Cory Doctorow is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, and a contributor to The Guardian, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wired, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites.
He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Senior Lecturer; in 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
His novels have been translated into dozens of languages and are published by Tor Books and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards.
Doctorow co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, sold to OpenText in 2003, and presently serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, The Glenn Gould Foundation, and the Chabot Space & Science Center’s SpaceTime project.
In 2007, Entertainment Weekly called him, “The William Gibson of his generation.” He was also named by Forbes Magazine as one of its Web Celebrities in each of 2007-2010, and one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders for 2007. IDW published an anthology series of comic books inspired by his short fiction called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now.
Anda’s Game, a graphic novel in the series, was released in 2007.
His New York Times bestseller Little Brother was published in May 2008. It was nominated for the 2008 Hugo, Nebula, Sunburst, and Locus Awards. It won the Ontario Library White Pine Award, the Prometheus Award, as well as the Indienet Award for bestselling young adult novel in America’s top 1000 independent bookstores in 2008.
His novel Makers, was published by Tor Books and HarperCollins UK in October 2009, and a short story collection, With a Little Help, was published in 2010. In 2011, Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays, called Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century (with an introduction by Tim O’Reilly). The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, a PM Press Outspoken Authors chapbook, was also published in 2011. Another young adult novel, Pirate Cinema, and the novel “The Rapture of the Nerds”, co-written with Charles Stross, were both releases in 2012. A sequel to Little Brother, Homeland, was published in 2013.
On February 3, 2008, he became a father. The little girl is called Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, and is a marvel that puts all the works of technology and artifice to shame.
You can visit Doctorow online at his website, Craphound.
Photo by Jonathan Worth.