I’m off on my family holiday and won’t be back until 2009, so I wanted to drop one last post in the queue for the wild and wooly 2008 — a year that was busy and wonderful and that ended a little scarily. We moved continents and had a baby; I wrote two books and published three; went on a book tour and spent a month in Asia researching the next book; and to top it all off, got married three times on two continents (to the same woman!).

It’s been a fantastic year, thanks to you folks. It’s been an especially great year for me, writing-wise. The UK edition of Little Brother, my first young adult novel, is selling briskly, and the US edition is doing spectacularly, having just gone on to an eighth hardcover printing (the hardcover’s selling so well that my publisher’s delayed the paperback for a year!). The book’s made just about everyone’s best-of lists for 2008: the New York Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the Globe and Mail, the National Post, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Review, School Library Journal, Amazon Editors’ Picks, Amazon top teen books, Richie’s Picks, Book Sense, VOYA, TeenReads, Texas Library Association, io9 — not to mention a whopping haul of awards and award-nominations: Emperor Norton Award, ALA’s YALSA Award, Cybils Award, Prometheus Award, Ontario Library Association White Pine Award, the ALA Printz Award and the Nebula Award! My agents are doing some serious talking with a film studio (though nothing’s ever final until it’s signed and delivered), and there are more overseas publishers signing up every month to do their own editions.

Best of all is all the fan-stuff — videos, art, readings, translations, adaptations… All the stuff that takes advantage of the Creative Commons license to remake Little Brother to better suit the readers (and man, do I get awesome email from readers, from security researchers at Microsoft to activist students in rural schools). And of course, I was floored by the generosity of the donors who sent hundreds of copies of the book to libraries, schools, halfway houses, and shelters as a way of saying thanks for the CC license.

Who the hell knows what’ll happen in 2009? It’s definitely the most uncertain new year I can remember. One thing I’m sure of, though, is that whatever happens, we’ll all figure it out together, that the Internet will make it possible for us to bug-in and help each other here at home, rather than heading for a defensive position in the hills. Crappy economies are often the home of wonderful Bohemias. Two recessions ago, I dropped out of school to become a computer programmer. In the last one, I quit the company I’d co-founded and went to work for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Now that I’m a parent — and now that I’m a little older — I feel the risk a lot more keenly than I did then. But I just keep on remembering that we live in the best time in the history of the world to have a worst time: the time when collective action is cheaper and easier than ever, the time when more information and better access to tools, ideas and communities are at our fingertips than they’ve ever been.

Have a fantastic holiday. Remind the people who matter to you of that fact. Ring in the new year with a big grin, and I’ll see you all in 2009.

Here’s a Happy Thanksgiving from the New York Times: they’ve named Little Brother one of the eight “Notable Children’s Books of 2008,” calling it, “a novel that is at once an entertaining thriller, a thoughtful polemic and a practical handbook of digital-age self-defense.”

Notable Children’s Books of 2008

(Thanks, Lori!)

A reminder that tomorrow is the UK launch and signing for Little Brother at Forbidden Planet in London — 1PM! You can also pre-order signed copies through the Forbidden Planet site. Hope to see you there!

Saturday 29, November, 1:00PM – 2:00PM
Forbidden Planet London Megastore,
179 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8JR

Our Price: £6.99

Little Brother UK launch/signing at Forbidden Planet London, Nov 29

Damien G Walter’s written a smashing profile of me for The Guardian, pegged to the UK release of Little Brother (hope to see you all at the UK launch at Forbidden Planet on Saturday!).

“The job of a science fiction writer, historically, has been to understand how technology and social factors interact,” he says, “how technology is changing society. An activist’s job is to try to direct that change.”

This time his message is aimed at the teenage readers who wear the kind of skater jeans and T-shirt combination Doctorow is sporting today. “If you don’t read the Anarchist’s Cookbook when you are 16 you have no soul,” he says. “If you are still reading it when you are 36 you have no brain.” (He himself is 37, but if he’s abandoned anarchism, he’s clearly not settling into a conservative middle age.)

“My hope is that Little Brother is a verb and not a noun, that it’s a thing you do, not just a book you read,” he continues. “That’s where thinking about the future and influencing the future converge.”

Cory Doctorow: willing science fiction into fact