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Eastern Standard Tribe

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Review:

Joey DeVilla

There’s a certain casual but insistent forward flow to his writing that makes you want to keep reading. It’s rather like the motion of a Haunted Mansion Doombuggy: it shows you something cool, but its wiggle tells you that something cooler is waiting just over there in the next chamber… [The book is full of] argumentative personalities, smooth-talking biz-dev guys and anal-rententive user experience orthos so real that you want to pimp-slap them with a hardcover edition of Tufte.

Joey DeVilla,
The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century
Review:

Now

Cory Doctorow writes fast and furiously, the words gushing out of him in a stream of metaphor and imagery that keeps you glued to his futurist tales…

Doctorow offers characters that are absolutely human. There are no robots here — these people are sexed up and emotionally charged.

Susan Cole,
Now Magazine, Rating: NNNN
Review:

Locus

The first thing you notice when reading Eastern Standard Tribe is that it suggests a methodology that Doctorow follows when building his novels: identify and research a cool new idea, add more and more cool bits to that idea, and then build that into a story. In Down and Out the cool idea was reputation-based economies, and in Tribe it’s a new kind of social group emerging that chooses to abandon its local standard time to live and work in stop with another more desirable one…

Damien Broderick, in a recent review, coined the rather amusing term “blogpunk,” which seems to very much apply to Doctorow’s work. It refers to the tendency of writers of online journals to accumulate fascinating factoids and then share them amongst themselves. And, to an extent, you can see that in Tribe. The novel’s background is full of cool things — cars running on lard and such — but it’s just that, background. At its heart, Tribe is a witty, sometimes acerbic poke in the eye at modern culture. Everything comes under Doctorow’s microscope, and he manages to be both up to date and off the cuff in the best possible way.

Jonathan Strahan,
Locus Magazine

I’m on the cover of Now Magazine

/ / Eastern Standard Tribe, News

Now Magazine, Toronto’s free entertainment weekly, has a great cover story on me this week, with a review of Eastern Standard Tribe.

A reminder: I’ve got two signings coming up in Toronto this week. The first is tomorrow night, at the Merril Collection, 239 College, third floor, 7 pm, 416-393-7748.

The second is on March 27, at Bakka Books, 598 Yonge at Wellesley, 3 to 5 pm. 416-963-9993.

(Some minor errata: My thesis was about fringe culture and the Internet; I got a job programming, not advertising, CDROMs; and the entertainment industry is worth $60 billion, not million; I was considered the best writer in my school workshops, not my professional ones)

Review:

NPR

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.

Rick Kleffel
NPR

NPR

/ / Eastern Standard Tribe, News

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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Review:

Entertainment Weekly

Clerks meets Startup.com… Tribe is packed with big ideas.

Entertainment Weekly,
March 19, 2004

Down and Out relicensed today

/ / Eastern Standard Tribe, News

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!

Wild remixes

/ / Eastern Standard Tribe, News

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.