I’ve done an interview on Minnesota Public Radio’s Future Tense, which will air shortly. Here’s a sneak preview of the piece.
All About:
Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom
If you attended last year’s World Science Fiction Convention in San Jose, California, or pre-registered to attend this year’s convention in Toronto, you’re eligible to nominate (64K PDF) people, stories and books for the 2003 Hugo Awards. (Shameless plug: my stories 0wnz0red and Jury Service are both eligible in the Novella category)
(Thanks, Derryl!)
Review:
A K M Adam
Doctorow writes with a satisfying deftness, keeping his plot progressing at a an almost cinematic pace (indeed, the novel reads in some ways as a draft for a screenplay, although, regrettably, one can’t imagine the Disney corporation having the insight to permit such a movie to be made, more’s the pity). The periodic flashbacks don’t throw off the plot line’s advance; the hypothetical technology seems real and, largely, quite desirable (someone must encode a process for identifying Whuffie, now–speaking of which, whence comes that tag for online reputation?); the neologisms are generally transparent. Though the characters are drawn to be no rounder than the plot requires, they hold our interest and engage our sympathies in subtle ways. Most important, the ideas at stake drive the plot: What does it mean to have a particular identity? What makes an experience particularly moving or enjoyable? What makes Jules’s life meaningful? Doctorow propels readers through an amusement ride of meaning, leaving them exhilarated, tantalized, and eager for more.
He might well have supplied more without overextending the plot. Jules refers often to his days at the University of Toronto, and Doctorow might have offered a fuller picture of that critical phase of the radical social change that the whole book presupposes. Or he might have written out a longer ending, permitting readers to see how the year in Disney World affected Jules in the longer run. Still, one can’t complain about an author who opts to leave readers hungry for more rather than yawning for less. The streamlined narrative conveys part of the disburdened world Jules inhabits.
Critics are comparing Doctorow to Bruce Sterling, Douglas Adams, Neal Stephenson; what excites me about Doctorow is his capacity to work with ideas as Philip K. Dick did, but with significantly greater grace and elan. Compare Down and Out with We Can Build You, not only because both deal with animatronic presidents, but also because both provoke questions about what makes feelings “real,” about manipulation and coercion of assent, about what makes a life meaningful. You will see, I think, that Dick’s brooding brilliance does not overshadow Doctorow’s truer gift for narrative and composition; where Dick got there first, Doctorow makes more of the elements, more satisfactorily. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom breaks through not by virtue of being clever or portentous or literary or slick or even distinctively original, but by virtue of excelling at the job of writing vividly, lightly, about heavy topics–and such breakthroughs (like moving pictures, or flying steel) change things.
Vernor “Singularity” Vinge on the book-launch:
One of the wonderful things about our times is that individual writers are empowered and can experiment with new ways of getting the word out. If there aren’t too many new laws made, I think this will ultimately give us much better ways of doing things (and probably a large variety of such new ways).
— Vernor
California Author is running a feature on Down and Out, called The Whuffie Channel.
01/10/2003 The Whuffie Channel. Cory Doctorow imagines a world where death and copyright have a cure. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (Tor Books) is set in the post-death, post-work, net-in-your-head future. It is in bookstores this week and yesterday it was one of Amazon’s top 300 sellers. His future-is-now marketing strategy: the entire book can also be downloded for free at his website, where readers are encouraged to share it. In the first 24 hours, the book was downloaded 20,000 times.
Wired News has posted coverage of the release of my novel:
Doctorow’s fans aren’t surprised to find his book online for free. The plots of his most recent short story, “0wnz0red,” involves digital rights management, or how files are protected from sharing and copying.
Moreover, Doctorow is known outside science fiction circles for his prolific, passionate posts about digital rights issues on the BoingBoing weblog and other forums, as well as his work with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
“I don’t believe that I am giving up book royalties,” Doctorow said about persuading his publisher, Tor Books, to make Down and Out available digitally for free under the new Creative Commons licensing system.
“(Downloads) crossed the 10,000-download threshold at 8 a.m. this morning,” Doctorow said Thursday, “which exceeds the initial print run for the book.”
Doctorow said he thinks the marketing buzz from those downloads will be worth more than any lost book sales. “I think that the Internet’s marvelous ability to spread information to places where it finds a receptive home is the best thing that could happen to a new writer like me.”
Volunteers have sent in copies of the novel in multiple file formats (PalmOS PDB, Apple Newton PKG, PalmOS Palm Reader, and Microsoft LIT). They’re linked off the downloads page.
24 hours after launching the site from which you can download my novel for free, the book has been downloaded over 20,000 times. It’s been Slashdotted, blogged to hell and back, and I’ve done a number of press interviews about it. What’s more, the title is currently sitting at #304 in the Amazon Sales Rank. Let’s call this one a success. I could not be more stoked. Damn.
Thanks to Jason Andrade for setting up a mirror of the downloads page in Australia for your antipodean convenience.
I’ve done an interview with Creative Commons about Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in which I go into some depth about the motivation for releasing the book online, gratis.
Well, in some ways, this novel is a parable about Napster, and about the reputation economies that projects like Ringo, Firefly, Epinions and Amazon hint at. In a world where information is nonscarce, the problem isn’t finding generic information — it’s finding useful information. There’s an old chestnut in online science fiction fandom that the Internet “makes us all into slushreaders.” (“Slush” is the unsolicited prose that arrives at publishers’ offices — a “slushreader” wades through thousands of these paste-gems looking for the genuine article). This has always struck me as a pretty reactionary position.
Nearly every piece of information online has a human progenitor — a person who thought it was useful or important or interesting enough to post. Those people have friends whom they trust, and those friends have trusted friends, and so on. Theoretically, if you use your social network to explore the Web, you can make educated guesses about the relative interestingness of every bit of info online to you. In practice, this kind of social exploration is very labor-intensive and even computationally intensive, but there’s a lot of technology on the horizon that hints at this…
Scarcity is, objectively, worse than plenty. When you’ve got lots of some useful object, you’re richer than when you have less of it. When there’s more than enough to go around, the economic value tends to plummet, but the utility is just as high. Think of oxygen: on the Earth’s surface, we’re well-supplied with breathable atmosphere. Aside from a few egregiously West-coast “oxygen bars,” it’s hard to imagine paying money for O2. But in Heinlein’s sf novels set on the moon, there’s a thriving trade in oxygen. In both situations, air is highly useful, but dirtsiders are richer in air than their loonie cousins.
