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Eastern Standard Tribe

3.48 of 5 stars 3.48 · rating details · 2,053 ratings · 159 reviews

A comedy of loyalty, betrayal, sex, madness, and music-swapping
Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He's doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without a question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth onto the world.

Wh...more

Paperback, 224 pages

Published April 1st 2005 by Tor Books (first published February 17th 2004)

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The Things that Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away by Cory Doctorow

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Nov 16, 2012 Ruby Tombstone rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is another great read, but I've found that Doctorow's first two books (This and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) are a bit different to his later novels. They're both set further into the future, and while the concepts are interesting, it's all a bit more vague as to how the technology that supports them would actually function. This is to be expected when it comes to speculative fiction I suppose, but I much prefer the detail of the later books.

I found the first couple of sections of th...more

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Nov 28, 2007 Ken-ichi rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: escape

This book was written by Cory Doctorow, one of the writers at BoingBoing.net, so it might not surprise you that you that it's under the Creative Commons license and you can read it for free at his site. Being, however, a chump, I paid real Earth dollars for it in meatspace. Meatspace! I am a hip cyberpunk! From the future!

The book is near-future science fiction with just about one cool new idea: in a pervasively connected homogenized world, the most meaningful form of of group identity isn't ge...more

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Jan 18, 2013 Juushika rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: genre-science-fiction, status-owned, free-ebook

There is a book here that I would love, but this isn't it. Tribes are self-selecting, internet-founded communities whose activities transition into the real world; members modify their lives (and sleep schedules) to interact with the Tribe and the Tribe rewards them with everything a community can, from socialization to business opportunities. But Eastern Standard Tribe isn't about that: it's about disintegration on the fringes of a Tribe, immersed in the technology that's created Tribes but pre...more

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Aug 28, 2012 Simon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Read Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow 4/5.
Much better than some of the other detritus I've been reading recently. Starts off really well but the last 1/4 was a mixture of dull pointless family conversations and a rushed ending.

I'd have like the ending to go a bit deeper, I was left with a "oh is that it?" when all the loose ends were wrapped up in a couple of pages. Also the book alternates between First Person and Third Person which I found a bit jarring. Howeve
r it wasn't a bad read but...more

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Jun 19, 2012 Joe White rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, donated

Once I got past the fact that I didn't like the main character, and didn't care for the hip-hop delivery style of language used early in the book, I did get into the flow of the main creative foundations in the book.

This book exhibits a historical look at the late 90's through early oughts (oo's), where wardriving was a pastime, IPods and the music copying contention were rampant news, rapidly developing high end feature phones and early smartphones became ever-present tools, and the San Franci...more Once I got past the fact that I didn't like the main character, and didn't care for the hip-hop delivery style of language used early in the book, I did get into the flow of the main creative foundations in the book.

This book exhibits a historical look at the late 90's through early oughts (oo's), where wardriving was a pastime, IPods and the music copying contention were rampant news, rapidly developing high end feature phones and early smartphones became ever-present tools, and the San Francisco Angel investors were forming up into the new business creation in the US. There is foretelling of comp tech to be used in autos and other domestic products, but only to the extent that it was on the verge of being introduced in the last decade. For example, there were no Google glasses or electronic implants. Communication via social graphs as expressed in the book matched the development of social tools coming into widespread use at the time of publication.

Art, the main character, is more of an idea man and designer, rather than a developer, so the technical aspects of the new century age were rather limited to communication, encryption, and new venture business idea creation.

In order to exercise his literary writing skills the author uses a narrative style of first person conversation from his main character, using time jumps in the plot time-line to bring a more "live" presence to actions as they occur. It allows the reader to build on the story by a filling in method. There are literary references to Catch 22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, as the Cuckoo's nest is acted out and the main character is almost trapped in the governmental vortex of a Catch 22, where when accused you can't prove an untruth, and the boxed in bureaucrats aren't about to rock the system boat. The idea of a colleague stealing an idea (yours as seen through the main character's eyes) and creating a company generating a fortune from your idea was a vivid foretelling of elements of the Facebook creation, and other similar smaller companies that have been swallowed up or crushed by software monopolies.

The book is actually well written and is more of an essay length compared to romance saga novels. I just couldn't identify with any of the characters or the new age language use, so only rated it as a 3 star production.
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May 22, 2012 Adam rated it 3 of 5 stars

As I've said before, and will surely say again, I think Cory Doctorow is an amazing human being and I am glad he has sufficient influence to force his vision of the future onto reality, at least a little bit. I mean, seriously, if there are any other modern, (relevant*) authors whose entire literary catelogue I can download without guilt or financial expenditure, someone needs to point me to them immediately.

And for a few dozen pages each, Cory Doctorow's books really sing. I mean, really, who...more

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Oct 03, 2011 Rebecca rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

I'm giving this a 3 because I thought a lot of the world-building was interesting and I found the voice engrossing. However, the book is deeply flawed in some irritating ways.

The narrator is sarcastic and not particularly likeable, but he is interesting, I must grant. He's affiliated with a group based in the EST but finds himself in London undercover trying to sabotage other groups. (There's a really interesting theory here about how the internet changes the way that people self-identify; howev...more

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Jan 12, 2011 Lis Carey rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: f-sf

Art Berry lives in a world just slightly askew from the rest of us. In our increasingly wireless world of instant and constant communication, he gives his loyalty not to a state or a company or family and friends he sees regularly, but to the Eastern Standard Tribe—a largely faceless collection of people whose home time zone is the Eastern Standard Zone, who are locked in cutthroat competition with other tribes aligned with other time zones. Art himself is currently working in London, engaged in...more Art Berry lives in a world just slightly askew from the rest of us. In our increasingly wireless world of instant and constant communication, he gives his loyalty not to a state or a company or family and friends he sees regularly, but to the Eastern Standard Tribe—a largely faceless collection of people whose home time zone is the Eastern Standard Zone, who are locked in cutthroat competition with other tribes aligned with other time zones. Art himself is currently working in London, engaged in industrial sabotage against the Greenwich Mean Tribe. Virgn/Deutsche Telekom thinks he's working for them, improving their user interface; in fact he's trying to make it almost unusable. He's got a partner and supervisor from the Tribe, Federico, and a new girlfriend, Linda, whom he met when she staged an accident with him as the fall guy so that she could claim the insurance.

For some reason, that doesn't suggest to Art that perhaps Linda is fundamentally untrustworthy and not looking out for his best interests.

Art's having fun, screwing with V/DT's user interface, dreaming up a really good, fun, and profitable idea for EST to sell to MassPike, involving rights management for downloaded music. There are frustrations, too, of course, as he begins to dimly realize that Fede might be double-crossing him, trying to steal his idea and cut him out of the deal. There are more frustrations as Linda and Fede make increasingly contradictory and irreconcilable demands on him. Eventually, on a trip which he thinks is to pitch the idea, and a side trip home to Toronto to introduce Linda to his Gran, Art finally figures out that Linda is not his friend, either. He reacts very badly, and winds up on the roof of a mental institution in Massachusetts, trying to decide whether to stick a pencil into his brain.

There are some neat ideas here, and the story moves along briskly, alternating between the main story and Art on top of the asylum, trying to figure out what he does next, with quite adequate amounts of suspense. Unfortunately, it doesn't quite satisfy. Except for Art, neither the characters nor the book's main conceit, the Tribes, feel fully developed. I was left feeling that this will probably be a fun book to read when Doctorow finishes writing it.
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Aug 24, 2010 Kate O'Hanlon rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The novel opens with the narrator, Art, on the roof of a sanatorium with a pencil up his nose considering whether to give himself an armature lobotomy. The story then splits into two time lines, in one we see how Art got himself into this mess, in the other we see himself get out of it. And though the reader already knows how one of the time lines ends Doctorow still succeeds at ratcheting up the tension almost to the end (I say almost, I did get slightly impatient with the flashback story line...more

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Aug 17, 2010 Paul rated it 4 of 5 stars

Here is a near-future novel about an industrial saboteur who finds himself on the roof of an insane asylum near Boston.

In a 24-hour, instant communication world the need for sleep is the only thing that hasn’t changed. The world is splintering into tribes based on time zones; those in other time zones will be at lunch or sleeping when you need them. Only those in your own time zone can be depended upon.

Art lives in London, and he works for a European telecommunications mega-corporation. His "rea...more

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Apr 19, 2009 Jennifer rated it 5 of 5 stars

Freaking. Awesome. I used this quote in so many college essays:

“So you’re a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you’re sixteen years old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of media on your desktop. All the good stuff—everything that tickles you—comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They’re making cool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell that they’re exactly the kind of people who’d really ap

...more Freaking. Awesome. I used this quote in so many college essays:

“So you’re a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you’re sixteen years old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of media on your desktop. All the good stuff—everything that tickles you—comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They’re making cool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell that they’re exactly the kind of people who’d really appreciate you for who you are. In the old days, you’d pack your bags and hitchhike across the country and move to your community. But you’re sixteen, and that’s a pretty scary step.

“Why move? These kids live online. At lunch, before school, and all night, they’re comming in, talking trash, sending around photos, chatting. Online, you can be a peer. You can hop into these discussions, play the games, chord with one hand while chatting up some hottie a couple thousand miles away.

“Only you can’t. You can’t, because they chat at seven AM while they’re getting ready for school. They chat at five PM, while they’re working on their homework. Their late nights end at three AM. But those are their local times, not yours. If you get up at seven, they’re already at school, ’cause it’s ten there.

“So you start to f with your sleep schedule. You get up at four AM so you can chat with your friends. You go to bed at nine, ’cause that’s when they go to bed. Used to be that it was stock brokers and journos and factory workers who did that kind of thing, but now it’s anyone who doesn’t fit in. The geniuses and lunatics to whom the local doctrine tastes wrong. They choose their peers based on similarity, not geography, and they keep themselves awake at the same time as them. But you need to make some nod to localness, too—gotta be at work with everyone else, gotta get to the bank when it’s open, gotta buy your groceries. You end up hardly sleeping at all, you end up sneaking naps in the middle of the day, or after dinner, trying to reconcile biological imperatives with cultural ones. Needless to say, that alienates you even further from the folks at home, and drives you more and more into the arms of your online peers of choice.

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May 29, 2009 Brad rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: canadian-lit, sci-fi, doing-the-dishes

Eastern Standard Tribe reads so quickly and flows so well that it feels like it must be light weight fluff -- a throw away entertainment and nothing more -- but it doesn’t take much, only a little thought and a willingness to engage with “dead bodies” and “living flesh,” to see that it is much more.

Cory Doctorow is an unrepentant blogger, and it shows in this, his second novel. His language fizzes and crackles like three bags of Pop Rocks burning their carbonated pleasure on a tongue, popping ou...more Eastern Standard Tribe reads so quickly and flows so well that it feels like it must be light weight fluff -- a throw away entertainment and nothing more -- but it doesn’t take much, only a little thought and a willingness to engage with “dead bodies” and “living flesh,” to see that it is much more.

Cory Doctorow is an unrepentant blogger, and it shows in this, his second novel. His language fizzes and crackles like three bags of Pop Rocks burning their carbonated pleasure on a tongue, popping out computer geek jargon in one line and imaginary pop culture in the next, before spinning off into a welcome tirade full of compelling arguments.

One minute Doctorow’s revealing truly terrifying insights into the field of mental health, demonstrating how a pseudo-science bent on homogeneity can wield enough power to put people away without due process or any process at all. The next he’s casually envisioning a mobile, futuristic Napster to rule the highway airwaves with piracy turned privateering.

It is sci-fi so successful in its plausibility that it almost ceases to be sci-fi. In Doctorow’s future there are cars that run on vodka or fry grease, airplanes with hot tubs, comm sets that nullify texting and turn it into chatting, and circadian tribalism that offers a new system of societal organization just waiting to take over those systems we’ve long accepted, embraced and grown tired of.

It’s all either already happening or is going to happen. And if it doesn’t happen it will likely only be because whatever it is has taken another form. It’s not prophetic, but it is fascinatingly observant.

Taken together, Eastern Standard Tribe and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom suggest that Cory Doctorow has the potential to be a Canadian Philip K. Dick. I can’t give much higher praise than that. But if you aren’t familiar with Dick’s work try this equation:

A non-nihilistic Chuck Palahniuk - Chuck’s always disappointing third act + a smart, sci-fi kick in the ass = Cory Doctorow.

Check out how his “Chi is flowing” before they turn one of his books into a movie and taint his prose forever. He may not be the most literary rat on the ship, but his energy makes him the most likely to escape the scuttle.(less)

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Mar 14, 2009 Mikael rated it 5 of 5 stars

Cory Doctorow's amazingly written Eastern Standard Tribe starts out with an amazingly epic first chapter, sebsequently following two stories that follow each other, the beginning of the first connecting with the end of the last just before the book ends. This leads to a very strange style of reading, where you know a little more of what happens in the early plot every time you visit the later, but never enough to make either boring.

At times you stop and wonder where the author is going with the...more

1 like · like · see review

Jan 04, 2010 Ryan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

I took a sociology class in university in which we learned about two basic methods of societies becoming organized: either by common location, or by common interest. Eastern Standard Tribe takes that concept, as well as the fact that people use computers and other communication technologies more often in their personal lives than in previous generations, and takes them to an extreme conclusion. This novel is full of "tribes", groups organized by common interest and the time zone that they live i...more

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Apr 04, 2013 Heather Pearson rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: canadian

Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow was my selection for my local book club read this month. It had been sitting on my shelf for over a year and I was still curious. The premise is that that people are divided by time zones. They don't have to live in a particular time zone to identify with it. With an online world, it is easy to work and socialize/game with people anywhere. The main character Art Berry identifies with the Eastern Standard (EST) time zone even though he is currently working...more Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow was my selection for my local book club read this month. It had been sitting on my shelf for over a year and I was still curious. The premise is that that people are divided by time zones. They don't have to live in a particular time zone to identify with it. With an online world, it is easy to work and socialize/game with people anywhere. The main character Art Berry identifies with the Eastern Standard (EST) time zone even though he is currently working in England. This constant time zone shifting tends to play havoc with peoples states of mind.

While Art is in London working for one company, he is actually an agent for the EST and trying to undermine the company's success as well as the standing of other tribes. All seems to be progressing well until he is involved in an automobile accident. He hits a pedestrian, Linda, and they both end up in the same hospital room. From that point on, their paths cross and intersect as they build a personal relationship. This turns out to be a major complication in his line of business.

Our book club had a lively conversation of this book. The concept of aligning yourself with people from different time zones was a bit far fetched. Yes, we admit that it does happen for the purpose of work meeting with distant staff and for online game playing, but to live your whole life with a shifted internal clock, nope, we didn't buy it. Only exception I came up with was those scientists studying the Mars Rover who set their hours by Mars time.

How widespread are these tribes. We all got the impression that it was not a global phenomenon, rather small groups of dissatisfied people who had banded together. Outside of these groups, the general population hadn't heard of them. One of the doctors in the hospital has no idea what Art was referring to. This brought us to question whether Art really did belong in the psychiatric hospital. oops, I didn't tell you about that, you'll have to read and find out how and why that happened. If he wasn't crazy, then was he just suffering the effects of resetting his internal clock due to his overseas travel.

This was another enjoyable book by Cory Doctorow, though I would have liked if the final chapters had been expanded. It seemed a rushed, that the developments could have been explored in more detail.
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Sep 26, 2009 Evilynn rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sf, 2009, cyber-punk

The plot is okay, but the writing is sub par, and it contains some of the worst descriptive passages of sex I've ever read: "He smiles down at her nipple, which is brown as a bar of Belgian chocolate, aureole the size of a round of individual cheese and nipple itself a surprisingly chunky square of crinkled flesh". Put me off sex for a week that did. And who has square nipples anyway?

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Apr 12, 2009 LB rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: scifi

I've truly enjoyed Cory Doctorow's writing because I'm never tripped up by unchecked sexism, homophobia, racism, or any of the other -isms and phobias that take my attention from the writing. He doesn't seem to possess any of it, and I'm left free to enjoy as opposed to feeling angry and/or marginalized.

This story has a feeling of incomplete-ness is places. There is a bit of the unexplained in terms of Linda (her origins, her temper, why he puts up with her temper), Fede (I have no idea how to p...more

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Mar 26, 2013 Brian rated it 1 of 5 stars

so, i was listening to this on audiobook. and, well, it was horrible. first off...i always wondered why authors didnt read their books more often, i just figured it out!

cory reads this book himself. it sounds like he is just reading it in front of his computer or something, there are background sounds and coughs and stuff. plus he reads REALLY FAST!

audio books were something i was real skeptical about, but i got into them pretty easy with some good narrators and good books. a good narrator can...more

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Jan 12, 2009 Jack rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

This slight novel is really only science fiction in the sense that it is set in a very near-term future. Doctorow's underlying thesis is that people may form more stable and long-term relationships with networks of people on the 'net than with those they live and work with. That's an interesting proposition, but he makes remarkably little use of the idea. The 'Tribe' of the title is nearly absent from the story itself. I never found out what the basis of the group was, how they interacted, or re...more

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Sep 30, 2011 Jon rated it 3 of 5 stars

Pretty engrossing. The main character has a nice geeky feeling that not surprisingly reminds me a bit of myself and people I know. Lots of ideas for tinkering and improving things.[return][return]One thing I'll say is the blurb is a little misleading. I was expecting something Illuminatus like from the blurb, with different groups attempting to cause radical change in the real world through a variety of mechanisms. Not a bad book, but I'd like to see Doctorow write that one someday too ;). [retu...more

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Nov 19, 2010 Idleprimate added it

Shelves: black-comedy-absurdity-satire, canadian-authors, philosophy-of-civilization, technology-philosophy-social-com, sci-fi

in the right mood, I think this reads as clever, in the wrong mood, as precious. It's the only doctorow i've read so far, so i don't know whether he grows as a crafter of character and plot, but this book succeeds on exploring ideas and perceptions as well as having some pretty snare-drum prose in places despite being uneven.

It's a brief read and it's shortcomings don't get in the way of enjoying the observations on identity, belonging, cultural interaction, technology and economy.

I think, at m...more

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Jun 21, 2010 Nicholas Karpuk rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Ever like a person but drift off when they start discussing their pet obsession? Like a guy who is pretty well-rounded otherwise, but if you get him started on Warhammer 40K or Quantam Physics or his opposition to DRM, he sort of disconnects from you?

That's Cory Doctorow about a 1000 times over. The man appears to be made of pet obsessions. His books are littered with little rants and bits where you see the author poking through the narrative.

And it's a shame, because Eastern Standard Tribe has...more

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Jul 26, 2011 Ron Arden added it

This was one quirky book, but I liked it. Doctorow wrote this book in 2004, but it seems like he wrote it yesterday. The book starts in the present, at least for the story, and then goes into the past to give us the back story that lead to the current story. You following so far?

Art is an interface designer. He is good at being the champion of users, since engineers have no idea how someone actually uses anything. He is currently on assignment and living in London. He really lives as part of the...more

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May 10, 2009 Jason rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a jolly good read that has some interesting ideas mixed in. I'm reminded of William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, but with a complete story. (I love them both, but they have a tendency to come up with these very cool ideas and drop them into a story that just kind of meanders and then ends.) I'm partial to non-linear storytelling, but even with that caveat, I believe it is used very well in this instance. Almost "Memento"-like the narrative moves from the end and beginning, toward the middl...more

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Jun 29, 2010 Osho rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010

Another lightweight but enjoyable early novel from Doctorow. The main conceit, that there is tribal affiliation among people in the same time zone (and hence, same circadian rhythm), is interesting but not given the role or exploration it deserves. The plot, which some reviewers have called "complex," seems not complex but slightly convoluted. Though the secondary characters are depicted with enough personality cues that they can be told apart, the narrator's tone is that of the previous novel....more

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Jun 24, 2009 Richard Kelly rated it 4 of 5 stars

I think I like Doctorow, but he has some character issues. He builds a beautiful world and weaves a compelling story, but his characters all blend, they all make similar decisions, have similar thought processes, and talk the same for the most part. This book is better written than Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom with a deeper story, but it is not very sci-fi-ish, which is fine, but don't expect a sci-fi book.

This book felt like a five star book until the plot really got going. I loved readin...more

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Oct 05, 2009 Lawrence Schoen rated it 4 of 5 stars

Doctorow's voice is so crisp, so clean, it leaps off the page and runs around the house like a puppy on amphetamines. The plot is straightforward, nothing subtle or complex about it. What's subtle is the ease with which Doctorow gets into your head with his ideas. In no time at all you find yourself nodding in agreement, as he explains how tribes work, how they've always worked, and how the global expansion and ease of communication continue to drive such sensibilities. I'm still not sure how mu...more

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May 25, 2011 Jeremy Stephens rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-of-2011

Once again Cory Doctorow presents a weird world view shaped by realistic human interactions with technology. While this book wasn't as bizarre as Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, it is worth reading due to its captivating story and ideas relating to the internet groups being the center of one's sense of community. In many ways, this book reminds me of JD Salinger's The Catcher In the Rye- the main character is a misfit who struggles with interpersonal relationships and is telling the story fr...more

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Aug 04, 2012 Callista rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi, contemp-pop-fiction

I liked parts of this; there were some interesting ideas and a few things that made me chuckle or even laugh out loud. It was short, so the things I didn't like didn't go on too long. I did like how things turned out for the main character, although the resolution involved a somewhat-too-tidy chain of coincidences.
The format/style was peculiar, telling part of the story in 3rd person, past tense and part of it in 1st person, present tense although the main character in both parts is the same per...more

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Jan 08, 2012 Nadyne rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: e-books, fiction, science-fiction, novel, read-in-2012, 2000-s, kindle, canadian

First sentence: "I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and Western medicne thus: 'Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart."

P. 99: "Fede stood and treated Linda to his big, suave grin."

Last sentence: "'Oh, I know,', I say, and dial up some music on the car stereo."

Plot Summary (Goodreads):

Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule....more First sentence: "I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and Western medicne thus: 'Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart."

P. 99: "Fede stood and treated Linda to his big, suave grin."

Last sentence: "'Oh, I know,', I say, and dial up some music on the car stereo."

Plot Summary (Goodreads):

Art is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, cooperating, conspiring, to help each other out, coordinated by a global network of Wi-Fi, instant messaging, ubiquitous computing, and a shared love of Manhattan-style bagels.
Or perhaps not. Art is, after all, in the nuthouse. He was put there by a conspiracy of his friends and loved ones, fellow travelers from EST hidden in the bowels of Greenwich Mean Time, spies masquerading as management consultants who strive to mire Europe in oatmeal-thick bureaucracy.
Eastern Standard Tribe is a story of madness and betrayal, of society after the End of Geography, of the intangible factors that define us as a species, as a tribe, as individuals. Scathing, bitter, and funny, EST examines the immutable truths of time, of sunrise and sunset of societies smashed and rebuilt in the storm of instant, ubiquitous communication.

Although I rarely read science-fiction, I really enjoyed this book. It handles themes as identity, friendship, culture and cultural identities, human relations, and how these are affected by new media, .... It was thought-provoking and it was a great read.

About.com (Contemporary Literature) wrote a great review:

Nothing about Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, is as misleading as the end of the first chapter when Art Berry, the protagonist, says, ‘The theme of this story is: “Would you rather be smart or happy?”’ That may be a perennially intriguing question, but any claim the book can lay to answering it is subverted by the ending, which suggests that smarts can lead both to happiness and material success. Indeed, Doctorow seems to conflate these last two concepts.
This is not to suggest that Eastern Standard Tribe is not a novel of ideas—indeed, Doctorow writes the sort of near-future science fiction in which ideas overwhelm both story and character. One of the most important ideas that Doctorow raises is actually external to the text: in addition to being available as a hardcover, readers can download the entire text of the book for free from his Web site, www.craphound.com. Why make the book freely available? Partly in order to learn how electronic books will work in the future, but largely as a promotional vehicle.
As with electronic publication, Doctorow uses Eastern Standard Tribe to explore ideas and flesh out their implications. The principal topic for this book is not the “choice” (if one exists) between smart and happy, but the development of group identity across a global information network: how do we make friends, build relationships, and learn to trust people who may be thousands of miles away, people we have never met? How deep do these loyalties run? How will this change our culture? Eastern Standard Tribe’s essays on these themes range from frustrating lumps of exposition, clumsily placed into the mouths of characters Ayn Rand style, to brilliant chat-room sequences that ring true. Doctorow’s rendering of cryptographic credential verification is a cypherpunk’s wet dream.

Another idea explored in the book is a variation on Rosenhan’s classic experiment, wherein merely showing up at a mental hospital with a vague and silly-sounding symptom (a voice in the patient’s head saying “thud”) resulted in all eight test patients being committed. Once committed, these patients had little to no way of demonstrating their sanity, and were held indefinitely before being discharged for reasons every bit as arbitrary as their admittance. The present-tense storyline of Eastern Standard Tribe involves Art trying to demonstrate his sanity after being committed to the institution based on testimony from “friends,” who have in fact set him up so that he cannot interfere with a scheme they’ve hatched in the past-tense storyline.
If the plot sounds thin, it is; as in Doctorow's first novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the plot is there to force the characters into contact with a series of ideas. The characters are merely types, lightly-sketched—something Doctorow admits—and it’s clear that his real fascination is with ideas. The question of Art’s fate and the breezy prose are enough to pull the reader through to the book’s disappointing conclusion, but no question is ever answered convincingly, not even “what happens?”Books need not answer questions, if they pose interesting enough problems, or suggest new ways of experiencing the world. Eastern Standard Tribe straddles that line, but does so with humor and style; Doctorow clearly has one foot planted in the next decade, and the book is a joy to read.(less)

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About Cory Doctorow

Canadian blogger, journalist and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

He is an activist in favor of liberalizing 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, Disney, and post-scarcity economics.

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“Stories are propaganda, virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly into your emotions. ” — 10 people liked it

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