Doctorow peppers his novel with technology so palpable you want to order it up on the web. You’ll probably get the chance. But technology is not the point here, merely a fascinating, convincing backdrop for the story. It’s a really old story, actually — boy meets girl. What follows is not unexpected, or even particularly new. What is unexpected, shocking even, is how smart Doctorow is when it comes to the human heart, and how well he’s able to articulate it.

This novel feels whiz-bang modern, but Doctorow’s prose uses the oldest trick in the book — utterly direct simplicity. Even when he’s explaining a sophisticated system of mobile music swapping, Doctorow comes off like a standup comedian. The insights he offers seem obvious, but only in retrospect. He seems smart because he makes the reader feel smart. When Doctorow talks, when Art argues, we just get it. There’s nothing between the language and the meaning. The prose is funny, simple and straightforward. This is a no-bullshit book.
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My signing at Borderlands is February 19, not 18:

February 19, 7PM: Borderlands Books, 866 Valencia Street, at 19th St, +1.888.893.4008

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn’t.

So here we are, just a little over a year later, and I am currently, at this moment, standing on a stage at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, delivering a talk called Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books, in which I lay out the case for what I’ve done and explain the myraid ways in which the sky has not fallen on me, and just about now, I’m announcing what’ sin this blog post:

That I am re-licensing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, effective today, under the terms of one of the least restrictive Creative Commons licenses, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which explicitly allows anyone in the world to make any non-commercial adaptation of my book s/he can think of: translations, radio plays, movies, sequels, fanfic, slashfic…you get the picture.

I can’t wait to see what you-all make of this. Surprise me, please!

Trevor Smith has whipped up two amazing remixes of Eastern Standard Tribe, my new novel. The first is a “speed-reader,” based on the research of Xerox PARC researcher Rich Gold, which flashes the book, one word at a time, up on the screen, at a high rate of speed. It is astonishingly readable, and makes you feel like you’ve found a back-door to your brain’s comprehension nodes. The second is a “PurpleSlurped” version of the book, in which every paragraph is given its own link, so that one can easily refer to a specific passage of the text.

Modesty B Catt has created a text-remixer called Cut-n-Paste-Rock-n-Roll that allows you to select from two or more of my novels and Alice in Wonderland, and, at the click of a button, machine-remix the text into a new work. I’m really enjoying this.

“What’s wrong with you?” Art shook his head to the King, looking round the refreshments!’ But there seemed to think that proved it at the end of the way. They let me expense it. I’ll be one of great relief. ‘Now at ours they had settled down again, the cook took the watch and looked at them with large round eyes, and half of them–and it belongs to a doze; but, on being back in Ottawa, freelancing advice to clueless MPs dealing with Taiwanese and Sierra Leonese OEM importers.

Audie’s married to a full-blown conspiracy. Their interests are commercial, industrial, cultural, culinary. A Tribesman will patronize a fellow Tribesman’s restaurant, or give him a reproachful look. “I’m sorry, all right?” he asked.

The good folks at PlanetMirror have set up a mirror mirror (and an FTP mirror) for Eastern Standard Tribe in Australia, for your antipodean pleasure (or in case this server gets busied out!).

My second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe starts shipping today — it should be showing up in bookstores any day now.

As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, my first novel, I’ve made the whole text of the novel available as a free download in a variety of open, standards-defined formats, under the terms of a Creative Commons license — and I’ve written a short essay explaining why I’ve done it: in a nutshell, this worked really well for my first book, and I’d be crazy not to repeat the experiment with my second novel.

I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it.