Q & A with Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow is a writer, blogger, journalist, technologist, co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing, and author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. We spoke with him recently about his latest book, Little Brother, a science-fiction novel for young adults.

Cory Doctorow. Photo: Bart Nagel.

A bunch of my friends had written young adult novels and were having the best time. My friend Kathe Koja had been a famous horror writer who’d written very graphic horror, and she decided to write these very very spare, almost Hemingway-esque young adult novels. And the experiences she described were just so cool, writing for kids who read not just for entertainment but to try to figure out the way the world works. The feedback she got was so blunt and honest that she was really, really, really excited, and she let her horror novels go out of print.

The other thing is that I was going to write a book where the technology really worked, where it was real technology. I thought young adult was a good genre for that. In young adult fiction, there’s an honorable tradition of talking about how technology works—unashamed lectures—and I really like that mode. [Robert Anson] Heinlein was a great proponent of that. When I was a kid, I found out a lot about how finance and politics and so on worked through books like Have Space Suit—Will Travel. My book is sort of a radical, political Have Space Suit—Will Travel. So young adult seemed like the right genre.

What was the flash of inspiration for Little Brother?

One thing was the kids I was meeting, who thought of technology increasingly as something that controlled them and not as something that empowered them. That was the complete opposite of how I’d grown up. People in my Dad’s generation grew up thinking of computers as these soulless machines that would regiment them and put them in lines, but in my generation—I got a computer in 1979 and a modem in 1980, and it was like the whole world opened to me. The amount of control and power I had over my world as a nine-year-old was unbelievable. I don’t think there had ever been a nine-year-old before that who could travel across the globe with these things and have conversations and meet interesting people. But now I meet kids today who tell me, “The computer is used to spy on me, the authorities know what I’m doing, marketers know what I’m doing.”

Another inspiration was thinking about how all these techno-thrillers I read depended on technology that was like magic—technology that did something technology really can’t do.  As a geek, I thought I’d be able to use technology in the story and not make it totally implausible. I thought, “Can I write a tight, well-paced techno-thriller where everything could actually happen?”

How much of the stuff in the book is real and how much is possible in the future?

I’d say 90% is real now, and 100% is possible in the future. Most of the stuff in the book just requires reconfiguring the bits we have today. The things that aren’t real yet are Microsoft releasing a free Xbox and making money by selling software licenses. The book relies on the idea that everyone has one of these in the closet because Microsoft is giving them away on the street.

For a while, merchants were giving us barcode scanners called QCats. They gave them away for free when you bought anything at RadioShack, and the idea was to be able to scan barcodes in magazine ads, and so pretty soon everyone had them lying around the house. And then someone figured out how to hack them to read any barcode. You could, for example, catalog your whole CD library. And you could count on everyone having one sitting in a closet. That’s a magic combination.

One of my favorite hardware hacks of all time is when someone figured out to build a WiFi antenna out of a Pringles can. The most amazing thing is that the directions for where to drill used the Pringles labels as landmarks: through the left eye, through the cholesterol count, and then the bar code in the middle, too. It’s pretty amazing when anyone interested in doing the project has access to a precision-manufactured piece of hardware: a Pringles can. It’s sitting there so cheap that anyone can walk out anywhere in the developed world, 24/7, and get one—that’s a really powerful thing for the transmission of an idea. So there’s a lot of stuff in the book that’s barely possible, a lot of stuff that actually exists, and stuff that could exist pretty soon.

What research did you do in preparation for Little Brother?

Little Brother was all stuff that I knew was going on, or stuff I’d written about, or could look up, or had already spoken to people about and written about on Boing Boing. So it’s the opposite of coming up with an idea and then figuring out what you need to know. It’s knowing a bunch of stuff and seeing what ideas come out of that.

I’m working on a new novel that’s a little more research-intensive and a little less foreknowledge-based. It’s set partly in India, and I know a lot of what I need to know, but I haven’t spent much time in China and I haven’t spent any in India. So I’m taking a research trip and spending a little time in both.

It’s going to be a young adult novel called For the Win. It’s an extension of a short story I wrote called “Anda’s Game,” which is about people who play video games, and this play is a form of work called gold farming. Games have a virtual wealth, a virtual gold, and a lot of people would rather buy the gold on eBay than do the repetitive tasks required to amass it. And so people in the developing world are paid to work in essentially sweatshops and play games all day, making virtual gold that’s then sold to rich players.

What were the differences between writing for adults and writing for young adults?

I once asked a young adult writer what she thought the soul of young adult fiction was. She said, “Being an adolescent is the state of perpetually going through these one-way changes, where you’re very brave, and you jump off cliffs. You can’t go back again. Like one day you’re someone who has never told a lie of consequence and then you’re someone who has. You can never go back and be that other person again.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the centers of our brain that govern risk don’t fully develop until we’re out of our teens. There was a court case last year or the year before in which a teen had done something very foolish, and part of the defense was that his capacity to understand risk was not physiologically fully developed. He literally couldn’t parse risk the way an adult would. I think if you could parse those risks, you probably wouldn’t take all kinds of momentous steps in your life. From a plotting perspective, I like to keep that in mind.

The only other big difference was that when it was all done, my editor said, you know Scholastic has some interest in distributing this as part of their book club. But they won’t do that if it’s got the F word in it, so do you mind if we just take it out of the two places where it is? And I said, take the F word out. No big deal.

Have you exhausted the issues covered in Little Brother?

Not at all. These are immutable topics for our era. Surveillance will be key to all the work I do, because we live in a surveillance state. I live in London. My photo is taken 500 times a day. London is the most surveilled city in the world. Scotland Yard recently advocated that five-year-olds should have their DNA logged into a police database if they exhibit so-called criminal behaviors so that later in life when they offend, we’ll know who they are and we can pick them up. London Metropolitan Police have put up posters all over the city advising us that if we see people taking pictures of security cameras, that we should rat them out to the police because they might be terrorists. It’s increasingly difficult to take note of all the ways we’re losing our civil liberties. Go into an airport and try saying, “I don’t see how I could blow up a plane with my shoe and some water.” They’ll throw you out of the airport, they might even arrest you for “making jokes about terrorism.” It’s not a joke; it’s a security discussion! We’re not allowed to ask the man who’s telling you to take off your shoes, why do I have to take off my shoes?

How do you balance your writing with your other activities?

I do a lot of stuff—I’m on a lot of advisory boards, I’m on some boards of charities, I do all this activism stuff, I write Boing Boing, I write six columns—and yes, this stuff takes up a lot of time. What allows me to do all this is that it’s all part of the same thing. I think the job of a science-fiction writer is to figure out how technology is changing society, how it might change society in the future, and sometimes to even influence how technology is changing society. But that’s also the definition of a tech journalist, a columnist, an activist.

One question I often get is, “How much time do you spend on Boing Boing?” Depending on how you calculate it, I either spend all of my time or none of it. Every time I run across something relevant to anything I do, I write it up for Boing Boing. So in addition to making it searchable, and having people comment on it, and making it clearer, putting it on Boing Boing is powerfully mnemonic for me—it means I remember it. These are sometimes like pieces of a puzzle that I don’t have the box art for. I find these pieces lying around, and I put them on Boing Boing so that I’ll know which pieces I’ve got—and every now and then I’ll find a corner piece, and a whole piece of the puzzle snaps in.

Little Brother was very much like that. I had a flash of inspiration, and I went home and wrote the book in eight weeks, from the day I started to the day I finished. Technically it’s a very research-intensive book—there’s a lot of factual and technological material in it—but everything there, I had already written about on Boing Boing. So I’d been collecting this stuff on Boing Boing without knowing what it was for.

I know a lot of visual artists who work this way—they have of boxes of stuff that looks like it should go into something someday, but they don’t yet know exactly what. My friend Roger Wood, a sort of mad clockmaker, has boxes and boxes in his flat labeled “doll parts,” etc. Boing Boing is like that, but machine searchable.

That said, I don’t have much of a social life.

(See our story on Doctorow's book here.)

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Tor, $17.95, 978-0-7653-1985-2