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.

Here’s how you can join us — (more…)

I dreamt I was at a Cory Doctorow reading, and Cory came up to where I was seated and handed me a medicine bottle filled with pills. And because it was Cory, I downed them all. But then I looked down at the empty bottle suspiciously, wondering what I’d just done. There was no label on the bottle to tell me what I’d ingested, however.

“Trust me,” he said.

And because it was Cory, I did.

He them brought over a laptop device a few feet square, bristling with glowing vacuum tubes, but still light enough to rest on my knees. He slipped headphones around my ears, plugged them into the machine, then plugged in a microphone as well and handed it to me.

He told me I should begin to wail.

Before I could, however, he asked if he could borrow my phone. He was disappointed to see when I handed it to him that it was an iPhone. But not disappointed in the way you’d expect Cory to be upon seeing an Apple product. Instead, he asked me, “Why don’t you have the most powerful device?”

“I don’t need the most powerful device,” I said. “I just have what I need to do the job.”

I saw the sadness in Cory’s eyes, so added: “Look, I can cut up a board with a saw or a nuke. But I don’t need a nuke when I can get away with the saw.”

“Nukes are cool,” he said.

I agreed.

And then I woke, never finding out what chemical wonders awaited me from the drugs, or what technological marvels would occur were I ever to get the chance to wail into that microphone.

When I heard earlier in the week that Cory Doctorow would be in Baltimore yesterday for a reading at Red Emma’s Bookstore and Coffee House, I decided to head over. I don’t see Cory often enough, partially because it’s hard to grab extended time with anyone in the maelstrom of a convention, but also because his success as a writer and pontificator out in the “real world” has transformed him from Cory Doctorow into C!O!R!Y D!O!C!T!O!R!O!W. (Not that he thinks of himself like that.)

I arrived half an hour or so before his reading began, and though there were a couple of dozen people already there, Cory was alone at the counter, typing away on his laptop. Was the crowd too in awe of him to go over and speak, or were they just respectfully giving him space to get some work done? No idea, but it meant there was space for me to slip onto the stool next to him and catch up until it was time for him to perform.

He started out by reading a brief section from his new novel For the Win, a clip of which I’ve embedded below. I captured Cory with my new Flip camera, my first attempt to do anything more than experiment with it around the house. It wasn’t the best idea to record him in a dark bookstore with a sunny window behind him, because it caused a halo effect at times, but the place was packed, and by the time I realized how he occasionally appeared to be glowing, it was too late to move. But I think the video is worth sharing anyway.

And here’s the Q&A, chopped into YouTube-friendly chunks. (more…)

I stayed up much too late last night, and for that I blame Cory Doctorow. I parked myself on the couch yesterday evening with the partial first draft of a new short story and a copy of Cory’s new novel, Little Brother. I figured I’d read a chapter of the book as a way of unwinding before setting it aside and diving back into my story. But I found that once I started the novel I could not stop.

I’ve probably read every word of Cory’s which has ever seen print, going all the way back to “Craphound,” his first professionally published short story, which I bought for the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age magazine. (Has it really been ten years?) I enjoy his work, and knew that I’d get to Little Brother eventually, but I wanted to read it while it was still fresh to market, so I shoved it to the top of my to-be-read-next list. The buzz surrounding the novel about wronged kids taking on the Department of Homeland Security made it sound as if this book had taken a great leap forward from Cory’s other works, as if it was not just a good book, but a great book, one of those novels that demanded to be read.

So I started reading it, figuring I dip my toes briefly in his story and then get on with what I’d really planned to do that evening, my own writing. But once in, I couldn’t get out. The story was compelling, funny, tense, heart-rending, and a real page-turner, all those often-used adjectives, but as I read on, as I was dragged on, I knew it was more than that. It’s also an important book, and my skin occasionally tingled during certain passages as that realization coursed through me. Accuse me of having drunk the Doctorow Kool-Aid if you will, but I honestly believe that when it comes time for people of the future to figure out who we were and what we went through during these crazy times at the beginning of the 21st Century, Little Brother will help them puzzle it out. (more…)