I’m delighted to announce that Little Brother is a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Library Association Young Reader’s Choice Award, “the oldest children’s choice award in the U.S. and Canada.” Not only that, it’s in stupendous company — be sure to follow the link and check out the list of nominees!
Monthly Archives::
April 2010
Hey, Londoners! I’m giving a talk on May 8 at 7PM at the Nettlefold Hall in West Norwood (SE27). The library there has asked me to come in and talk about how I use technology to write and publish my work. It’s free, but seats are limited, so they’re asking you to RSVP. Hope to see you there!
Nettlefold Hall: CORY DOCTOROW TALK – Readers And Writers Festival, 8th May 2010, 7pm
Sandy works with the Ice Owls, a team of blind and low-vision hockey players. In the course of making the team’s website, Sandy had need of some sample text with which to test the site with a screen-reader. Instead of opting for the boring, non-representative “lorem ipsum” text, Sandy used text from my novel Makers. What a cool place to find myself — more testament to the awesome power of ubiquitous, pluripotent Creative Commons text!
Update: David Jordan sez, “I just saw your post about Makers as Lorem Ipsum and was reminded about my use of Little Brother in the Google Summer of Code proposal, which is to turn the freedom-loving, debian-based Nokia n900 into an accessibility device that reads printed text. At any rate I made a demo video using Little Brother as an example. I’ll bet this could read a Kindle to a blind person, no matter what Amazon/the publisher says.”
Sandy works with the Ice Owls, a team of blind and low-vision hockey players. In the course of making the team’s website, Sandy had need of some sample text with which to test the site with a screen-reader. Instead of opting for the boring, non-representative “lorem ipsum” text, Sandy used text from my novel Makers. What a cool place to find myself — more testament to the awesome power of ubiquitous, pluripotent Creative Commons text!
Update: David Jordan sez, “I just saw your post about Makers as Lorem Ipsum and was reminded about my use of Little Brother in the Google Summer of Code proposal, which is to turn the freedom-loving, debian-based Nokia n900 into an accessibility device that reads printed text. At any rate I made a demo video using Little Brother as an example. I’ll bet this could read a Kindle to a blind person, no matter what Amazon/the publisher says.”
My latest Guardian column, “Digital Economy Act: This means war,” explains how the latest round of dirty tricks from the entertainment industry — perverting British law, proposing an American police state, building an oppressive global treaty behind closed doors — changes the game. We’re no longer merely arguing about the future of control over culture: now it’s about the fundamentals of a just and free society:
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In the US, the MPAA and RIAA (American equivalents of the MPA and the BPI) just submitted comments to the American Intellectual Property Czar, Victoria Espinel, laying out their proposal for IP enforcement. They want us all to install spyware on our computers that deletes material that it identifies as infringing. They want our networks censored by national firewalls (U2’s Bono also called for this in a New York Times editorial, averring that if the Chinese could control dissident information with censorware, our own governments could deploy similar technology to keep infringement at bay). They want border-searches of laptops, personal media players and thumb-drives…
I’m not such a techno-triumphalist that I believe that the free and open internet will solve all our socio-economic problems. But I am enough of a techno-pessimist to believe that baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell.
Chekhov wrote that a gun on the mantelpiece in act one is sure to go off by act three. The entertainment industry’s blinkered pursuit of its own narrow goals has the potential to redesign our technology to be the perfect tools and excuses for oppression.
My next YA novel, For the Win, comes out in less than a month on May 11, and the early reviews have begun to show up. I’m especially delighted to have gotten my first-ever starred review in Booklist, which reads, in part, “Doctorow is indispensable. It’s hard to imagine any other author taking on youth and technology with such passion, intelligence, and understanding…Once again Doctorow has taken denigrated youth behavior (this time, gaming) and recast it into something heroic… With its eye-opening humanity and revolutionary zeal, this ambitious epic is well worth the considerable challenge.”
Judit Hegedus from the Open Society Institute in Budapest has translated my story Printcrime into Hungarian. This is one of my most widely translated stories, and this edition was part of an exhibition on copyright. OSI Deputy Director Jerzy Celichowski explains: “Visitors can print their own copy and take it home.”
Today marks the 15th anniversary of HarperVoyager, the excellent British science fiction line by whom I’m privileged to be published in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and other commonwealth territories. They’ve released this fun little vanity trailer to commemorate the event — happy anniversary, everyone!
Voyager 15th Anniversary Trailer (Thanks, Sarah!)
Jonathan Worth, the photographer who produced an extraordinary limited-edition run of portrait photos of me, has but a second batch on sale. Each one is accompanied by a signed manuscript page from my next novel, FOR THE WIN.
