Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 18

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...

Terra Nullius

Terra Nullius is my March 2019 column in Locus magazine; it explores the commonalities between the people who claim ownership over the things they use to make new creative works and the settler colonialists who arrived in various “new worlds” and declared them to be empty, erasing the people who were already there as a prelude to genocide.

I was inspired by the story of Aloha Poke, in which a white dude from Chicago secured a trademark for his “Aloha Poke” midwestern restaurants, then threatened...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 12)

Here’s part twelve 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:

Al...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 11)

Here’s part eleven 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:

Ala...

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (part 10)

Here’s part ten 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:

Alan ...