Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 53

Pre-order a signed first edition of Walkaway, which got a starred review in Booklist today!

Here’s a reminder that you can pre-order a signed first edition hardcover of Walkaway, my first novel for adults since 2009, which William Gibson called “A wonderful novel” and Edward Snowden called “a reminder that the world we choose to build is the one we’ll inhabit” and Kim Stanley Robinson called “a utopia is both more thought-provoking and more fun than a dystopia” and Neal Stephenson called “the Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunct faculty/Anonym...

The cover of this week’s Bookseller!

Clarion Workshop now accepting applications for sf writers to learn with Lynda Barry, Nalo Hopkinson, CC Finlay…and me!

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The instructors for this summer’s Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy writers’ workshop are Dan Chaon, Lynda Barry, Nalo Hopkinson, Andrea Hairston, Cory Doctorow, C.C. Finlay and Rae Carson: the workshop runs from Jun 25-Aug 5 at UCSD in La Jolla, California.

It’s an intensive, boot-camp style writing workshop that’s been running annually since 1968. New instructors rotate in every week and students write about one story every week, and learn to improve their work by critiquing one anot...

Why the Trump era is the perfect time to go long on freedom and short on surveillance

My new Locus column is “It’s Time to Short Surveillance and Go Long on Freedom,” which starts by observing that Barack Obama’s legacy includes a beautifully operationalized, professional and terrifying surveillance apparatus, which Donald Trump inherits as he assumes office and makes ready to make good on his promise to deport millions of Americans and place Muslims under continuous surveillance.

But Trump supporters shouldn’t get too happy about this: after all, the billions Trump will...

Kirkus just gave me an AWESOME Christmas present: this starred review for WALKAWAY

Kirkus Reviews is one of the publishing industry’s toughest gauntlets, used by librarians and bookstore buyers to help sort through the avalanche of new titles, and its reviews often have a sting in their tails aimed at this audience, a pitiless rehearsal of the reasons you wouldn’t want to stock this book — vital intelligence for people making hard choices.

So when I saw the starred, uniformly glowing review for my next novel, Walkaway, with nary a quibble in sight, I did a little victor...

Free audiobook of Car Wars, my self-driving car/crypto back-door apocalypse story

Last month, Melbourne’s Deakin University published Car Wars, a short story I wrote to inspire thinking and discussion about the engineering ethics questions in self-driving car design, moving beyond the trite and largely irrelevant trolley problem.

Shortly after, I went into Skyboat Media’s studio and recorded an audio edition of the story, which the Deakin folks mastered with visuals and SFX to produce a smashing video.

I’ve extracted just the audio as an MP3 for your mobile listening...

Everything is a Remix, including Star Wars, and that’s how I became a writer

Kirby Ferguson, who created the remarkable Everything is a Remix series, has a new podcast hosted by the Recreate Coalition called Copy This and he hosted me on the debut episode (MP3) where we talked about copying, creativity, artists, and the future of the internet (as you might expect!).

Are you one of the many Star Wars fans eagerly awaiting the release of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story later this month? As you watch – and rewatch – the trailer, take a break to tune into Re:Create’s n...

Mr Robot has driven a stake through the Hollywood hacker, and not a moment too soon

Mr Robot is the most successful example of a small but fast-growing genre of “techno-realist” media, where the focus is on realistic portrayals of hackers, information security, surveillance and privacy, and it represents a huge reversal on the usual portrayal of hackers and computers as convenient plot elements whose details can be finessed to meet the story’s demands, without regard to reality.

There’s a problem with this: information security really matters, and practically no one unde...

A new edition of the Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free audiobook featuring Neil Gaiman

“Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free” is my 2014 nonfiction book about copyright, the internet, and earning a living, and it features two smashing introductions — one by Neil Gaiman and the other by Amanda Palmer.

I released an audio edition of the book in 2014, read by the incomparable Wil Wheaton, who also read the audiobook of my novel Homeland). At the time, I tried to get Neil and Amanda into a studio to record their intros, but we couldn’t get the stars to align.

But good things c...

My keynote from the O’Reilly Security Conference: “Security and feudalism: Own or be pwned”

Here’s the 32 minute video of my presentation at last month’s O’Reilly Security Conference in New York, “Security and feudalism: Own or be pwned.”

Cory Doctorow explains how EFF is battling the perfect storm of bad security, abusive business practices, and threats to the very nature of property itself, fighting for a future where our devices can be configured to do our bidding and where security researchers are always free to tell us what they’ve learned.