Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 47

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...

My presentation from ConveyUX

Last March, I traveled to Seattle to present at the ConveyUX conference, with a keynote called “Dark Patterns and Bad Business Models”, the video for which has now been posted: “The Internet’s broken and that’s bad news, because everything we do today involves the Internet and everything we’ll do tomorrow will require it. But governments and corporations see the net, variously, as a perfect surveillance tool, a perfect pornography distribution tool, or a perfect video on demand tool—not as...

Interview with Wired UK’s Upvote podcast

Back in May, I stopped by Wired UK while on my British tour for my novel Walkaway to talk about the novel, surveillance, elections, and, of course, DRM. (MP3)

I’ll see you this weekend at Denver Comic-Con!

I just checked in for my o-dark-hundred flight to Denver tomorrow morning for this weekend’s Denver Comic-Con, where I’m appearing for several hours on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, including panels with some of my favorite writers, like John Scalzi, Richard Kadrey, Catherynne Valente and Scott Sigler:

Friday:

* 1:30-2:30pm The Future is Here :: Room 402
How have recent near-future works fared in preparing us for the realities of the current day? What can near-future works being publish...

Audio from my NYPL appearance with Edward Snowden

Last month, I appeared onstage with Edward Snowden at the NYPL, hosted by Paul Holdengraber, discussing my novel Walkaway. The library has just posted the audio! It was quite an evening

Bruce Sterling reviews WALKAWAY

Bruce Sterling, Locus Magazine: Walkaway is a real-deal, generically traditional science-fiction novel; it’s set in an undated future and it features weird set design, odd costumes, fights, romances, narrow escapes, cool weapons, even zeppelins. This is the best Cory Doctorow book ever. I don’t know if it’s destined to become an SF classic, mostly because it’s so advanced and different that it makes the whole genre look archaic.

For instance: in a normal science fiction novel, an author pa...

Canada: Trump shows us what happens when “good” politicians demand surveillance powers

The CBC asked me to write an editorial for their package about Canadian identity and politics, timed with the 150th anniversary of the founding of the settler state on indigenous lands. They’ve assigned several writers to expand on themes in the Canadian national anthem, and my line was “We stand on guard for thee.”

I wrote about bill C-51, a reckless, sweeping mass surveillance bill that now-PM Trudeau got his MPs to support when he was in opposition, promising to reform the bill once he...

Talking about contestable futures on the Imaginary Worlds podcast

I’m in the latest episode of Imaginary Worlds, “Imagining the Internet” (MP3), talking about the future as a contestable place that we can’t predict, but that we can influence.

We were promised flying cars and we got Twitter instead. That’s the common complaint against sci-fi authors. But some writers did imagine the telecommunications that changed our world for better or worse. Cory Doctorow, Ada Palmer, Jo Walton and Arizona State University professor Ed Finn look at the cyberpunks and t...