Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 18

Announcing the Attack Surface tour

It’s been 12 years since I went on my first book tour and in the years since, I’ve met and spoken with tens of thousands of readers in hundreds of cities on five continents in support of more than a dozen books.

Now I’ve got another major book coming out: ATTACK SURFACE.

How do you tour a book during a pandemic? I think we’re still figuring that out. I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t be leaving Los Angeles this time around. Instead, my US publisher, Tor Books, has set up eight remote “Attack Sur...

Poesy the Monster Slayer

POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER is my first-ever picture book, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller and published by Firstsecond. It’s an epic tale of toy-hacking, bedtime-avoidance and monster-slaying.

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627

The book’s publication was attended by a superb and glowing review from Kirkus:

“The lights are out, and the battle begins. She knows the monsters are coming, and she has a plan. First, the werewolf appears. No problem. Poesy knows the tools to get rid of him: si...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 15)

Here’s part fifteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

A...

IP

This week on my podcast, I read the first half of my latest Locus Magazine column, “IP,” the longest, most substantial column I’ve written in my 14 years on Locus‘s masthead.

IP explores the history of how we have allowed companies to control more and more of our daily lives, and has come to mean, “any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”

It represents a major realization on my part after decades of writing, talking and thinking...

My first-ever Kickstarter: the audiobook for Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book

I have a favor to ask of you. I don’t often ask readers for stuff, but this is maybe the most important ask of my career. It’s a Kickstarter – I know, ‘another crowdfunder?’ – but it’s:

a) Really cool;

b) Potentially transformative for publishing.

c) Anti-monopolistic

Here’s the tldr: Attack Surface – AKA Little Brother 3- is coming out in 5 weeks. I retained audio rights and produced an amazing edition that Audible refuses to carry. You can pre-order the audiobook, ebook (and previous volumes)...

Attack Surface Kickstarter Promo Excerpt!

This week’s podcast is a generous excerpt – 3 hours! – of the audiobook for Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book, which is available for pre-order today on my very first Kickstarter.

This Kickstarter is one of the most important moments in my professional career, an experiment to see if I can viably publish audiobooks without caving into Amazon’s monopolistic requirement that all Audible books be sold with DRM that locks it to Amazon’s corporate platform…forever. If you’ve ever wanted ...

Get Radicalized for a mere $2.99

The ebook of my 2019 book RADICALIZED — finalist for the Canada Reads ward, LA Library book of the year, etc — is on sale today for $2.99 on all major platforms!

Books

There are a lot of ways to get radicalized in 2020, but this is arguably the cheapest.

How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism

For this week’s podcast, I read an excerpt from “How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism,” a free short book (or long pamphlet, or “nonfiction novella”) I published with Medium’s Onezero last week. HTDSC is a long critical response to Shoshanna Zuboff’s book and paper on the subject, which re-centers the critique on monopolism and the abusive behavior it abets, while expressing skepticism that surveillance capitalists are really as good at manipulating our behavior as they claim to be. It is a g...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 14)

Here’s part fourteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

A...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 13)

Here’s part thirteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).

This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”

Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:

A...