(Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight,...)
Bursting with cutting-edge speculation and human insight, Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a coming-of-age romantic comedy and a kick-butt cybernetic tour de force Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies... and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World. Disney World! The greatest artistic achievement of the long-ago twentieth century. Now in the care of a network of volunteer "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have, enhanced with only the smallest high-tech touches. Now, though, it seems the "ad-hocs" are under attack.
(Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but...)
Marcus, a.k.a "w1n5t0n," is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works – and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems. But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
(In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, youn...)
In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco - an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state. A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus's hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumb drive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It's incendiary stuff - and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world.
(Anda loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer r...)
Anda loves Coarsegold Online, the massively-multiplayer role-playing game that she spends most of her free time on. It's a place where she can be a leader, a fighter, a hero. It's a place where she can meet people from all over the world, and make friends. Gaming is, for Anda, entirely a good thing. But things become a lot more complicated when Anda befriends a gold farmer - a poor Chinese kid whose avatar in the game illegally collects valuable objects and then sells them to players from developed countries with money to burn. This behavior is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realize that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person's real livelihood is at stake.
(Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our...)
Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation - New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow - Radicalized is a timely novel comprised of four science fiction novellas connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future. Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper. In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectify the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless... only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.
(Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface is a standalone novel set ...)
Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface is a standalone novel set in the world of New York Times bestsellers Little Brother and Homeland. Most days, Masha Maximow was sure she'd chosen the winning side. In her day job as a counterterrorism wizard for a transnational cybersecurity firm, she made the hacks that allowed repressive regimes to spy on dissidents, and manipulate their every move. The perks were fantastic, and the pay was obscene. Just for fun, and to piss off her masters, Masha sometimes used her mad skills to help those same troublemakers evade detection if their cause was just. It was a dangerous game and a hell of a rush. But seriously self-destructive. And unsustainable. When her targets were strangers in faraway police states, it was easy to compartmentalize, to ignore the collateral damage of murder, rape, and torture. But when it hits close to home, and the hacks and exploits she’s devised are directed at her friends and family - including boy wonder Marcus Yallow, her old crush and archrival, and his entourage of naïve idealists - Masha realizes she has to choose. And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian blogger, journalist, and author. He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books.
Background
Ethnicity:
Doctorow's paternal grandfather was born in what is now Poland and his paternal grandmother was from Leningrad. Both were deserters from the Red Army, and as a result Doctorow's father was born in a displaced persons camp near Baku, Azerbaijan. His grandparents and father emigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union. Doctorow's mother's family were Ukrainian-Russian Romanians.
Doctorow was born on July 17, 1971, in Toronto, Canada, the son of a math and computer science teacher. He is of Eastern European descent.
Education
Doctorow quit high school, received his Ontario Academic Credit (high school diploma) from the SEED School in Toronto, and attended four universities without obtaining a degree.
Doctorow writes science fiction and nonfiction about technology, both of which he was exposed to at an early age by his father. He notes on his Web site that he learned to use a keyboard before he learned cursive writing. He began selling his short fiction at seventeen and has had continued success with his stories. A collection has been published, and he has published two novels.
Doctorow is obsessed with two things: trash and Walt Disney. His friends make livings from reassembling computers from discarded parts and creating sculptures and other items from flea market and yard sale finds. His Disney obsession may come from the fact that when he was a child, his grandparents took him to the Florida theme park during his Christmas visits. He notes that "garbage and Disney appear in almost everything I write."
Doctorow has cowritten how-to books, one on publishing science fiction and the other, Essential Blogging: Selecting and Using Weblog Tools, a guide to setting up and maintaining an online Weblog, like his own blog Boing Boing. The book advises on real-time editing versus uploading files. The authors begin with basics and add sophistication as the book progresses.
Doctorow is a co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. The blog is mentioned is several of his books. He is also a contributing writer to Wired magazine, and contributes occasionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, and the Boston Globe.
Doctorow is also a digital rights activist and an outreach coordinator with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, described on their Web site as "a group of passionate people - lawyers, volunteers, and visionaries - working in the trenches, battling to protect your rights and the rights of Web surfers everywhere. The dedicated people of EFF challenge legislation that threatens to put a price on what is invaluable; to control what must remain boundless, because being able to share ideas and information is the reason the Web was created in the first place!"
The flagship product of OpenCola, founded by Doctorow and John Henson, is file sharing and search engine technology that resides on the user's hard drive and accesses the hard drives of other OpenCola users, keeping track of searches and links and making them available to others with the same interests. The best information rises to the top through sheer numbers of hits, gaining whuffie points.
With his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Doctorow has appeared at the vanguard of a trend within science fiction that's so bleeding-edge it doesn't even have a stupid nickname yet. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is set in late XXI, after the ascension of the Bitchun Society. In this postmonetary world, whuffie points are everything, gained for good will and contributions to the public good. There is no death. In this wired world, minds are backed up frequently, so that if the body dies, a cloned one, specially grown for them, is programmed with their last backup.
One-hundred-year-old Jules works at Disney World, which is run by groups of young people with communications devices implanted in their inner ears and brains. Jules is killed for the fourth time when he opposes the remaking of his station, the old-style Haunted Mansion, by a group that wants to replace its animatronics, converting it into a virtual-reality attraction like they did at the Hall of Presidents, and where visitors can now become Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. Other characters include Keep A-Movin' Dan and Jules's girlfriend Lil.
Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, is about a man in a secret society of members who help each other find jobs and who sabotage other tribes. Doctorow told that the novel "is based on the idea that before the Internet and universal end-to-end communication came along, you were pretty much stuck with being friends with the people who lived near you... But with the advent of the Internet, you can be friends with people who think like you, even if they don't live near you."
In March 2019, Doctorow released Radicalized, a collection of four self-contained science-fiction novellas dealing with how life in America could be in the near future. The book was selected for the 2020 edition of Canada Reads, in which it was defended by Akil Augustine.
Doctorow has made his fiction and nonfiction available in a variety of formats through his Web site. As he notes, the six of nine stories from his collection, as well as Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and other works, are available through download under a license developed by the Creative Commons project, which allows distribution of creative work in a manner similar to the free/open-source software movement. The works of a range of artists may be copied and used for noncommercial purposes with proper attribution. "It's a great project," commented Doctorow, "and I'm proud to be a part of it."
Achievements
Doctorow is best known for his works of science fiction and as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. His science fiction has won numerous awards, and his novel Little Brother spent seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Doctorow married Alice Taylor in October 2008; they have a daughter named Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, who was born in 2008.
Spouse:
Alice Taylor
Taylor is the founder of MakieLab, an "entertainment playspace for young people' that will invite users to download and print 3D dolls and accessories."
