprooted her from all her friends. One day in computer lab, she is invited to be part of a beta project involving girl gamers. Once, she’s in this virtual world, she immediately transforms into Kalidestroyer, a superheoric version of herself. She’s prettier, lighter, and faster. What does that say about the real world Anda?
Anda is quickly lured into the subculture of gold farming within the role-playing game she’s now absorbed in. Lucy, an older girl who is a seasoned gamer, recruits Anda to join her in killing gold farmers. As she explains it, these gold farmers are cheating and making it harder for everyone else. So, why not kill them and get paid for it? Reluctantly, she admits that you get paid by other gold farmers. But who cares, may as well make a profit, right? It’s from here that Anda ends up meeting one of these gold farmers and learns the grim realities of working in some boiler room for endless hours with no health benefits.
And as much as Anda worries about Raymond, you can’t help but be concerned about Anda. And you’re supposed to be, of course. Doctorow and Wang have created quite a compelling portrait of a vulnerable young woman. Here’s the deal, Anda represents the West and being in a privileged position. Anda’s Chinese friend, Raymond, represents those less fortunate. Anda is on a mission to save Raymond. But other issues resist easy resolution, or perhaps any resolution. At the end of the day, the virtual world still retains its mystique as a paradise and vulnerable souls like Anda continue to favor their avatars over themselves, much more than they might ever realize. This is the thing, you read this and you can’t help but get wrapped up in these characters and wonder about what lies ahead. To be fair, we do come to some better understanding of what is real and what is not. Of course, there’s always room for more. Well, perhaps material for another book.
“In Real Life” is published by First Second Books. You can find it here, here, and here. And, if you happen to be in the London area next week, you will want to stop by Orbital Comics, near Leicester Square, on the evening of Wednesday, November 12. The event is free, and Doctorow will be giving a short talk on science fiction and its relationship to the future, the present, politics and society called “Predicting the present: Science Fiction as a lens for focusing on today.” If you can’t make it out to the reading, Orbital Comics has got you covered with special copies of the now-sold-out first printing of “In Real Life” with a custom, numbered bookplate signed by Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang.