Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 46

Burbank! I’ll see you tonight at 7PM at the Buena Vista library

My Walkaway book-tour is basically over, but I’m taking a little victory lap tonight at my local library, the Buena Vista Branch of the Burbank Public Library. Hope to see you there!

Walkaway is a finalist for the Dragon Awards and is #1 on Locus’s hardcover bestseller list

Dragon Con’s Dragon Award ballot was just published and I’m delighted to learn that my novel Walkaway is a finalist in the “Best Apocalyptic Novel” category, along with Daniel Humphreys’ A Place Outside the Wild, Omar El Akkad’s American War, Declan Finn and Allan Yoskowitz’s Codename: Unsub, N.K. Jemisin’s The Obelisk Gate, Rick Heinz’s The Seventh Age: Dawn, and J.F. Holmes’s ZK: Falling.

I’m also delighted to note that Walkaway is currently Locus Magazine’s #1 top-selling hardcover at...

A Hopeful Look At The Apocalypse: interview with Innovation Hub

I’m on the latest episode of Innovation Hub (MP3):

Science-fiction is a genre that imagines the future. It doesn’t necessarily predict the future (after all, where are flying cars?), but it grapples with the technological and societal changes happening today to better understand our world and where it’s heading.

So, what does it mean when so much of our most popular science-fiction – The Handmaid’s Tale, The Walking Dead, and The Hunger Games – present bleak, depressing futures? Cory Docto...

Hey, Little Rock, AR: there’s a special stage performance of Little Brother coming your way for Banned Books Week!

Adapted by Josh Costello from the novel by Cory Doctorow
September 15, 16, 22, 23, 24, 28, 29, 30, 2017
Directed by Ryan Whitfield and Jason Green

SYNOPSIS
While skipping school and playing an alternate reality game, San Francisco teenager Marcus Yallow ends up in the middle of a terrorist attack and on the wrong side of the Department of Homeland Security. This play asks “What is the right thing to do when authorities become oppressors?”

CAST
LITTLE BROTHER CAST LIST
Marcus – Jeffrey Oakle...

Come see me at San Diego Comic-Con!

There are three more stops on my tour for Walkaway: tomorrow at San Diego Comic-Con, next weekend at Defcon 25 in Las Vegas, and August 10th at the Burbank Public Library.

My Comic-Con day is tomorrow/Sunday, July 23: first, a 10AM signing at the Tor Books booth (#2701); then a panel, The Future is Bleak, with Annalee Newitz, Scott Westerfeld, Scott Reintgen and Alex R. Kahler; and finally a 1:15PM signing at autographic area AA06.

(Image: Gage Skidmore, CC-BY-SA)

Rudy Rucker on Walkaway

Walkaway is my first novel for adults since 2009 and I had extremely high hopes (and not a little anxiety) for it as it entered the world, back in April. Since then, I’ve been gratified by the kind words of many of my literary heroes, from William Gibson to Bruce Sterling to the kind cover quotes from Edward Snowden, Neal Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robinson.

Today I got a most welcome treat on those lines: a review by Rudy Rucker, lavishly illustrated with some of his excellent photos. R...

San Diego! Come hear me read from Walkaway tomorrow night at Comickaze Liberty Station!

I’m teaching the Clarion Science Fiction writing workshop at UCSD in La Jolla this week, and tomorrow night at 7PM, I’ll be reading from my novel Walkaway at Comickaze Liberty Station, 2750 Historic Decatur Rd #101, San Diego, CA 92106. Hope to see you!

I’m profiled in the new issue of Locus Magazine

Cory Doctorow: Bugging In:

‘‘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. Climat...

Talking Walkaway with Reason Magazine

Of all the press-stops I did on my tour for my novel Walkaway, I was most excited about my discussion with Katherine Mangu-Ward, editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine, where I knew I would have a challenging and meaty conversation with someone who was fully conversant with the political, technological and social questions the book raised.

I was not disappointed.

The interview, which was published online today, is a substantial and challenging one that gets at the core of what I’d hoped to...

How to write pulp fiction that celebrates humanity’s essential goodness

My latest Locus column is “Be the First One to Not Do Something that No One Else Has Ever Not Thought of Doing Before,” and it’s about science fiction’s addiction to certain harmful fallacies, like the idea that you can sideline the actual capabilities and constraints of computers in order to advance the plot of a thriller.

That’s the idea I turned on its head with my 2008 novel Little Brother, a book in which what computers can and can’t do were used to determine the plot, not the other...