Cory Doctorow's Blog, page 65

Audio from Seattle Hieroglyph event with Neal Stepehenson

Here's an MP3 of the audio from the Reigniting Society’s Ambition with Science Fiction event that I did with Neal Stephenson and Ed Finn at Seattle Town Hall on Oct 26, to promote the Hieroglyph anthology, designed to inspire optimistic technologies to solve the Earth's most urgent problems. I had a story in it called The Man Who Sold the Moon.

Stories are a fuggly hack

My latest Locus Magazine column is Stories Are a Fuggly Hack, in which I point out the limits of storytelling as an artform, and bemoan all the artists from other fields -- visual art, music -- who aspire to storytelling in order to make their art.

There are other media, much more abstract media, that seemingly manage to jump straight to the feels: painting, photography, poetry, sculpture, music. Not always – all of these things can tell stories, but they don’t need to in order to make you fee...

Amanda Palmer’s Art of Asking: art for the crowdfunding age

Amanda Palmer's new book Art of Asking is a moving and insightful memoir of her life performing music while making personal connections with her fans; I wrote a long, in-depth review of it for The New Statesman.

There's a litmus test for how you will likely feel about Palmer's Kickstarter: Palmer invited local musicians in each city on her tour to come onstage and jam with the band. She asked that they come by for an afternoon's quick rehearsal, and offered them beer, t-shirts, and gratitude a...

UK launch of In Real Life at Orbital Comics, London, Nov 12

I've just come back to the UK from my US tour for In Real Life, the New York Times bestselling graphic novel Jen Wang and I made; I'll be launching it in London at the incomparable Orbital Comics, near Leicester Square, on the evening of Weds, 12 Nov.

The event is free, and I'll be giving a short talk on science fiction and its relationship to the future, the present, politics and society called "Predicting the present: Science Fiction as a lens for focusing on today."

I hope you'll come -- and...

London, Tue night: Biella Coleman and I talk about “Hackers and Hoaxers: Inside Anonymous”

Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman (author of the brilliant Coding Freedom) spent years embedded with Anonymous and has written an indispensable account of the Anonymous phenomenon.

I'm going to join Biella for a live appearance at Foyles Books in central London on Tuesday night at 7PM, in an event moderated by James Bridle. Tickets are £5 , and there are still some left.

There is no better way to understand Anonymous than through an anthropological lens, because the most significant thing about...

Interview with The Geekcast

I sat down at New York Comic-Con with Aaron from The Geekcast podcast for a long, interesting interview (MP3) on a wide variety of subjects about art, computers, games and justice!

I’m coming to Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, SF/Palo Alto!

As the tour with my graphic novel In Real Life draws to a close, my next tour, with my nonfiction book Information Doesn't Want to Be Free kicks off with stops down the west coast.

I've also got stops coming up in Warsaw, London, Stockholm, Ann Arbor, Baltimore, DC, and Denver -- here's the whole list. Here's some of what Kirkus Review had to say about the new book:

In his best-selling novel Ready Player One, Ernest Cline predicted that decades from now, Doctorow (Homeland, 2013, etc.) should...

There’s no back door that only works for good guys

My latest Guardian column, Crypto wars redux: why the FBI's desire to unlock your private life must be resisted, explains why the US government's push to mandate insecure back-doors in all our devices is such a terrible idea -- the antithesis of "cyber-security."

As outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder invokes child kidnappers and terrorists, it's like a time-warp to the crypto-wars of the early 1990s, when the NSA tried to keep privacy technology out of civilian hands by classing it as a mun...

My In Real Life book-tour!

I'm heading out on tour with my new graphic novel In Real Life, adapted by Jen Wang from my story Anda's Game. I hope you'll come out and see us! We'll be in NYC, Princeton, LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis and Chicago! (I'm also touring my new nonfiction book, Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, right after -- here's the whole schedule).

Homeland wins Copper Cylinder award for best Canadian YA sf novel

The Copper Cylinder Prize, voted on by members of the Sunburst Award Society awarded best YA novel to Homeland; best adult novel went to Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars.

It's a fantastic honour, in some ways even better than winning the juried Sunburst Award, because popular awards are given to books that have wide appeal to the whole voter pool. I'm incredibly grateful to the Sunburst Award Society, and also offer congrats to Guy for his well-deserved honour.

Sunburst Award Society Announces...