I could not be happier to announce that my novel Pirate Cinema has won the Libertarian Science Fiction Society’s Prometheus Award, along with Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon. I won the Prometheus in 2008 for my novel Little Brother, and it’s among my proudest honors. My sincere thanks to the judges and the members of the society for this honor.

My novel Pirate Cinema has been shortlisted for this year’s Sunburst Award, a juried prize for the best in Canadian science fiction. It’s up in the Young Adult category, and is part of an exciting slate that is full of exciting books that deserve your attention.

Hey, San Diego! I’m in town, teaching the Clarion Writing Workshop, and tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 7PM, I’ll be appearing at Mysterious Galaxy as part of Clarion’s speaker series. And if you’re coming to Comic-Con, you can catch me on Thursday and Friday.

The Financial Times’s Tim Harford has a regular feature called Lunch with the FT in which he takes someone out for lunch and a long chat, and then reports on both the lunch and the talk. We sat down recently for very nice steaks and cheap wine, and Tim’s just written it up:

Doctorow is clearly fascinated by economic issues, and points out that most science fiction and fantasy economies make no logical sense. The exception, he declares, is when Marxists write science fiction or fantasy. Take the recent Hobbit movie, for example. “How can the goblins have a mine that’s so inefficient?” he laughs, as he pauses from ripping the soft flesh from the marrowbones on his plate with his bare hands.

The porterhouse steak arrives, pre-sliced. It’s very good, charred on the outside but soft and pink beneath the surface. Doctorow has asked for horseradish while I am dipping my steak and chips into béarnaise sauce. The conversation is animated enough to slow our progress, and neither of us raises an eyebrow when a waiter noisily drops something fragile on the other side of the dining room.

So, I ask, if only Marxists get economics right in their novels, does that make Doctorow a Marxist? There’s a tension there, somehow – he’s a successful player in the market economy and fluently speaks the language of business; of profit, marketing reach, margins, and price discrimination. But his political activism seems squarely on the left – pro-labour, pro-equality, pro-rights.

“Marxists and capitalists agree on one thing: they agree that the economy is important. Once we’ve agreed on that we’re arguing over the details,” he says.

Plus, check out that caricature!

Lunch with the FT: Cory Doctorow

Here’s the second part of my interview with TVOntario’s “The Agenda” (part one was posted earlier this week) in which we talk about hacktivism and Aaron Swartz.

Hey there! I’m doing a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) right now with Peter Beagle, Connor Cochran, and Lois Bujold from the current Humble Ebook Bundle.