My Own Biggest Fan

Written for Izzum. This is it before edits. It will probably be better after. Thanks Joe for the title.

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Futureshock: Predicting the Present with Cory Doctorow – a Bungled Interview by Mason Hastie

Having attained a certain level of notoriety, at least within select circles, Cory Doctorow is a busy man. A busy man who wears a lot of hats. The fact that the Vancouver ex-pat living in London accepted Izzum’s request for an interview so easily was surprising and exciting. The fact that said interview was erased by a careless interviewer was heartbreaking. It doesn’t change the fact that we wanted a story on him and he had taken an hour out of his personal time to talk with us.

What makes Cory such a busy man? He is on the masthead of at least four magazines at any moment, and not credited on many others he writes for. He is a science fiction novelist (or SF, apparently Sci-Fi is out). He is also the European voice for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is the reason he is in London. It’s also the reason I had to wake up at an ungodly hour to talk to him.

“Tell me about your work for the EFF.”

Groggily I attempt to interview him and record our conversation using a $20 device I bought at Radioshack. It is useless. We can barely hear each other over the buzz the flippin’ thing is causing. We decide that we are going to try speaking over the internet, which requires me to install two pieces of software that I have never used. Needless to say I bungled it. What happened isn’t important, or at least the importance doesn’t outweigh my embarrassment. But the twenty minutes we spent getting everything set up told me as much about him as his CV.

The EFF is an organization that fights selective battles to set legal precedents so that we don’t loose rights that most people would think were obvious. Examples: listening to a CD that you bought in the store on your iPod, making copies of the DVD of home-movies your cousin made, burning audio from an interview that you conducted yourself to CD (that is if you even record it *ahem). Currently there is legislation being discussed in the U.S. that could make the iPod, photocopier and the VCR all illegal. The EFF is using its financial and legal resources to make sure that not only do these wacky laws not get passed, but they also want to set a precedent so that no one can place limits on what you are allowed to do with your property.

Not being one to talk the talk that he can’t walk, Cory has released the bulk of his literary output electronically under a Creative Commons license. What this means is that you can go to his website, download his books and then read, email, print, do whatever, (just don’t sell it, natch) as much as you would like. The purpose of this is to prove that yes, items freely traded electronically do sell, often more copies due to word-of-mouth advertising than without. It has worked. His first novel sold over 8000 hardcover copies and is currently in paperback, apparently not bad for a first-time novelist especially in as hostile a literary climate as today. I mean, how many of us read as much as we should?

Cory’s output is amazingly prolific. He tells me he pulls it off due to overlap. The posts he has on Boing Boing spring from his research for the EFF. When I read Eastern Standard Tribe, his second novel, I could see how both also inform his fiction. In EST the main character has plans for a revolutionary way of trading music while on the freeway (trust me, the novel is more than that, there are GUNS and SEX too). I suppose writing about what one is familiar with is the first step to making fiction believable to the reader.

Our conversation was interesting and enlightening and although it was largely lost to the void, there was one moment that stands out vividly for me. I asked him about what he was doing with science fiction, if in his eyes he was showing a probable future or an ideal future. His answer surprised me because as he told me I knew it was obvious.

“Orwell was not writing about what he thought 1984 was going to be like, he was writing about 1948. He was making a comment on his time and not making predictions. That’s what science fiction authors do, they don’t try to predict the future.”