Cory Doctorow

"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. 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...

When Marcus, once called M1k3y, receives a thumbdrive containing evidence of corporate and governmental treachery, his job, fame, family, and well-being, as well as his reform-minded employer's election campaign, are all endangered.

Alan meets his next-door neighbor Mimi, who shows him her deepest secret-the wings that protrude from her back only to be cut four times a year to hide their presence. Alan, too, is an oddity, the son of a mountain and a washing machine, with a set of nesting Russian dolls for brothers.... Name-shifting characters whose reality transcends the peculiarities of their circumstances and a search for identity in a world of impermanence and utter strangeness...

"Hubert, Seth, and their ultra-rich heiress friend Natalie are getting a little old to hang out at the "Communist parties," techno-raveups in abandoned industrial spaces, full of insta-printed drugs and toys. And Natalie was finished, years ago, with her overcontrolling zillionaire dad. And now that anyone can manufacture food, clothing, shelter with equipment comparable to a computer printer, there seems to be little reason to to stick with the world...

"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...

"A monster slayer needs no bedtime! Once her parents are off to bed, Poesy excitedly awaits the monsters that creep into her room. With the knowledge she's gained from her trusty Monster Book and a few of her favorite toys, Poesy easily fends off a werewolf, a vampire, and much more. But not even Poesy's bubblegum perfume can defeat her sleep-deprived parents!"--

A tale set at the end of the twenty-first century finds the planet's divided hominid population subjected to the forces of a splintery metaconsciousness that inundates networks with plans for cataclysmic technologies, prompting an unwitting jury member to participate in a grueling decision.

Cory Doctorow burst on the SF scene in 2000 like a rocket, inspiring awe in readers (and envy in other writers) with his bestselling novels and stories, which he insisted on giving away via Creative Commons. Meanwhile, as coeditor of the wildly popular blog Boing Boing, he became the radical new voice of the Web, boldly arguing for internet freedom from corporate control. Doctorow's activism and artistry are both on display in this Outspoken Author...

When the tech platforms promised a future of "connection," they were lying. They said their "walled gardens" would keep us safe, but those were prison walls. The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences, and customers we rely on. The impossibility...

One of the Web's most celebrated high-tech culture mavens returns with this second collection of essays and polemics. Discussing complex topics in an accessible manner, Cory Doctorow's visions of a future where artists have full freedom of expression is tempered with his understanding that creators need to benefit from their own creations. From extolling the Etsy maker verse to excoriating Apple for dumbing down technology while creating an information...