A reminder: I’ll be launching my new short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I’m going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you!
Monthly Archives::
September 2003
A reminder: I’ll be launching A Place So Foreign and Eight More at Borderlands Books in San Francisco this Thursday, at 7PM. I’m going to be signing copies and reading from a new work. Hope to see you!
Review:
SF Crow’s Nest
I have to say that being a new-comer to Doctorow’s work I was hooked from the first page. This is an extremely entertaining, rich, clever, engaging and well-written collection and the stories cover a mixture of topics and characters. In addition is an interesting introduction to each story from Doctorow himself so you can see where he gets his ideas from and how he works. I personally look forward to more from Cory Doctorow and would recommend him to anyone who would like to read something fresh, original, and just that little bit different.
Laura Kane,
SF Crow’s Nest
SF Crow’s Nest
This is pretty flattering: a reader of mine has set up a MeetUp day for fans of my writing. If you’re interested in hanging out with people in your town who dig my stuff, you can sign up for the International Cory Doctorow Meetup Day:
The San Mateo Daily Journal has a nice article on my talk at the Silicon Valley Futurists’ Salon meeting last week.
“Has this benefited me?” he said. “I don’t have a firm answer. I don’t have another first novel that I can compare with the sales of the first one to. The evidence points to yes, it’s at least been neutral.”
Many at the salon seemed to agree with Doctorow.
“Someone’s finally saying something sensible,” said Daniel Ford, a 24-year-old graduate student at Stanford University. “I guess the base of it [is] that it’s about [ensuring] creativity. If new technological problems come about you deal with them.”
I’ll be reading from my short story collection and signing books on October 9th, at the Other Change of Hobbit Bookstore in Berkeley from 6-8PM. Hope to see you there!
There’s a book launch for A Place So Foreign and Eight More, my new short story collection, coming on Thursday, October 2nd at 7:00 pm at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I’ll be doing a reading, answering questions, and signing all the books I can lay hands on. Hope to see you there!
Just a reminder that I’ll be giving a futuristic talk about copyright, DRM, science fiction and whatnot this Friday night at the Silicon Valley Futurist Salon:
We will be back at the Barnes and Noble bookstore at the Hillsdale Shopping Center just across of the San Mateo Caltrain Station. 11 West Hillsdale Blvd., Hillsdale Shopping Center San Mateo, CA 94403 650-341-5560
I’m “appearing” at a book-club that meets in an online roleplaying game called Second Life, this Sunday at 6:30 PM. If you’ve got a Windows box, you can get a free seven-day avatar and join the disucssion!
Cory Doctorow will be the debut guest of the
Hamlet Linden Book Club, the first reading
group (far as we can tell!) to be conducted in
a massively multiplayer online world — Second Life.This Sunday, Sept. 21, at 6:30pm (PST), Cory
Doctorow’s avatar will appear in the main auditorium
of Second Life, the 3D online society where Hamlet
Linden (aka Wagner James Au) is the world’s
embedded journalist. Cory will discuss his
acclaimed novel *Down and Out in the Magic
Kingdom* with an in-world audience of Second
Life residents.
Over on the Whuffie blog (yes, there is such a thing; no, I did not have anything to do with it; and yes, I am immensely flattered), there’s a guest-blogger writing good, scholarly critical analysis of the economics of the Bitchun Society, the world in which my novel is set.
The danger, pointed out in this passage from Doctorow’s novel, in having a completely subjective, reputation-based economy is that it is quite possible for someone like me to be made an outsider from the economy due to actions for which I had no responsibility. Granted, similar problems exist in a cash-based economy. The market could bottom out, as we all certainly know, and I could be left with stock in… nothing. Still, there are objective factors, along with the subjective ones that move the market, that justify such occurrences. With a reputation economy, the threat of being ostracized unfairly is very real, and very much free from the protections of objectivity. Thus, this points to a problem with such a system. I do not think it is a problem that would defeat the system, as a general concept, but it is one that may justify eschewing it as a device for commerce.
The subjective nature of reputation is an interesting issue that goes beyond Herodotus. It is one that troubles modern politicians and entertainers, sometimes rightly, and sometimes wrongly. It’s for this reason that I think X’s website, and Doctorow’s novel, are such interesting topics of discussion. Reputation is a matter that merits consideration, because it is a value that, subjectively, has massive impact on our life — and on the lives of the ancients.
He makes a good point. The problem (OK, a problem) with Whuffie is that it lacks a lot of the critical stuff that makes up the fundamentals of democratic infrastructure, like protection for minority opinions. Some of that is elided by the lack of scarcity in the novel: it’s hard to be a well-and-truly oppressed minority when every material want is answered in plenty, but the social effect of the normative pressure of Whuffie is ultimately highly corrosive.
To put it more pithily: “Popular speech never needs defending.” Free speech shouldn’t be a popularity contest.
