A short life of the author
Cory Efram Doctorow (b. 1971) was born on 17 July 1971 in Toronto, Canada, and holds both Canadian and British citizenship. He did not attend university. He has worked in software, ran a bookshop, and was the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation from 2002 to 2006. He lives in Los Angeles.
Life and Career
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) — a post-scarcity novel set in Walt Disney World — was his debut and one of the first novels released simultaneously in print and under a Creative Commons licence. This open-access approach — giving away digital copies to sell more physical books — became his signature publishing model and proved enormously influential.
Little Brother (2008) — a YA novel about Marcus Yallow, a San Francisco teenager who organises resistance against government surveillance after a terrorist attack — was a landmark in activist fiction. It was adopted by schools and civil liberties organisations and introduced a generation to concepts of digital privacy and encryption. Homeland (2013) and Attack Surface (2020) are sequels.
Walkaway (2017) — about people who abandon conventional society to build open-source, post-scarcity communities — is his most ambitious adult novel. Radicalized (2019) — four novellas about technology and social collapse — and Red Team Blues (2023) — a thriller about cryptocurrency and forensic accounting — demonstrated his range.
Doctorow’s nonfiction — including Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (2014), How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (2021), and The Internet Con (2023) — is equally important. His concept of “enshittification” — the process by which platforms degrade their products to extract value — entered common usage in 2023.
Major Works and Themes
Doctorow writes about the politics of technology — who controls the tools, who benefits, and who is harmed. His fiction makes the case that technology is political and that citizens must fight to keep it democratic.
Key Works
- Little Brother (2008)
- Walkaway (2017)
- Red Team Blues (2023)
Collecting Doctorow
Most Doctorow titles are freely available digitally under Creative Commons. Physical first editions of Little Brother (2008, Tor) bring $30–$80. Signed copies are available from events.
Bibliography
| Title | Year | Publisher | Language |
|---|---|---|---|
| Attack Surface The adult sequel to Little Brother follows Masha Maximow — Marcus Yallow's former frenemy — who works for a private military contractor building surveillance systems for authoritarian regimes, then returns to San Francisco and must choose between her lucrative career and her conscience when the same tools she built abroad are deployed against protesters at home. | 2020 | Tor Books | English |
| Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom Doctorow's debut novel imagines a post-scarcity future where death has been cured, money replaced by 'Whuffie' (a reputation currency), and the great conflict of civilization is over the stewardship of Disney World — a satirical science fiction about what people fight over when material needs have been eliminated: status, legacy, and the right to shape collective memory. | 2003 | Tor Books | English |
| Eastern Standard Tribe In a near-future where people align themselves with global time zones rather than nations — forming 'tribes' based on when they're awake — Art Berry is a user-experience consultant caught between his loyalty to the Eastern Standard Tribe and his assignment to sabotage European competitors, told from a rooftop where he's contemplating whether he's crazy or the world is. | 2004 | Tor Books | English |
| Little Brother After a terrorist attack on San Francisco, seventeen-year-old Marcus Yallow is detained by the Department of Homeland Security, subjected to humiliating interrogation, and released with a warning to keep quiet — instead, he uses his hacking skills to lead a youth insurgency against the surveillance state, in Doctorow's most influential novel and a manual for digital resistance disguised as a young-adult thriller. | 2008 | Tor Teen | English |
| Makers Two hardware hackers in a Florida junkyard invent a new economy — repurposing discarded technology into useful products, creating a movement of small-scale manufacturing that threatens corporate America — in Doctorow's love letter to the maker movement and his most detailed exploration of what happens when innovation escapes institutional control. | 2009 | Tor Books | English |
| Radicalized Four linked novellas exploring how people radicalize under pressure: a man battles his health insurance company for his wife's cancer treatment; a Superman analogue watches America descend into fascism; preppers build a bunker for a collapse that arrives differently than expected; and a woman discovers that her smart home has been weaponized against her — Doctorow's most focused fiction. | 2019 | Tor Books | English |
| Red Team Blues Martin Hench is a sixty-seven-year-old forensic accountant who has spent four decades following the money through Silicon Valley's darkest corners — and when a cryptocurrency scam leads to murder, he must use every trick he's learned to survive a conspiracy that stretches from the Bay Area's startup culture to its criminal underworld, in Doctorow's hardboiled detective novel about the real crime of the tech industry. | 2023 | Tor Books | English |
| Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Doctorow's strangest and most literary novel: Alan is the son of a mountain and a washing machine, one of his brothers is an island, another nests inside the others like Russian dolls, and a third keeps returning from the dead — a work of domestic magical realism crossed with a manifesto for municipal wireless networking, somehow. | 2005 | Tor Books | English |
| The Lost Cause In a near-future where the climate crisis has been acknowledged and massive Green New Deal infrastructure projects are underway, a young man in Burbank discovers that the most dangerous opposition comes not from climate deniers but from armed MAGA militias who would rather destroy their communities than share them with climate refugees — Doctorow's most hopeful and most frightening novel. | 2023 | Tor Books | English |
| Walkaway In a near-future of extreme wealth inequality, millions of people simply walk away from mainstream society to build their own communities in the abandoned ruins of the old economy — using open-source technology, post-scarcity manufacturing, and radical generosity as their operating principles — until the invention of uploaded consciousness threatens to make the walkaway revolution permanent. | 2017 | Tor Books | English |