Cory Doctorow

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 an 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 na ve idealists--Masha realizes she has to choose. And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt.

Hackers have a bad reputation, as shady deployers of bots and destroyers of infrastructure. In Coding Democracy, Maureen Webb offers another view. Hackers, she argues, can be vital disruptors. Hacking is becoming a practice, an ethos, and a metaphor for a new wave of activism in which ordinary citizens are inventing new forms of distributed, decentralized democracy for a digital era. Confronted with concentrations of power, mass surveillance, and authoritarianism enabled by new technology, the hacking movement is trying to "build out" democracy into cyberspace.

Return to the world of Little Brother and Homeland. Attack Surface takes us five minutes into the future, to a world where everything is connected and everyone is vulnerable. Masha Maximow has made some bad choices in life – choices that hurt people. But she's also made some pretty decent ones. In the log file of life, however, she can't quite work out which side of the ledger she currently stands. Masha works for Xoth Intelligence, an InfoSec company upgrading the Slovstakian Interior Ministry's ability to spy on its citizens' telecommunications with state-of-the-art software (at least, as state-of-the-art as Xoth is prepared to offer in its middle-upper pricing tier). Can you offset a day-job helping repressive regimes spy on their citizens with a nighttime hobby where you help those same citizens evade detection? Masha is about to find out. Pacy, passionate, and as current as next week, Attack Surface is a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place. Praise for Cory Doctorow: 'The right book at the right time from the right author – and, not entirely coincidentally, Cory Doctorow's best novel yet' JOHN SCALZI'A wonderful, important book... I think it'll change lives' NEIL GAIMAN on Little Brother'One of our most important science fiction writers' KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

OneZero, Medium's official technology publication, is thrilled to announce a print-on-demand edition of How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism by Cory Doctorow, with an exclusive new chapter. How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism was first published online in August, where it was an instant hit with readers, scholars, and critics alike. For years now, we've been hearing about the ills of surveillance capitalism - the business of extracting, collecting, and selling vast reams of user data that has exploded with the rise of tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Amazon. But what if everything we've been hearing is wrong? What if surveillance capitalism is not some rogue capitalism or a wrong turn taken by some misguided corporations? What if the system is working exactly as intended - and the only hope of restoring an open web is to take the fight directly to the system itself? In Doctorow's timely and crucial new nonfiction work, the internationally bestselling author of Walkaway, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and Little Brother, argues that if we're to have any hope of destroying surveillance capitalism, we're going to have to destroy the monopolies that currently comprise the commercial web as we know it. Only by breaking apart the tech giants that totally control our online experiences can we hope to return to a more open and free web - one where predatory data-harvesting is not a founding principle. Doctorow shows how, despite popular misconception, Facebook and Google do not possess any "mind-control rays" capable of brainwashing users into, say, voting for a presidential candidate or joining an extremist group--they have simply used their monopoly power to profit mightily off of people interested in doing those things and made it easy for them to find each other. Doctorow takes us on a whirlwind tour of the last 30 years of digital rights battles and the history of American monopoly - and where the two intersect. Through a deeply compelling and highly readable narrative, he makes the case for breaking up Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple as a means of ending surveillance capitalism.

Finalist for the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine. Celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of cutting-edge science fiction from the hit podcast, Escape Pod. Escape Pod has been bringing the finest short fiction to millions of ears all over the world, at the forefront of a new fiction revolution. This anthology gathers together fifteen stories, including new and exclusive work from writers such as from Cory Doctorow, Ken Liu, Mary Robinette Kowal, T. Kingfisher and more. From editors Mur Laffterty and S. B. Divya comes the science fiction collection of the year, bringing together bestselling authors in celebration of the publishing phenomenon that is, Escape Pod.

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 an 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 na ve idealists--Masha realizes she has to choose. And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt.

Cory Doctorow's two New York Times-bestselling novels of youthful rebellion against the torture-and-surveillance state - now available in a softcover omnibus "A wonderful, important book ... I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year." -Neil Gaiman Little BrotherMarcus Yallow is seventeen years old when he skips school and finds himself caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his friends are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they are brutally interrogated for days. When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state. He knows that no one will believe him, which leaves him one option: to take down the DHS himself. Can one brilliant teenage hacker actually fight back? Maybe, but only if he's very careful...and if he chooses his friends well. HomelandA few years after the events of Little Brother, California's economy collapses and Marcus finds himself employed by a crusading politician who promises reform. Then his former nemesis, Masha, emerges with a thumbdrive containing WikiLeaks-style evidence of government wrongdoing. When Marcus witnesses Masha's kidnapping by the same agents who detained and tortured him earlier, he has to decide whether to save her or leak the archive that will cost his employer the election and put thousands at risk. Surrounded by friends who consider him a hacker hero, stalked by people who look like they're used to inflicting pain, Marcus has to act, and act fast." As dead serious as Nineteen Eighty-Four, as potentially important a 'novel of ideas, ' with a much more engaging central character and an apparently inexhaustible supply of information on everything from brewing coffee to sneaky surveillance and how to defeat it." --The Wall Street Journal on Homeland

From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, Radicalized is four urgent SF novellas of America's present and future within one book Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation, Radicalized is a timely collection consisting of four SF 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 rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims. Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer. The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

If you want a better future tomorrow, you're going to have to fight for it today. Here are four urgent stories from author and activist Cory Doctorow, four social, technological and economic visions of the world today and its near – all too near – future. 'Unauthorized Bread' is a tale of immigration, toxic economic stratification and a young woman's perilously illegal quest to fix a broken toaster. In 'Model Minority' a superhero finds himself way out his depth when he confronts the corruption of the police and justice system. 'Radicalized' is the story of a desperate husband, a darknet forum and the birth of a violent uprising against the US health care system. The final story, 'The Masque of the Red Death', tracks an uber-wealthy survivalist and his followers as they hole up and attempt to ride out the collapse of society. 'Cory Doctorow is one of our most important science fiction writers' KIM STANLEY ROBINSON.

From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, Radicalized is four urgent SF novellas of America's present and future within one book Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation, Radicalized is a timely collection consisting of four SF 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 rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims. Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer. The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

FBI files on writers with dangerous ideas, including Hannah Arendt, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, Susan Sontag, and James Baldwin. Writers are dangerous. They have ideas. The proclivity of writers for ideas drove the FBI to investigate many of them-to watch them, follow them, start files on them. Writers under Surveillance gathers some of these files, giving readers a surveillance-state perspective on writers including Hannah Arendt, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, Susan Sontag, and Hunter S. Thompson. Obtained with Freedom of Information Act requests by MuckRock, a nonprofit dedicated to freeing American history from the locked filing cabinets of government agencies, the files on these authors are surprisingly wide ranging; the investigations were as broad and varied as the authors' own works. James Baldwin, for example, was so openly antagonistic to the state's security apparatus that investigators followed his every move. Ray Bradbury, on the other hand, was likely unaware that the Bureau had any interest in his work. (Bradbury was a target because an informant warned that science fiction was a Soviet plot to weaken American resolve.) Ernest Hemingway, true to form, drunkenly called the FBI Nazis and sissies. The files have been edited for length and clarity, but beyond that everything in the book is pulled directly from investigatory files. Some investigations lasted for years, others just a few days. Some are thrilling narratives. Others never really go anywhere. Some are funny, others quite harrowing. Despite the federal government's periodic admission of past wrongdoing, investigations like these will probably continue to happen. Like all that seems best forgotten, the Bureau's investigation of writers should be remembered. We owe it to ourselves. Writers Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Ray Bradbury, Truman Capote, Tom Clancy, W. E. B. Du Bois, Allen Ginsberg, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, Ken Kesey, Norman Mailer, Ayn Rand, Susan Sontag, Terry Southern, Hunter S. Thompson, Gore Vidal

The repackaged trade paperback of Cory Doctorow's miraculous novel of family history, Internet connectivity, and magical secrets--now with a new cover 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, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.

Cory Doctorow's debut cyberpunk science fiction that explores the scarcity of morality in a world that has conquered death and material insufficiency--now repackaged with a new cover 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. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents and is replacing its venerable audioanimatronics with new, immersive direct-to-brain interfaces that give guests the illusion of being Washington, Lincoln, and all the others. For Jules, this is an attack on the artistic purity of Disney World itself. Worse: it appears this new group has had Jules killed. This upsets him. (It's only his fourth death and revival, after all.) Now it's war: war for the soul of the Magic Kingdom, a war of ever-shifting reputations, technical wizardry, and entirely unpredictable outcomes. 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.

Kirkus' Best Fiction of 2017 From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death. "Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle." --William Gibson Hubert Vernon Rudolph Clayton Irving Wilson Alva Anton Jeff Harley Timothy Curtis Cleveland Cecil Ollie Edmund Eli Wiley Marvin Ellis Espinoza--known to his friends as Hubert, Etc--was too old to be at that Communist party. But after watching the breakdown of modern society, he really has no where left to be--except amongst the dregs of disaffected youth who party all night and heap scorn on the sheep they see on the morning commute. After falling in with Natalie, an ultra-rich heiress trying to escape the clutches of her repressive father, the two decide to give up fully on formal society--and walk away. After all, now that anyone can design and print the basic necessities of life--food, clothing, shelter--from a computer, there seems to be little reason to toil within the system. It's still a dangerous world out there, the empty lands wrecked by climate change, dead cities hollowed out by industrial flight, shadows hiding predators animal and human alike. Still, when the initial pioneer walkaways flourish, more people join them. Then the walkaways discover the one thing the ultra-rich have never been able to buy: how to beat death. Now it's war - a war that will turn the world upside down. Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multi-generation science fiction thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years...and the very human people who will live their consequences.

From Cory Doctorow, the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, the repackaged trade paperback of Makers, a novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America--now with a new cover Perry and Lester invent things--seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the New Work, a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups like Perry and Lester's. Together, they transform the country, and Andrea Fleeks, a journo-turned-blogger, is there to document it. Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot.combomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Wal-Marts across the land. As their rides, which commemorate the New Work's glory days, gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive grows jealous, and convinces the police that Perry and Lester's 3D printers are being used to run off AK-47s. Hordes of goths descend on the shantytown built by the New Workers, joining the cult. Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry's friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the 'fatkins' treatment, turning him into a sybaritic gigolo. Then things get really interesting.

From Cory Doctorow, a powerful and funny novel about time, tribalism, and a young man's dismaying discoveries about his own life Scathing, bitter and funny, Eastern Standard Tribe examines the immutable truths of time, and of societies rebuilt in the storm of instant, ubiquitous communication. Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He's doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without a question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth onto the world. Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications megacorp, but Art's real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe. Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, 24 hours a day. But one thing hasn't changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into Tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted-not happiness, not money, and most certainly not love. Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain....

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 behaviour is strictly against the rules in Coarsegold, but Anda soon comes to realise that questions of right and wrong are a lot less straightforward when a real person's real livelihood is at stake. In Real Life is a touching and morally complex tale for young adults.