From the SLiC Archives. This article was originally published in School Libraries in Canada, Volume 29 Number 1, Winter 2011. Refusing most interview requests at the time, Doctorow agreed to this one because of the nature of the publication. This extraordinary conversation ranges from Doctorow’s YA books, through the writer’s craft, and onto technology’s influence on social activism. Mr. Doctorow is a huge supporter of libraries and librarians, and readers will appreciate his thoughtful observations about our influence. Derrick Grose’s in-depth knowledge of Doctorow’s work informs his skillful questioning. This article is not to be missed!
Moving beyond “mountains of dead and mulched trees with interesting things inked on them”
A Canadian-born lover of books and prominent science fiction author, Cory Doctorow is a champion of the cause of freedom of access to knowledge. When asked to do an interview with School Libraries in Canada, he replied, “Generally, I’m not doing any interviews right now as I struggle with an imminent book deadline. However, given the nature of the publication, I feel duty-bound to do something with you, if we can make it happen….” He made it happen, and in the interview he reveals a few of the reasons for his commitment to positive social action, his deep-rooted attachment to school libraries, and his sense of common-cause with the library community in general.
Derrick Grose – Although you make your novels freely available on-line, you identify yourself as a lover of books. How did you become a book lover?
Cory Doctorow – I don’t actually remember a time when I wasn’t and I guess the cliché is that you become a book lover because your parents are and certainly I grew up in a very booky kind of household. There were books in every room of the house and that seems to have characterized my life every since. Everywhere that I go I seem to accumulate mountains of dead and mulched trees with interesting things inked on them.
DG – I remember reading that you have 10,000 books in storage in various cities.
CD – Not any more. I shipped two boxes worth over here to London and all the rest went into schools. There is a school in Toronto that has a really excellent science fiction collection.
DG – What prompted that decision?
CD – Honestly, it was Amazon. Amazon’s used book market place is so good that it is possible to replace almost any trade book of the last fifty years for pennies. The cost of storing the books was a lot more than pennies and it was much easier to access those books through Amazon than it was to get them from a box in a storage container on a different continent.
I grew up as a science fiction reader and then I worked in a science fiction book store in Toronto. Because of the short life cycle of paperback books and trade books, it was often the case that I was desperately scrambling to find some first volume or the third volume of a series of some beloved book that was out of print. Those books, my science fiction collection of writers who have influenced me, are my tools as a writer. It used to be the case that the only way to have that set of tools was to actually own those books and have them sitting on your shelves because, if you let go of one, you would never recover it. But that is not the case anymore.
DG – What has been the role of school libraries in the development of the love of books, the technological expertise and the social consciousness that is evident in your novels?
CD – I remember the first really substantial thing that happened to me in a school library. That was the day that they marched my grade three class down to the school library at Crestview Elementary and the school librarian explained the subject indices to us. It was like being led to a candy store; all of a sudden there was a key to all of the books on the shelves. I couldn’t have imagined this before. The potential made the blood rush in my ears. To be able to think of almost anything and go through that subject index and find those books was spectacular.
And then I worked at a number of school libraries. I spent one summer at a junior high in Toronto inputting the ISBN of every book in the entire collection as they moved from a card catalogue to their first digital catalogue. That was also kind of an education because a lot of the books pre-dated ISBN so I found myself looking at their Library of Congress numbers and starting to understand that there are multiple ways of organizing knowledge that suit different needs and that serve different audiences. I went from the revelation that there was one way to organize information, as was represented by the card catalogue, to the revelation that there was not one perfect way to do it. I think of it as like the David Weinberger revelation that everything is miscellaneous and that in fact what you really want to do is have lots of different ways to refer to and organize knowledge because any one way to do it is a constraint as much as it is an enabler.
DG – Your acclaimed young adult novels, Little Brother and For the Win, both allude to historical movements in the struggle for civil and human rights while showing how these struggles continue in contemporary times. What is responsible for your dedication to promoting social consciousness?
CD – That, like my love of books, comes from my parents who were career activists as well as being school teachers. My dad taught in the Toronto secondary school system and my mom was an elementary school teacher and then she worked at the Ministry of Education. They are both socialists. They are both feminists and they were both really involved in the anti-war and Trade Union movements. When I was five years old they told me that I was going to march at my aunt’s wedding and they asked me if I knew how to march. I think I shocked my very conservative baby-sitter when I answer, “Yes!” and stamped back and forth across the living room mimicking a protester carrying a placard and shouting, “Not the church and not the state, women must control their fate!” So I came by my social activism honestly.
DG – In your opinion, what elements in Little Brother and For the Win make them so appealing to a wide audience of young readers?
CD – For Little Brother, one of the things that younger readers really respond to is a combination of factors related to the memetic treatment of ICT. In literature and in science fiction in particular there are two approaches to technology.
One is to treat it as a plot device in which case you fudge it, and get it to do whatever you want it to do. With that approach goes technology that isn’t very interesting to begin with, or that your audience doesn’t know very much about. For a long time computers were treated in the first way because people didn’t have them, so you would have things like HAL.
The other approach makes readers aware of unexpected capacities in the technology they use. This approach makes it possible to engage an audience of contemporary adolescents by making technology the centrepiece of a puzzle. It explores what it means to be a hacker. Readers respond to a rigorous literary treatment of technology that engages them in fun intellectual games. There is a signal to the reader that they should pay attention to the computers because they are not merely about moving the plot along, but there is actually something interesting going on in connection with the technology. There is new real-world potential for these ubiquitous devices and it is being revealed in the context of the other things that are going on all around you. I think that the games in For the Win demonstrate this.
Teenagers in particular are fascinated by the dual nature of computers that on one hand can be used to attempt to control them but that, on the other hand, can be used to subvert that control. When I was a kid, activists had to spend a lot of time and money stuffing envelopes, putting up posters and making phone calls to get people to show up for a demonstration. Computers give us all of that for free, giving us time for doing much more interesting things than merely keeping one another abreast. Kids respond to that dual nature of computers because they can see how they are giving them more flexibility and autonomy in their lives but they can also see how they are reducing it. Whether or not they have articulated it yet, I think every kid would like to know how to emphasize the former and reduce the latter.
DG – You have put your finger on part of what gives the novels their impact for me. They mirror the ambiguities in computers and in society in a way that reflects the world around us.
CD – Fiction is a weird thing. It is pretty odd to have empathy for a fictional person but that is the crux of why we read fiction. You care whether little Nell lives or dies; care about whether or not the damsel in distress is rescued from the train track. In some ways it is like caring whether the stick man in hangman is going to survive but somehow, in the course of writing fiction, we are able to convince people’s brains that the things we are writing about are real enough to ascribe importance to, to create narrative tension. Part of the way we do that is through that long identified concept, the suspension of disbelief. People have to stop, momentarily, disbelieving what is obviously a fictional made-up thing in order for the fictional, made-up thing to work.
One thing that militates against the suspension of disbelief is something that is obviously untrue. Given that all fiction contains things that are obviously untrue, it is a question of choosing untrue thing that you are going to try to get the other side to believe in very carefully and minimizing them.
Obviously fiction is simplified from the real world and, in particular, science fiction chooses its battles. You speculate about the things you want to be allegorical about and you want to have a fairly realistic backdrop against which to speculate because that way it feels more realistic overall.
DG – At the end of Little Brother, Marcus Yallow has discredited the Department of Homeland Security and is working to mobilize voters to promote democracy in the United States. At the end of For the Win, the youthful labour activists have had their strike broken in China but there seems to be recognition in the corporate world that they have power and they must be negotiated with. At the conclusion of Makers, Perry and Lester seem to take refuge from the world in the workshop where they will engage in the creative tinkering that had absorbed them in their younger days.
Am I correct in detecting increasing shades of pessimism, especially in the conclusion of the last novel? Is the difference in perspective between the first two novels and the third simply a difference between novels directed at young adults and a novel for an older audience, or is your perspective changing?
CD – It is in fact a case of different endings for novels but, also, although the order of publication is misleading, Makers was in fact written first. The endings are germane to the questions that are raised in each novel. Many people have criticized Little Brother for having a downer ending because it didn’t end with Marcus defeating the war on terror, but it ends with Marcus going free and the war on terror going on. I think that is truer to the way the world works: a partnership that starts out using guerrilla tactics finds its way into more traditional politics. It’s not like that mysterious process in Marxist politics where there is suddenly an inexplicable withering away of the state; instead, the struggle goes on. But the battlefield has shifted.
I guess with Perry and Lester, artistically it made sense for that ending to be there. In terms of the polemic nature of the book, if I had to explain why it was like that, it was because they failed. They decided that they would have this loose unstructured thing and, as a result of having a loose unstructured thing it rose and fell. It didn’t have any staying power. It had all the advantages of a loose unstructured thing: it was really dynamic; it was able to accept input from all kinds of different sources and exploit a kind of collective intelligence because it didn’t have a central part telling everyone what they were going to do. However, their failure to make a kind of coherent movement out of what they were doing, a formal institution, meant that they had no institutional memory and their creation didn’t go on without them.
DG – Are the prospects for democracy in the world improving or deteriorating as a consequence of technological change? What are the key indicators that lead you to your conclusion?
CD – This business of it being cheaper than ever to form a group is really interesting and exciting. It means on one hand groups can form and take on bad actions, actions I would rather not take on, without having the sort of centralized institution that makes them much easier to identify. It is much easier to be a terrorist today. We know how to fight armies but we don’t really know how to fight terrorists. We treat them as criminals. We don’t know how to wage war on terrorists so we find ourselves in Afghanistan trying to fight a conventional war.
The world used to be rigidly divided along axes like materialist and spiritualist, centralized and decentralized, and what the lost cost of forming groups allows us to do is bring together people who agree on some issues to fight on just those issues. It used to be very hard to do that because the cost of bringing people together was so high, the cost of coordinating was so high that people were stuck in these coalitions that looked like left-wing and right-wing instead of deciding, “I’m going to get together with those people to save the whales even if we don’t share the same motivations or political beliefs.” And what that means is it is easier for us to find our common ground and act on it, and I think that is great for democracy. I don’t have a kind of “Is technology good or bad for democracy?” yes or no answer. What I think we have got is a changing landscape for democratic action as a consequence of technology that is good sometimes and bad sometimes.
DG – Is there anything you would like to add?
CD – There is always one thing that I tell librarians when I talk to them. I think that librarians as a group undervalue their force, the extent to which they are unimpeachable in a policy fight. As a group, librarians tend to be very well organized obviously but, in addition to that, when librarians say something, even something controversial about something like universal access to human knowledge, people may challenge what they say, but they won’t fault them on the basis that they 
are serving their own self-interest. Very few people will say, “Those librarians want universal access to human knowledge because it helps them to feather their nests. Everyone know that librarians are just well-fed millionaires.” You don’t become a librarian except for noble reasons so, when librarians speak, it does carry a lot of weight in policy fora. When Google says we should have balanced and sane copyright laws, people say you just want that because you want to make another million. Nobody says that to librarians. When you combine the incredible organizational acumen of librarianship as a profession with the moral unimpeachability of librarianship as a profession, you have an incredible unrealized force for good, and where librarians have acted nationally and internationally through things like IFLA, the ALA and CLA and so on, they have made a huge difference. I have worked alongside IFLA in connection with the United Nations World Information Property Organization and they are so effective when they speak because they come from a place that nobody can argue with. Nobody credible can say they hate librarians and just wish that they would go away. I want people reading this to know that if they go to their M.P.’s on issues like those around Bill C-32 and C-61, or the pending Canada – E.U. copyright treaty, if they to to the CRTC to see what they are negotiating like the carriage rules for Bell and net neutrality, and they speak to them as specialists in the preservation and diffusion of culture and knowledge, the politicians listen. They have to listen because everyone respects the trade.
DG – Thank you very much for your time and particularly for your inspirational reminder about our potentially important role in influencing political decision-makers to formulate information policy in ways that will help us to serve, as you said, as “specialists in the preservation and diffusion of culture and knowledge.”
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and the author of WALKAWAY, a novel for adults, a YA graphic novel called IN REAL LIFE, the nonfiction business book INFORMATION DOESN’T WANT TO BE FREE, and young adult novels like HOMELAND, PIRATE CINEMA and LITTLE BROTHER and novels for adults like RAPTURE OF THE NERDS and MAKERS. He works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is a MIT Media Lab Research Affiliate, is a Visiting Professor of Computer Science at Open University and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles. (craphound.com/bio/)
Derrick Grose, now retired from the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board where he was a secondary teacher-librarian, was the long-time Editor of School Libraries in Canada. Derrick was the 2014 recipient of the Canadian Library Association’s Angela Thacker Memorial Award for his outstanding contribution as the SLiC editor.