Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe
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Cory Doctorow >> Eastern Standard Tribe
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12 Cory Doctorow
Copyright 2004 Cory Doctorow
doctorow@craphound.com
http://www.craphound.com/est
Tor Books, March 2004
ISBN: 0765307596
--
=======
Blurbs:
=======
"Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar -- a hard combination to beat
(or, these days, to find)."
- William Gibson,
Author of Neuromancer
--
"Cory Doctorow knocks me out. In a good way."
- Pat Cadigan,
Author of Synners
--
"Cory Doctorow is just far enough ahead of the game to give you that authentic
chill of the future, and close enough to home for us to know that he's talking
about where we live as well as where we're going to live; a connected world
full of disconnected people. One of whom is about to lobotomise himself through
the nostril with a pencil. Funny as hell and sharp as steel."
- Warren Ellis,
Author of Transmetropolitan
--
=======================
A note about this book:
=======================
Last year, in January 2003, my first novel [ http://craphound.com/down ] came
out. I was 31 years old, and I'd been calling myself a novelist since the age of
12. It was the storied dream-of-a-lifetime, come-true-at-last. I was and am
proud as hell of that book, even though it is just one book among many released
last year, better than some, poorer than others; and even though the print-run
(which sold out very quickly!) though generous by science fiction standards,
hardly qualifies it as a work of mass entertainment.
The thing that's extraordinary about that first novel is that it was released
under terms governed by a Creative Commons [ http://creativecommons.org ]
license that allowed my readers to copy the book freely and distribute it far
and wide. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the book were made and distributed
this way. *Hundreds* of *thousands*.
Today, I release my second novel, and my third [
http://www.argosymag.com/NextIssue.html ], a collaboration with Charlie Stross
is due any day, and two [
http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/show.html?fn.preview_doctorow ] more [
http://www.craphound.com/usrbingodexcerpt.txt ] are under contract. My career as
a novelist is now well underway -- in other words, I am firmly afoot on a long
road that stretches into the future: my future, science fiction's future,
publishing's future and the future of the world.
The future is my business, more or less. I'm a science fiction writer. One way
to know the future is to look good and hard at the present. Here's a thing I've
noticed about the present: MORE PEOPLE ARE READING MORE WORDS OFF OF MORE
SCREENS THAN EVER BEFORE. Here's another thing I've noticed about the present:
FEWER PEOPLE ARE READING FEWER WORDS OFF OF FEWER PAGES THAN EVER BEFORE. That
doesn't mean that the book is *dying* -- no more than the advent of the printing
press and the de-emphasis of Bible-copying monks meant that the book was dying
-- but it does mean that the book is changing. I think that *literature* is
alive and well: we're reading our brains out! I just think that the complex
social practice of "book" -- of which a bunch of paper pages between two covers
is the mere expression -- is transforming and will transform further.
I intend on figuring out what it's transforming into. I intend on figuring out
the way that some writers -- that *this writer*, right here, wearing my
underwear -- is going to get rich and famous from his craft. I intend on
figuring out how *this writer's* words can become part of the social discourse,
can be relevant in the way that literature at its best can be.
I don't know what the future of book looks like. To figure it out, I'm doing
some pretty basic science. I'm peering into this opaque, inscrutable system of
publishing as it sits in the year 2004, and I'm making a perturbation. I'm
stirring the pot to see what surfaces, so that I can see if the system reveals
itself to me any more thoroughly as it roils. Once that happens, maybe I'll be
able to formulate an hypothesis and try an experiment or two and maybe -- just
maybe -- I'll get to the bottom of book-in-2004 and beat the competition to
making it work, and maybe I'll go home with all (or most) of the marbles.
It's a long shot, but I'm a pretty sharp guy, and I know as much about this
stuff as anyone out there. More to the point, trying stuff and doing research
yields a non-zero chance of success. The alternatives -- sitting pat, or worse,
getting into a moral panic about "piracy" and accusing the readers who are
blazing new trail of "the moral equivalent of shoplifting" -- have a *zero*
percent chance of success.
Most artists never "succeed" in the sense of attaining fame and modest fortune.
A career in the arts is a risky long-shot kind of business. I'm doing what I can
to sweeten my odds.
So here we are, and here is novel number two, a book called Eastern Standard
Tribe, which you can walk into shops all over the world and buy [
http://craphound.com/est/buy.php ] as a physical artifact -- a very nice
physical artifact, designed by Chesley-award-winning art director Irene Gallo
and her designer Shelley Eshkar, published by Tor Books, a huge, profit-making
arm of an enormous, multinational publishing concern. Tor is watching what
happens to this book nearly as keenly as I am, because we're all very interested
in what the book is turning into.
To that end, here is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of
text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet,
a tool designed to copy things very quickly from one place to another; and using
personal computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of
bits. These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice -- rip, mix
and burn! -- and that's what I'm hoping you will do with this.
Not (just) because I'm a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is 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.
I'm unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a new practice of book,
readers. Take this novel and pass it from inbox to inbox, through your IM
clients, over P2P networks. Put it on webservers. Convert it to weird, obscure
ebook formats. Show me -- and my colleagues, and my publisher -- what the future
of book looks like.
I'll keep on writing them if you keep on reading them. But as cool and wonderful
as writing is, it's not half so cool as inventing the future. Thanks for helping
me do it.
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--
Dedication
For my parents.
For my family.
For everyone who helped me up and for everyone I let down. You know who you are.
Sincerest thanks and most heartfelt apologies.
Cory
--
1.
I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference between Chinese and
Western medicine thus: "Western medicine is based on corpses, things that you
discover by cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese medicine is
based on living flesh, things observed from vital, moving humans."
The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and stilted, and not
particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook from a top-40 song, sticky in your
mind in the sleep-deprived noontime when the world takes on a hallucinatory
hypperreal clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a
sanatorium in the back woods off Route 128, far enough from the perpetual
construction of Boston that it's merely a cloud of dust like a herd of distant
buffalo charging the plains. Like now as I sit here with a pencil up my nose,
thinking about homebrew lobotomies and wouldn't it be nice if I gave myself one.
Deep breath.
The difference between Chinese medicine and Western medicine is the dissection
versus the observation of the thing in motion. The difference between reading a
story and studying a story is the difference between living the story and
killing the story and looking at its guts.
School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories that I'd escaped
into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their organs, covered their genitals
with polite sterile drapes, recorded dutiful notes *en masse* that told us what
the story was about, but never what the story *was*. Stories are propaganda,
virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert themselves directly
into your emotions. Kill them and cut them open and they're as naked as a
nightclub in daylight.
The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it: "What is the
theme of this story?"
Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and understand
it. The theme of this story is: "Would you rather be smart or happy?"
This is a work of propaganda. It's a story about choosing smarts over happiness.
Except if I give the pencil a push: then it's a story about choosing happiness
over smarts. It's a morality play, and the first character is about to take the
stage. He's a foil for the theme, so he's drawn in simple lines. Here he is:
2.
Art Berry was born to argue.
There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and speed, they are
the stuff of legend, remorseless and unstoppable. There are born ballerinas,
confectionery girls whose parents subject them to rigors every bit as intense as
the tripwire and poison on which the assassins are reared. There are children
born to practice medicine or law; children born to serve their nations and die
heroically in the noble tradition of their forebears; children born to tread the
boards or shred the turf or leave smoking rubber on the racetrack.
Art's earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting room of one of the
innumerable doctors who attended him in his infancy. He is perhaps three, and
his attention span is already as robust as it will ever be, and in his dream --
which is fast becoming a nightmare -- he is bored silly.
The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder that once held toy
blocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the blocks, which look like they'd be a
hell of a lot of fun, if someone hadn't lost them all.
Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely fascinating. They
confer briefly, then do *something* to the cylinder, and it unravels, extruding
into the third dimension, turning into a stack of blocks.
Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret knowledge that
older people possess, the strange magic that is used to operate cars and
elevators and shoelaces.
Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show him how the
blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever does. Many other mysteries are
revealed, each one more disappointingly mundane than the last: even flying a
plane seemed easy enough when the nice stew let him ride up in the cockpit for a
while en route to New York -- Art's awe at the complexity of adult knowledge
fell away. By the age of five, he was stuck in a sort of perpetual terrible
twos, fearlessly shouting "no" at the world's every rule, arguing the morals and
reason behind them until the frustrated adults whom he was picking on gave up
and swatted him or told him that that was just how it was.
In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed visit to church
with his Gran turned into a raging holy war that had the parishioners and the
clergy arguing with him in teams and relays.
It started innocently enough: "Why does God care if we take off our hats, Gran?"
But the nosy ladies in the nearby pews couldn't bear to simply listen in, and
the argument spread like ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where the
priest decided to squash the whole line of inquiry with some half-remembered
philosophical word games from Descartes in which the objective truth of reality
is used to prove the beneficence of God and vice-versa, and culminates with "I
think therefore I am." Father Ferlenghetti even managed to work it into the
thread of the sermon, but before he could go on, Art's shrill little voice
answered from within the congregation.
Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of Descartes's fairly
tricksy riddles in as long as it took to describe them, and then went on to use
those same arguments to prove the necessary cruelty of God, followed by the
necessary nonexistence of the Supreme Being, and Gran tried to take him home
then, but the priest -- who'd watched Jesuits play intellectual table tennis and
recognized a natural when he saw one -- called him to the pulpit, whence Art
took on the entire congregation, singly and in bunches, as they assailed his
reasoning and he built it back up, laying rhetorical traps that they blundered
into with all the cunning of a cabbage. Father Ferlenghetti laughed and
clarified the points when they were stuttered out by some marble-mouthed
rhetorical amateur from the audience, then sat back and marveled as Art did his
thing. Not much was getting done vis-a-vis sermonizing, and there was still the
Communion to be administered, but God knew it had been a long time since the
congregation was engaged so thoroughly with coming to grips with God and what
their faith meant.
Afterwards, when Art was returned to his scandalized, thin-lipped Gran, Father
Ferlenghetti made a point of warmly embracing her and telling her that Art was
welcome at his pulpit any time, and suggested a future in the seminary. Gran was
amazed, and blushed under her Sunday powder, and the clawed hand on his shoulder
became a caress.
3.
The theme of this story is choosing smarts over happiness, or maybe happiness
over smarts. Art's a good guy. He's smart as hell. That's his schtick. If he
were a cartoon character, he'd be the pain-in-the-ass poindexter who is all the
time dispelling the mysteries that fascinate his buddies. It's not easy being
Art's friend.
Which is, of course, how Art ("not his real name") ended up sitting 45 stories
over the woodsy Massachusetts countryside, hot August wind ruffling his hair and
blowing up the legs of his boxers, pencil in his nose, euthanizing his story
preparatory to dissecting it. In order to preserve the narrative integrity, Art
("not his real name") may take some liberties with the truth. This is
autobiographical fiction, after all, not an autobiography.
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