A million years ago, I set sail on the Writing Excuses Cruise, a writing workshop at sea. As part of that workshop, I sat down with the Writing Excuses podcast team (Mary Robinette Kowal, Piper J Drake, and Howard Taylor) and recorded a series of short episodes explaining my approach to writing. I had clean forgotten that they saved one to coincide with the release of Attack Surface, until this week’s episode went live (MP3). Listening to it today, I discovered that it was incredibly entertaining!
Today is the US/Canada release-date for Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book. It’s been a long time coming (Homeland, the second book, came out in 2013)!
It’s the fourth book I’ve published in 2020, and it’s my last book of the year.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250757531
When the lockdown hit in March, I started thinking about what I’d do if my US/Canada/UK/India events were all canceled, but I still treated it as a distant contingency. But well, here we are!
My US publisher, Tor Books, has put together a series of 8 ticketed events, each with a pair of brilliant, fascinating guests, to break down all the themes in the book. Each is sponsored by a different bookstore and each comes with a copy of the book.
https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-doctorow-virtual-lecture-series/
We kick off the series TONIGHT at 5PM Pacific/8PM Eastern with “Politics and Protest,” sponsored by The Strand NYC, with guests Eva Galperin (EFF Threat Lab) and Ron Deibert (U of T Citizen Lab).
https://www.strandbooks.com/events/event93?title=cory_doctorow_attack_surface
There will be video releases of these events eventually, but if you want to attend more than one and don’t need more than one copy of the book, you can donate your copy to a school, prison, library, etc. Here’s a list of institutions seeking copies:
https://craphound.com/littlebrother/2020/10/05/as-freebies/
And if you are affiliated with an organization or institution that would like to put your name down for a freebie, here’s the form. I’m checking it several times/day and adding new entries to the list:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uIXO0iV2RyVN6AtDYd1C7ImxS6V0jHWnMNFK179g6H4/
I got a fantastic surprise this morning: a review by Paul Di Filippo in the Washington Post:
He starts by calling me “among the best of the current practitioners of near-future sf,” and, incredibly, the review only gets better after that!
Di Filippo says the book is a “political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance,” whose hero, Masha, is “a protagonist worth rooting for, whose inner conflicts and cognitive dissonances propel her to surprising, heroic actions.”
He closes by saying that my work “charts the universal currents of the human heart and soul with precision.”
I mean, wow.
If you’d prefer an audiobook of Attack Surface; you’re in luck! I produced my own audio edition of the book, with Amber Benson narrating, and it’s amazing!
Those of you who backed the audio on Kickstarter will be getting your emails from BackerKit shortly (I’ve got an email in to them and will post an update to the KS as soon as they get back to me.
If you missed the presale, you can still get the audio, everywhere EXCEPT Audible, who refuse to carry my work as it’s DRM-free (that’s why I had to fund the audiobook; publishers aren’t interested in the rights to audio that can’t be sold on the dominant platform).
Here’s some of the stores carrying the book today:
Libro.fm:
https://libro.fm/audiobooks/9781664913257-attack-surface
Supporting Cast (Audiobooks from Slate):
https://attacksurface.supportingcast.fm/
Bandcamp:
https://corydoctorow.bandcamp.com/album/attack-surface
I expect that both Downpour and Google Play should have copies for sale any minute now (both have the book in their systems but haven’t made it live yet).
And of course, you can get it direct from me, along with all my other ebooks and audiobooks:
Here’s part eighteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).
Content warning for domestic abuse and sexual violence.
This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”
Some show notes:
Here’s the form for getting a free Little Brother story, “Force Multiplier” by pre-ordering the print edition of Attack Surface (US/Canada only)
Here’s the schedule for the Attack Surface lectures
Here’s the list of schools and other institutions in need of donated copies of Attack Surface.
Here’s the form to request a copy of Attack Surface for schools, libraries, classrooms, etc.
Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:
Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.
Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.
Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.
Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.
Science Fiction Cirklen is a member-funded co-op of Danish science fiction fans; they raise money to produce print translations of sf novels that Danes would otherwise have to read in English. They work together to translate the work, commission art, and pay to have the book printed and distributed to bookstores in order to get it into Danish hands.
The SFC folks just released their Danish edition of Little Brother — translated by Lea Thume — as a Creative Commons licensed epub file, including the cover art they produced for their edition.
I’m so delighted by this! My sincere thanks to the SFC people for bringing my work to their country, and I hope someday we can toast each other in Copenhagen.
Figuring out how to tour a book in the lockdown age is hard. Many authors have opted to do a handful of essentially identical events with a couple of stores as a way of spreading out the times so that readers with different work-schedules, etc can make it.
But not me. My next novel, Attack Surface (the third Little Brother book) comes out in the US/Canada on Oct 13 and it touches on so many burning contemporary issues that I rounded up 16 guests for 8 different themed “Attack Surface Lectures.”
This has many advantages: it allows me to really explore a wide variety of subjects without trying to cram them all into a single event and it allows me to spread out the love to eight fantastic booksellers.
Half of those bookstores (the ones WITH asterices in the listing) have opted to have ME fulfil their orders, meaning that Tor is shipping me all their copies, and I’m going to sign, personalize and mail them from home the day after each event!
(The other half will be sending out books with adhesive-backed bookplates I’ve signed for them)
All of that is obviously really cool, but there is a huge fly in the ointment: given that all these events are different, what if you want to attend more than one?
This is where things get broken. Each of these booksellers is under severe strain from the pandemic (and the whole sector was under severe strain even before the pandemic), and they’re allocating resources – payrolled staff – to after-hours events that cost them real money.
So each of them has a “you have to buy a book to attend” policy. These were pretty common in pre-pandemic times, too, because so many attendees showed up at indie stores that were being destroyed by Amazon, having bought the books on Amazon.
What’s more, booksellers with in-person events at least got the possibility that attendees would buy another book while in the store, and/or that people would discover their store through the event and come back – stuff that’s not gonna happen with virtual events.
There is, frankly, no good answer to this: no one in the chain has the resources to create and deploy a season’s pass system (let alone agree on how the money from it should be divided among booksellers) – and no reader has any use for 8 (or even 2!) copies of the book.
It was my stupid mistake, as I explain here.
After I posted, several readers suggested one small way I could make this better: let readers who want to attend more than one event donate their extra copies to schools, libraries and other institutions.
Which I am now doing. If you WANT to attend more than one event and you are seeking to gift a copy to an institution, I have a list for you! It’s beneath this explanatory text.
And if you are affiliated with an institution and you want to put yourself on this list, please complete this form.
If you want to attend more than one event and you want to donate your copy of the book to one of these organizations, choose one from the list and fill its name in on the ticket-purchase page, then email me so I can cross it off the list: doctorow@craphound.com.
I know this isn’t great, and I apologize. We’re all figuring out this book-launch-in-a-pandemic business here, and it was really my mistake. I can’t promise I won’t make different mistakes if I have to do another virtual tour, but I can promise I won’t make this one again.
Covenant House – Oakland
200 Harrison St
Oakland
CA
94603
Madison Public Library Central Branch
201 W Mifflin St,
madison
wi
53703
Monona Public Library
1000 Nichols Rd
Madison
wi
53716
Madison Public Library Pinney Branch
516 Cottage Grove Rd
Madison
Wi
53716
La Cueva High School
Michael Sanchez
7801 Wilshire NE
Albuquerque
New Mexico
87122
YouthCare
800-495-7802
2500 NE 54th St
Seattle
WA
98105
Nuestro Mundo Community School
Hollis Rudiger
902 Nichols Rd, Monona
Monona
Wi
53716
New Horizons Young Adult Shelter
info@nhmin.org
2709 3rd Avenue
Seattle
WA
98121
Salem Community College Library
Jennifer L. Pierce
460 Hollywood Avenue
Carneys Point
NJ
8094
Sumas Branch of the Whatcom County Library System
Laurie Dawson – Youth Focus Librarian
461 2nd Street
Sumas
Washington
98295
Riverview Learning Center
Kris Rodger
32302 NE 50th Street
Carnation
WA
98014
Cranston Public Library
Ed Garcia
140 Sockanosset Cross Rd
Cranston
RI
2920
Paideia School Library
Anna Watkins
1509 Ponce de Leon Ave
Atlanta
GA
30307
Westfield Community School
Stephen Fodor
2100 sleepy hollow
algonquin
Illinois
60102
Worldbuilders Nonprofit
Gray Miller, Executive Director
1200 3rd St
Stevens Point
WI
54481
Northampton Community College
Marshal Miller
3835 Green Pond Road
Bethlehem
PA
18020
Metropolitan Business Academy Magnet High School
Steve Staysniak
115 Water Street
New Haven
CT
6511
New Haven Free Public Library
Meghan Currey
133 Elm Street
New Haven
CT
6510
New Haven Free Public Library – Mitchell Branch
Marian Huggins
37 Harrison Street
New Haven
CT
6515
New Haven Free Public Library – Wilson Branch
Luis Chavez-Brumell
303 Washington Ave.
New Haven
CT
6519
New Haven Free Public Library – Stetson Branch
Diane Brown
200 Dixwell Ave.
New Haven
CT
6511
New Haven Free Public Library – Fair Haven Branch
Kirk Morrison
182 Grand Ave.
New Haven
CT
6513
University of Chicago
Acquisitions Room 170
1100 E. 57th St
Chicago
IL
60637
Greenburgh Public Library
John Sexton, Director
300 Tarrytown Rd
Elmsford
NY
10523
Red Rocks Community College Library
Karen Neville
13300 W Sixth Avenue
Lakewood
CO
80228
Biola University Library
Chuck Koontz
13800 Biola Ave.
La Mirada
CA
90639
Otto Bruyns Public Library
Aubrey Hiers
241 W Mill Rd
Northfield
NJ
08225
California Rehabilitation Center Library
William Swafford
5th Street and Western Ave.
Norco
CA
92860
Hastings High School
Rachel Haider
200 General Sieben Drive
Hastings
MN
55033
Ballard High School Library
TuesD Chambers
1418 NW 65th St.
Seattle
WA
98117
Southwest Georgia Regional Library System
Catherine Vanstone
301 South Monroe Street
Bainbridge
GA
39819
Los Angeles Center For Enriched Studies (LACES) Library
Rustum Jacob
5931 W. 18th St
Los Angeles
CA
90018
SOUTH SIDE HACKERSPACE: CHICAGO
Dmitriy Vysotskiy or Shawn Coyle
1048 W. 37th St. Suite 105
Chicago
Illinois
60609
Rising Tide Charter Public School
Katie Klein
59 Armstrong
Plymouth
MA
02360
Doolen Middle School
Carmen Coulter
2400 N Country Club Rd
Tucson AZ
85716
Fruchthendler Elementary School
Jessica Carter
7470 E Cloud Rd
Tucson
AZ
85750
Brandon Branch Library
Mary Erickson
305 S. Splitrock Blvd.
Brandon South Dakota
57005
Alternative Family Education of the Santa Cruz City Schools
Dorothee Ledbetter
185 Benito Av
Santa Cruz
CA
95062
Helios School
Elizabeth Wallace
597 Central Ave.
Sunnyvale
CA
94086
Eden Prairie High School
Jenn Nelson
17185 Valley View Rd
Eden Prairie
MN
55346
44
Helios School
Elizabeth Wallace
597 Central Ave.
Sunnyvale
CA
94086
Flatbush Commons mutual aid library
Joshua Wilkerson
101 Kenilworth Pl
Brooklyn
NY
11210
46
Here’s part seventeen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).
This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”
Some show notes:
Here’s the form for getting a free Little Brother story, “Force Multiplier” by pre-ordering the print edition of Attack Surface (US/Canada only)
Here’s the Kickstarter for the Attack Surface audiobook, where every backer gets Force Multiplier.
Here’s the schedule for the Attack Surface lectures
Here’s the form to request a copy of Attack Surface for schools, libraries, classrooms, etc.
Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:
Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.
Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.
Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.
Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.
Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.
I was incredibly happy to appear on the MMT Podcast again this week, talking about economics, science fiction, interoperability, tech workers and tech ethics, and my new novel ATTACK SURFACE, which comes out in the UK tomorrow (Oct 13 US/Canada):
We also delved into my new nonfiction book, HOW TO DESTROY SURVEILLANCE CAPITALISM, and how it looks at the problem of misinformation, and how that same point of view is weaponized by Masha, the protagonist and antihero of Attack Surface.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59
It’s no coincidence that both of these books came out at the same time, as they both pursue the same questions from different angles:
- What does technology do?
- Who does it do it TO and who does it do it FOR?
-
How can we change how technology works?
And:
- Why do people make tools of oppression, and what will it take to make them stop?
Here’s the episode’s MP3:
http://traffic.libsyn.com/preview/pileusmmt/The_MMT_Podcast_ep_68_Cory_Doctorow_v2.mp3
and here’s their feed:
Here’s part sixteen of my new reading of my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (you can follow all the installments, as well as the reading I did in 2008/9, here).
This is easily the weirdest novel I ever wrote. Gene Wolfe (RIP) gave me an amazing quote for it: “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.”
Here’s how my publisher described it when it came out:
Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur who moves to a bohemian neighborhood of Toronto. Living next door is a young woman who reveals to him that she has wings—which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.
Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and among his brothers are sets of Russian nesting dolls.
Now two of the three dolls are on his doorstep, starving, because their innermost member has vanished. It appears that Davey, another brother who Alan and his siblings killed years ago, may have returned, bent on revenge.
Under the circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to join a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet, spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles from scavenged parts. But Alan’s past won’t leave him alone—and Davey isn’t the only one gunning for him and his friends.
Whipsawing between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.
It’s been 12 years since I went on my first book tour and in the years since, I’ve met and spoken with tens of thousands of readers in hundreds of cities on five continents in support of more than a dozen books.
Now I’ve got another major book coming out: ATTACK SURFACE.
How do you tour a book during a pandemic? I think we’re still figuring that out. I’ll tell you one thing, I won’t be leaving Los Angeles this time around. Instead, my US publisher, Tor Books, has set up eight remote “Attack Surface Lectures.”
https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-doctorow-virtual-lecture-series/
Each event has a different theme and different guest-hosts/co-discussants, chosen both for their expertise and their ability to discuss their subjects in ways that are fascinating and engaging.
ATTACK SURFACE is the third Little Brother book, a standalone book for adults.
It stars Masha, a young woman who is finally reckoning with the moral character of the work she’s done, developing surveillance tools to fight Iraqi insurgents and ex-Soviet democracy activists.
Masha has struggled with her work for years, compartmentalizing her qualms, rationalizing her way into worse situations.
She goes home to San Francisco and discovers her best friend, a BLM activist, is being targeted by the surveillance weapons Masha herself invented.
What follows is a Little Brother-style technothriller, full of rigorous description and extrapolation on cybersecurity, surveillance and resistance, that illuminates the tale of a tech worker grappling with their own life’s work.
Obviously, this covers a lot of ground, as is reflected in the eight nights of talks we’re announcing today:
I. Politics & Protest, Oct 13, with Eva Galperin and Ron Deibert, hosted by The Strand Bookstore
II. Cross-Medium SciFi, Oct 14, with Amber Benson and John Rogers, hosted by Brookline Booksmith
III. Intersectionality: Race, Surveillance, and Tech and Its History, Oct 15, with Malkia Cyril and Meredith Whittaker, hosted by Booksmith
IV. SciFi Genre, Oct 16, with Sarah Gailey and Chuck Wendig, hosted by Fountain Books
V. Cyberpunk and Post-Cyberpunk, Oct 19, with Bruce Sterling and Christopher Brown, hosted by Andeersons Bookshop
VI. Tech in SciFi, Oct 20, with Ken Liu and Annalee Newitz, hosted by Interabang
VII. Little Revolutions, Oct 21, with Tochi Onyebuchi and Bethany C Morrow, hosted by Skylight Books
VIII. OpSec & Personal Cyber-Security: How Can You Be Safe?, Oct 22, with Runa Sandvik and Window Snyder, hosted by Third Place Books
Some of the events come with either a hardcover and a signed bookplate, or, with some stores, actual signed books.
(those stores’ stock is being shipped to my house, and I’m signing after each event and mailing out from here)
(yes, really)
I’ve never done anything like this and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t nervous about it. Book tours are crazy marathons – I did 35 cities in 3 countries in 45 days for Walkaway a couple years ago – and this is an entirely different kind of thing.
But I’m also (very) excited. Revisiting Little Brother after seven years is quite an experience. ATTACK SURFACE – a book about uprisings, police-state tactics, and the digital tools as oppressors and liberators – is (unfortunately) very timely.
Having an excuse to talk about this book and its themes with you all – and with so many distinguished and brilliant guests – is going to keep me sane next month. I really hope you can make it.
POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER is my first-ever picture book, illustrated by Matt Rockefeller and published by Firstsecond. It’s an epic tale of toy-hacking, bedtime-avoidance and monster-slaying.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627
The book’s publication was attended by a superb and glowing review from Kirkus:
“The lights are out, and the battle begins. She knows the monsters are coming, and she has a plan. First, the werewolf appears. No problem. Poesy knows the tools to get rid of him: silver (her tiara) and light. She wins, of course, but the ruckus causes a ‘cross’ Daddy to appear at her door, telling her to stop playing with toys and go back to bed. She dutifully lets him tuck her back in. But on the next page, her eyes are open. ‘Daddy was scared of monsters. Let DADDY stay in bed.’ Poesy keeps fighting the monsters that keep appearing out of the shadows, fearlessly and with all the right tools, to the growing consternation of her parents, a Black-appearing woman and a White-appearing man, who are oblivious to the monsters and clearly fed up and exhausted but used to this routine. Poesy is irresistible with her brave, two-sided personality. Her foes don’t stand a chance (and neither do her parents). Rockefeller’s gently colored cartoon art enhances her bravery with creepily drawn night creatures and lively, expressive faces.
“This nighttime mischief is not for the faint of heart. (Picture book. 5-8)”
Kirkus joins Publishers Weekly in its praise: “Strikes a gently edgy tone, and his blow-by-blow account races to its closing spread: of two tired parents who resemble yet another monster.”
