The wonderful online sf mag Infinity Plus has just published an excerpt from my novel Eastern Standard Tribe.
Argosy Magazine (with Charlie Stross)
The Infinite Matrix, January 2006
Charlie and I wrote this sequel to our novella Jury Service as a kind of bookend, and published the two together as a fixup we called The Rapture of the Nerds, a title we nicked off of Ken McLeod.
more
The 2004 Aurora Award nomination form is up online — this is the award given to the best science fiction works by Canadians or people living in Canada. Canadians and people living in Canada are eligible to nominate.
For the record, my eligible works for this ballot are:
Best Novel: Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Tor, January 2003
Best Short-Form Work: Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers, Asimov’s, June 2003
Flowers From Alice, New Faces in Science Fiction (Mike Resnick, ed.), December, 2003
Printed Meat and Nattering Packages, Business 2.0, May 2003
Road Calls Me Dear, The Mammoth Book of Road Stories, January 2003
Nominations are due July 17th (my birthday!).
Review:
San Francisco Chronicle
Unlike the characters in “Down and Out,” who could be killed and easily resurrected through advances in nanotechnology, Art and the supporting cast of “Eastern Standard Tribe” are thoroughly mortal, blessed only with “comms,” phonelike devices that put incredible computing power at everyone’s fingertips. Their vulnerability gives “Eastern Standard Tribe” an urgency and poignancy that Doctorow’s first novel lacked. One definitely finds oneself rooting for poor, beleaguered Art, and Doctorow resolves his plight with a satisfying dose of suspense and humor.
Michael Berry
San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle
Review:
Vancouver Sun
While some might consider Doctorow a booster for the online, wired lifestyle, his books contain subtle but pointed warnings about the flaws of high tech societies. Being a Tribalist, living out of circadian synch with the people around you, relating with people you mainly know as a handle on a screen, encourages paranoia and disloyalty, smartness instead of happiness. Art becomes an object lesson in how such a society can ruin a person, and his salvation doesn’t lie in technology.
Peter Tupper,
Vancouver Sun
Vancouver Sun
Peter Tupper has written a great feature on my books for the Vancouver Sun, with a special emphasis on Eastern Standard Tribe (there’s also a review of EST, but you have to buy a daily subscription to the print paper to read it — lame!).
Abbie Hoffman titled his counterculture guide/how-to manual Steal This Book. Toronto-born science fiction writer Cory Doctorow could call his work Download this Book.
Jill Smith has begun a distributed audiobook project for my novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, whose new, liberal Creative Commons license allows for exactly this kind of mishegas (see the distributed audiobook project for Lessig’s Free Culture for an example of how well this can work). She’s recorded a reading of the prologue and posted it to the Internet Archive’s public submission area, where open-licensed material is hosted for free.
I’m immensely gratified by this — audiobooks are my favorite nontextual medium for storytelling and I can’t fall asleep at night without one. I would love for others to take Jill’s lead and finish it out.
(Thanks Jill!)
Eric writes, on his blog, that he’s found himself recommending people for jobs whom he’s only “met” by reading their blogs. He describes the process as a burgeoning tribal affiliation, enabled by the ‘Net.
For me, I feel like the tribes are beginning to grow up much more around the little nodes and bubbles of the blogosphere, and they’re becoming rapidly more important as us early-twenties bloggers own real sphere of influence grows in the meatspace.
10 years from now, I can see not being part of the community be a really detrimental thing for a job hunter.
Review:
Toronto Star
The power of Eastern Standard Tribe draws on traditional storytelling elements — tight plotting, sharp characterization and keen thematic treatment. The novel is immediately accessible, the near-future setting all too familiar. Despite the shifting between chronologies and tenses (first- to third-person throughout), Doctorow maintains an unrelenting pace; many readers will find themselves finishing the novel, as I did, in a single sitting.
Robert Wiersema,
Toronto Star
Toronto Star
I’ve just gotten word that Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has qualified for the Preliminary Ballot for the 2004 Nebula Awards. That’s still a ways off — the book still has to make the final ballot in spring 2005, and then the award will be announced in April 2005. But this is a hell of a mitzvah, I gotta say.
