Cory Doctorow is in San Diego for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop, as one of this year's writers in residence. In addition, he will also be attending San Diego Comic Con tomorrow. SDLS caught up with him at Comickaze Comics, where he did a reading from Walkaway, for this interview.
Mr. Doctorow is a blogger, activist and journalist. He is the co-editor of Boing Boing, and is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He also co-founded the open source, peer-to-peer software company, OpenCola. and he has written multiple best selling, award winning books. He has written fiction, non-fiction, and graphic novels, some for young adults, as well as adult books. His latest novel is Walkaway.
SDLS: NPR wrote a review of Walkaway, in which they said the novel explores themes of abandonment, giving up something old, for something new. Would you agree with that analysis?
CD: NPR treated me very nicely in that review. I would say it's about people making bets on the future that is unknowable. When the world they do know is also intangible, the thing you're grasping for isn't really that much of a leap. It's about going from unknown to unknown, and being hopeful.
SDLS: You have written in multiple genres and medium, for example, graphic novels, Young Adult, Science Fiction, short story, non-fiction, etc. Writer's Digest did a great feature piece on you, in 2009 entitled "Inside the Mind of Cory Doctorow". In that piece, that asked you, "How do you move from genre to genre?" Your response, at that time, was that you think of yourself as a science fiction writer first and foremost. Do you still feel that way?
CD: No, I mean, I'm definitely a science fiction writer. I think I'm more widely known as a YA writer than as a writer for adults, and I've been giving some thought lately to what the difference is. I think that the crispist definition that I can come up with doesn't involve the subject matter, because whatever subject matter you say can never be in a YA novel, we can find some classic and amazing YA novel that you would have to be bonkers to try and escape from that category. So, instead, I think its that YA novels assume that the readers don't have a lot of context, cuz kids can be first rate reasoners, you know, there are child chess prodigies and child math prodigies, but they lack the context, so that's why there's no, like, child history prodigies, right? Or child lawyers, because you need to have been alive long enough to have amassed a body of facts sufficient to do your reasoning with. And so, young adult novels do not assume a lot of facts and evidence. Novels for adults can be much more aggressive in the amount of back story and fact matter that they have, and so, I write in those two different modes, but they're still science fiction novels.
SDLS: I am a big comic book fan, and I know you did a graphic novel with Jen Wang, In Real Life, which is based on your short story, Anda's Game. Have you given any thought to doing more work in the comics genre?
CD: Sure, well first let me say that Jen Wang did all of the heavy lifting for In Real Life, and did an amazing job, and she is a very gifted person, and all credit is due to her. I have written a picture book for small children that First Second is going to put out. They were happy enough with how In Real Life did, and they liked my idea enough, that it's going to come out. It's called Poesy The Monster Slayer, and it's about a little girl who gets all of these super girly toys, and who re-purposes them into fairly expedient monster killing weapons. So, we are currently negotiating with an illustrator, and I think it will be a 2018 or 2019 title.
Other kinds of graphic novels, I don't have any ambition for right now. I wouldn't rule it out, but I have a very full calendar. I'm writing a novella for Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror anthology, I am doing some TV writing for a media company called The Intercept, and I'm writing another novel right now, so, between that and the other political work I do, teaching, and touring Walkaway, I've been a very busy guy this year.
SDLS: Anda's Game was a bit prescient in predicting the world of online economies, the rise of Bitcoin, and using real money to buy virtual goods, etc., and your novel, Makers, involves events after a global economic collapse, and some of your other work touches on this theme as well. I had read online that, when you were asked why you moved out of London to Los Angeles, you said, "London is a city whose two priorities are being a playground for the corrupt global elites who turn neighborhoods into soulless collections of empty safe deposit boxes in the sky, and encouraging feckless criminality of the finance industry."
CD: I think that's still true of London.
SDLS: But then you moved to L.A., I mean, don't you think your statement applies everywhere these days?
CD: Well, I would have to say that, in London, they perfect it. I mean, you're right that the finance and property speculation in the conversion of shelter from a human right and human essential into an asset class to be speculated on is certainly a plague in every city, but in London, it's of a wholly different character in terms of the extremes it goes to there, so I think it's a different story with London. Yeah, I think L.A. is different. L.A.'s finance industry is at least expressed through a product, which is movies, and in London there is no product. It's just finance. It's money turned into other money turned into more money. It's synthetic bonds, and collateralized debt obligations, you know, bonds that are based on other bonds. It's like literally, nothing, and yet trillions of dollars being created out of thin air in a way that tanks the world's economy.
SDLS: Like Wall Street.
CD: Yeah, well all of the worst stuff that Wall Street did was done in London. So, all of AIG's worst paper was written in the city London, in the financial district there, and a lot in New York because they incorporated as subsidiaries in London, where the financial rules are at their most lax.
SDLS: Given the socio-political themes in much of your work, do you feel it's your job as a writer to offer solutions, do you have any practical advice to give in these areas, or do you feel it is your role as writer to just start a conversation?
CD: I think there is no path from A to Z. The first casualty of the battle is the plan of attack, so trying to chart a course to a better world is impossible. But, trying to find a vector towards a better world, a step we can take that makes the world materially better, so that from that new vantage point we might see another step we can take, I think that's eminently possible.
Additional info here:
http://sandiegoliteraryscene.blogspot.com/2017/07/comickaze-comics-hosted-cory-doctorow.html
http://craphound.com/
http://clarion.ucsd.edu/
http://sandiegoliteraryscene.blogspot.com/2017/06/clarions-8th-annual-write-thon-science.html
http://comickaze.com/
http://www.writersdigest.com/writing-articles/by-writing-goal/get-published-sell-my-work/inside-the-mind-of-cory-doctorow
http://www.npr.org/2017/04/27/523587179/in-walkaway-a-blueprint-for-a-new-weird-but-better-worldLabels: Author Interviews
