News

Canadian: last chance to vote in Indigo’s Teen Read poll

Canadians: Now that summer's over, it's your last chance to select your favorite young adult reads in Indigo's summerlong Teen Read Awards. They're soliciting Canadians' daily votes for great books for teens to read, as part of a longer and larger promotion of teen reading and literacy. I'm honored to note that my latest young adult novel For the Win is in the final heat!

BEST CANADIAN READ NOMINEES

Canadians: One month left to pick your favorite YA book!

A quick reminder: Canadian teens have one month left to vote for their favourite YA novels in Chapters/Indigo's Best Canadian Reads series. You can vote every day, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention that my latest novel, For the Win, is eligible for your vote!

I'm incredibly gratified to see Canada's largest bookseller putting such a sustained, high-profile effort into promoting YA reading and YA literature. Please participate and show your support!

BEST CANADIAN READ NOMINEES

Last chance to RSVP for London event tonight with Mieville, me and Rob Sharp of English PEN

Reminder for Londoners! I'm doing a live event tonight at 7PM with China Mieville in Exmouth Market (EC1R 4QE), through the excellent Clerkenwell Tales bookstore. We've outgrown the store, so Pete, our host, has booked the Church of the Redeemer next door; but we're nearly full there, too! If you'd like to come, RSVP (quickly!) to info@clerkenwell-tales.co.uk or tweet @booksellerpete. We'll be emceed by the wonderful Rob Sharp of English PEN.

Interview with Reason.tv about FOR THE WIN

Here's some video of interviews I did with Nick Gillespie from Reason Magazine and Reason TV after my talk at Public Knowledge in DC last
month. We talk about For the Win and how technology and kids and society interrelate.

Clute on For the Win

John Clute's smashing review of For the Win in the latest Strange Horizons compares the book (and me) to Heinlein in his heyday. Color me delighted!

There are a lot of MMORPG battles in the first half of the book, and a lot of lessons—much more interesting —about gameworld economies, and gold farming, and derivatives, in the second. The climax of the tale is double: an at times kinetically arousing narrative of the joining of the oppressed of the world and gameworlds in worldwide strike actions; and a neat narrative—infodumps hanging into the page whenever necessary — explaining how the greedy corporations of the world have been lured into a ponzi scheme engineered by members of our extremely clever crew, and how these corporations are forced into a humiliating climb-down at the very end: in the line of SF created by Heinlein, proper mousetraps trap proper mice: period.

Doctorow doesn't write a bad sentence; he doesn't even ever write a sentence you have to read twice. You can feel story pounding through the arteries of For the Win

Canadian teens invited to pick their favorite reads

Canada's Indigo/Chapters books have launched a summerlong teen literacy promotion that invites readers to pick their favorite books and vote for them in a nationwide poll (you can vote every day, so no need to pick just one!). I'm delighted to learn that my latest YA novel, For the Win, is one of the titles featured. If you liked FTW (or any other recent teen novel), I hope you'll stop in at Teen Read Awards and cast your vote!

BEST CANADIAN READ NOMINEES

Speaking in Washington DC area next week

Hey DC! Tor Books is bringing me to your area for the American Library Association conference this coming weekend, and while I'm in town, I've signed on to do a couple of public events I hope to see you at!

On Sunday, June 27 at 3PM, I'm speaking at Red Emma's books in Baltimore, in an event co-sponsored by the Baltimore Node hackerspace.

On Monday, June 28 at 6:30PM, I'm speaking at a special edition of DC Copynight, co-sponsored by Public Knowledge and hosted by the New America Foundation. Many thanks to Thomas "cmdln" Gideon of DC Copynight for setting this up!

Both events are free!

Interview with KPFA’s Cover to Cover, Open Book

Here's the full audio from the Cover to Cover, Open Book interview I did with Berkeley's KPFA. The edited, 29-minute version that aired doesn't stay online thanks to "bullying" with the SoundExchange rights-society, but Eric Klein, who conducted the interview, was kind enough to upload the whole thing.

MP3 Link

Copper Robot interview, pt 2

Here's part 2 of the interview I conducted in Second Life with the Copper Robot show. In this part, I talk about the research that went into For the Win.

“For anyone who’s my age and uses computers, you would have to undertake an extraordinary effort not to be a gamer,” he said. He started computer games at age 8, when a neighbor got Pong, and they became obsessed with the game.

“We think you’ve got to be somebody who spends 70 hours a week playing World of Warcraft in order to call yourself a gamer,” Cory said. However, that’s not true, he said. Likewise, most people think of gamers as either being children or overgrown children, but 50% of FarmVille players are 50-year-old women with high school diplomas, Doctorow said.

MP3 Link

Video from FOR THE WIN tour

Fora TV came out to one of the stops on my For the Win tour, at Books Inc in Palo Alto, and recorded the reading and Q&A:

Cory Doctorow: For the Win

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