My guest this episode is Cory Doctorow, recorded not — as most of these conversations are — while on my convention travels, but when he was in Washington, D.C. to receive an award from the Arthur C. Clarke Foundation, a brief pause while on his book tour promoting Chokepoint Capitalism, which he wrote with Rebecca Giblin.

We met for lunch at the Laotian restaurant Laos in Town, just a few blocks away from Union Station, partly because Cory had to leap a train immediately after for Baltimore that night, and so needed to be close by, but also because of Tom Sietsema’s rave in the Washington Post.

Cory is a science fiction writer, journalist and technology activist who in 2020, was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame. In the years since I published his first professional fiction sale in Science Fiction Age magazine (though I didn’t buy his first professionally sold short story, a distinction we get into during our chat), he’s won the Locus, Prometheus, Copper Cylinder, White Pine and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.

His novels include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), Eastern Standard Tribe (2004), Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005), Little Brother (2008), his most recent, Walkaway (2017), and others. His most recent short story collection is Radicalized (2019). He’s also a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties.

We discussed how different D.C. seems to him now that he’s a U.S. citizen, the way his remarkable evening hanging with both David Byrne and Spider Robinson put things in perspective, the lessons we learned (both good and bad) from Harlan Ellison, our differing levels of hope and despair at the current state of the world, the major effect Judith Merril had on the direction of his life, how an ongoing column he wrote for Science Fiction Age magazine predicted the next 20 years of his life, our differing opinions as to what it means when we say stories are didactic, how to continue on in the face of rejection — and then once we do, how not to become parodies of ourselves, the best piece of advice he didn’t follow, our differing views on spoilers, what he recently came to understand about the reactionary message of traditional hardboiled fiction — and how he used that in his upcoming trilogy, knowing when to break the rules of writing, and much more.

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Here’s the meal we shared at Laos in Town —

Herbal Sausage
pork with lao herb sausage, ginger, peanut, chili dipping

Grilled Pork Shoulder
with spicy roasted rice powder sauce

Crispy Chicken Rice
with garlic rice and sweet garlic sauce

orm
chicken, lao eggplant, green bean, scallion, mushroom, basil,
light dill soup, sticky rice

Green Tea Fudge Cake

Sweet Sticky Rice
with mango and coconut cream

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Coming up next, I chat with Brian Keene and Mary SanGiovanni — each of whom have individual episodes dedicated to them — about their their recent collaborative short story collection Things Left Behind. Because as anyone who’s listened to this podcast for any length of time knows, the idea writers can collaborate without leaving blood on the floor is beyond me, and I’m genuinely curious about how it can be done.
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Thanks for listening!