| Mr. Cory Doctorow |
| I do a bunch of things: I'm an activist, a writer, a public speaker, and a technology person. I'm the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). That involves my living in London, England and spending 2-3 weeks a month on the road working to see to it that the public and geeks don't get a raw deal in technology standards, treaties and laws. I'm also very active in promoting the BBC's Creative Archive project to the UK government. Other credentials: I'm a lecutre at universities all over the world from Yale to Cambridge, MIT to Central European University. I'm a fellow at Stanhope Centre in London, a Contributing Writer to Wired Magazine and a columnist for Popular Science and Make Magazines. I sit on the committee for the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference and am an advisor to Ludicorp, Inc, Downhill Battle, Technorati, and Musicbrainz. I'm also the co- editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing. I co-founded the open source P2P technology company OpenCola, which was sold to OpenText in 2003. I've been selling fiction since I was seventeen, but it took ten years for me to really "break out." My story, Craphound was published in the March 1998 Science Fiction Age, and since then I've sold dozens of stories, one of which was a finalist for the 2003 Nebula Award. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which Tor published in 2003. It went on to win the Locus Award for best first novel. Then I published a collection of short stories with Four Walls Eight Windows press later in 2003, called A Place So Foriegn and Eight More, which won the Sunburst Award for Best Canadian Science Fiction Book. In 2004, I published a second novel with Tor, called Eastern Standard Tribe, which is selling briskly and will be out shortly in paperback. All my books are available on the Web as free, Creative Commons-licensed downloads. This means that I'm voluntarily throwing out some of the copyright that I get automatically just by writing stuff down. I do that for political and economic reasons: I think that the increased scope and duration of copyright are strangling free expression, privacy and innovation, and I think that enabling my fans to trade my words makes me more money. So I get to do the right thing and get paid, which is good. My latest novel is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, released from Tor in July 2005. It is available on the Internet as a free Creative Commons download; for people living in the developing world, this license allows for unlimited commercial exploitation as well, with the sole caveat that commercial output may not be exported to a high-income nation. I also co-wrote The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science- Fiction, with novelist Karl Schroeder. There are certain recurring themes in my work; garbage and Disney appear in almost everything I write. I'm obsessed with both. Throughout my life, I've been exposed to people who are doing novel things with trash: my buddy Darren, who clears CDN$100K/yr pulling discarded computer parts out of dumpsters; my neighbour Roger Wood who make breathtaking assemblage sculptures out of crap he finds at yard-sales and flea-markets; my friend Murray, a handyman who makes everything from wheelbarrows to sheds out of scraps. . . The list goes on and on. I used to live in a humongous warehouse, and it was full to the brim with crap from yard-sales and thrifts. Disney's a little harder to explain. My grandparents are snow- birds, spending their winters in Fort Lauderdale, FL, and I grew up spending Christmas breaks with them. Those trips always included a pilgrimage to Walt Disney World (because what the hell else are you going to do when your grandkids come to stay with you at your seniors-only retirement condo?). The Disney organization fascinates me: internally, the theme-parks operate like socialist utopias, while externally, Disney is known as a rights-grabbing litigious bully. I've had a pretty cool life. I moved to Baja California, Mexico, when I was seventeen, to live in a little white house and write. I volunteered on community-initiated development projects in rural Costa Rica. I sat on the Board of Directors of an island conference centre on twelve acres of the most beautiful real- estate in the world. I went to the Clarion workshop in 1992, and I later workshopped with The Cecil Street Irregulars in Toronto, a fine gang of writers. I attended Canada's oldest alternative high- school, SEED, and became a committed auto-didact. |
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