In the virtual future, you must organize to survive

At any hour of the day or night, millions of people around the globe are engrossed in multiplayer online games, questing and battling to win virtual “gold,” jewels, and precious artifacts. Meanwhile, others seek to exploit this vast shadow economy, running electronic sweatshops in the world’s poorest countries, where countless “gold farmers,” bound to their work by abusive contracts and physical threats, harvest virtual treasure for their employers to sell to First World gamers who are willing to spend real money to skip straight to higher-level gameplay.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of “General Robotwalla.” In Shenzen, heart of China’s industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power—including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister’s people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once—a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

Imbued with the same lively, subversive spirit and thrilling storytelling that made LITTLE BROTHER an international sensation, FOR THE WIN is a prophetic and inspiring call-to-arms for a new generation

If you're under 19 and want a free early look at the book for review on your blog/paper/whatever, send a note with your address to torpublicity@tor.com with "FTW" for the subject-line. Also include the name of your blog or school paper. For fun, also share a game you enjoyed recently and why.

We did this with Little Brother a couple years back, on the grounds that books for young people should be available for young reviewers to write about, rather than adult reviewes who try to figure out whether young people will enjoy them. It was a real success and I'm happy to be repeating it.

This is being launched in honor of the American Library Association's Teen Tech Week, and is open to Canadians and Americans. I'm working on a similar offer for the UK edition, for Britons, Aussies, South Africans and Kiwis, and will post about it as soon as I have details.

Long story short: HarperCollins has shipped a beautiful, limited edition slipcased and signed edition of LITTLE BROTHER. But there are some problems:

1. Their ecommerce system is messed up and you have to phone in to order your copies

2. Due to a silly territorial rights issue, they won't ship to the US or Canada

But don't despair! A fantastic British online bookseller called The Book Depository:

1. Can sell the limited edition

2. Is charging *less* than HarperCollins for it

3. Doesn't charge for shipping

4. Ships to the US, Canada and 40+ other countries

5. Processes payment in your local currency, saving you currency conversion fees

Sorry to be learning in public here, but I'm pretty happy that this worked out the way it did!

Little Brother Limited Edition on The Book Depository

Now the bad news: it's only available outside of the US and Canada, due to a really silly bit of lawyerly risk-aversion about territorial rights. I'm working on seeing if there's a way to arrange to do a grey-market export to US/Canada, and earmarking, say, 100 of them for this purpose, but I can't make any guarantees.

But the good news for Britons is that HarperCollins will guarantee delivery before Xmas if you buy before Friday! Get 'em while they last!

Update: OK, the payment processor here is SERIOUSLY b0rked. You can order copies by phone here: +44 (0)870 787 1724

Little Brother - Cory Doctorow
Limited Edition Deluxe Version

High rez, Creative Commons licensed art by Richard Wilkinson

The first, from Donald Riggs at Drexel College in Philadelphia, contains links and supplementary material for students reading my second short story collection, Overclocked. Donald put the material together because Overclocked was Drexel's book of the year, given to the entire freshman class (I visited campus in November and met with students, taught a writing program, and gave a lecture). He's got a ton of good supplementary links and glossaries explaining the technical and genre terms for a lay audience.

The second, from Deborah Menkart at the Zinn Education Project: Teaching a People ’s History project is a recommendation for teachers whose students are working with Howard Zinn's brilliant "Peoples' History" books to include Little Brother in their works.

Coming from a family of teachers (both parents, brother) and serving on faculty at two universities at present (Open University, UK and University of Waterloo, Canada), I'm always intensely gratified when educators use my material with their students.

They're 64% of the way there as of this writing, and they need another $800 or so in the next 43 hours. I'm pretty excited by this novel use of goal-oriented online fundraising by activist groups, and the Burmese lot really seem to have a handle on how technology fits into their national struggles for justice.

But they're good folks at my publisher, and they're not fond of DRM either. When I asked them if there was some way we could sell the ebook without DRM, they told me that it was impossible (only one major ebook vendor, remember?), but would I mind if they just gave away the ebook in DRM-free ePub form?

Would I mind? That's a dandy solution! Here's a link to the free, DRM-free Dutch ePub version of Little Brother. Tell your (Dutch) friends, and be sure to stay clear of that infected DRM copy that's being sold.

Little Brother ePub (DRM-free)

(Thanks, Rienk!)

Intervju med Cory Doctorow from Veslebror Serdeg on Vimeo.

Here's an interview I gave to my Norwegian publisher about the writing of Little Brother.

The podcast is in eight parts -- I started reading it before I'd finished the story, so there's some minor inconsistencies that'll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I'll be reading "Martian Chronicles," my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.

The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in "I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet." That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.

No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, "I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing." Truth be told, I'd rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I'm smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.

Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity's hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn't a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren't any killer apps for AI.

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Podcast feed

The increasing reach of information technology into all areas of life, from social networking websites to data sharing in public services, has thrown up a number of questions about privacy. Information about our medical records, financial circumstances and shopping habits is increasingly likely to be stored in electronic media that are out of our control. Some critics worry more about Tesco’s data-gathering than any ‘surveillance state’. The controversy about Google Maps’ Street View function, which captured thousands of unwitting people walking or standing on the streets, is a reminder that new technology constantly raises new questions about our privacy. So how worried should we be? Does the convenience of easily accessed information outweigh the danger of abuse? How are our conceptions of privacy changing? And following the success of the Pirate Party in Sweden, can we expect privacy to move up the political agenda in the UK too.

Rethinking Privacy in an age of Disclosure and Sharing

I often get asked why the foreign editions of my books aren't available as a free download and the answer is simple: I rarely have any direct contact with my non-English publishers, let alone the kind of close working relationship that has enabled me to sell my UK and US publishers on the idea. But every now and again, a publisher will be excited enough about this to opt to put materials online off their own bat, and this is always wonderful for me. Samlaget is one of those publishers; Ragnfrid, my editor there, was the first non-English-language editor to buy the rights to Little Brother, right after it was published in English (her husband downloaded a free copy from my site, and shoved it into her hands!).

Cory Doctorow Veslebror Ser Deg