Back when I was still swimming through Quicksilver, I would occasionally take a break from it and read some other things–my own version of short attention span, I suppose. One of the books I ambled through was Cory Doctorow’s short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. That aforementioned link, uniquely perhaps, allows for free download of 6 of the 9 short stories in the collection. He has good reason to do so.
In addition to being a science fiction writer, Cory Doctorow runs a (as far as I can tell) popular website called BoingBoing, which is one of my favorite of the weblog variety. He is also the Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization devoted to advocating for the protection of individuals digital rights and freedoms on the internet, among other things. One of their basic assumptions (or beliefs) is that filesharing is not only not a bad thing–certainly not the demon which organizations such as the RIAA make it out to be–but a useful tool for promotion and distribution.
Doctorow put his money where his mouth was, making his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, available free to download. By all standards, this move was a resounding success and the novel sold very well. Just yesterday, he released his newest novel: Eastern Standard Tribe, also available as a free download.
Doctorow writes here about his reasoning for doing so, again:
Not (just) because I’m a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you — the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers — hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody’s got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You’ve got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.
As you may have noticed, I’ve strayed fairly far afield from actually discussing the short story collection. I don’t really feel like writing much about them, but what I will do is point to the two stories which I enjoyed the most:
“Craphound”
“0wnz0red” (originally published on salon.com–there may be hoops to jump through to read it)
Doctorow gives an insane number of interviews or so it seems to me. I sort of wonder how he finds the time to get any writing done.
Anyway, if you feel like actually purchasing some of his stuff, you can find it here and here.