Happy birthday to the pioneering Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorowby Jonathan Worth, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Influential blogger, journalist, and author Cory Doctorow contributes daily to Pluralistic, a monthly column for Locus, regularly to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Deeplinks, and numerous other venues. He is a vocal advocate of the Creative Commons, having published a majority of his works under that license. Doctorow co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, and serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Open Technology Fund, and the Metabrainz Foundation.

His numerous acclaimed, award-winning works include Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003; winner of Locus Award for Best First Novel), A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003; Sunburst Award), Little Brother (2008; John W. Campbell Memorial, Prometheus, Sunburst, and White Pine Award), Pirate Cinema (2012; Prometheus Award), Homeland (2013; Prometheus Award), and Walkaway (2017; Dragon Award). Additionally, Cory has won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer and The Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

Other works include Eastern Standard Tribe (2004), Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005), Little Brother (2008), Makers (2009), For the Win (2010), The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (2011), The Rapture of the Nerds (2012 with Charles Stross), In Real Life (2014 with Jen Wang), Poesy the Monster Slayer (2020; illustrated by Matt Rockefeller), Attack Surface (2020), and Red Team Blues (2023).

Doctorow’s many non fiction books include The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction (2000 with Karl Schroeder), Essential Blogging (2002), CONTENT: SELECTED ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY, CREATIVITY, COPYRIGHT, AND THE FUTURE OF THE FUTURE (2008), CONTEXT: FURTHER SELECTED ESSAYS ON PRODUCTIVITY, CREATIVITY, PARENTING, AND POLITICS IN THE 21ST CENTURY (2011), Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (2014), How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (2020), and Chokepoint Capitalism (2022 with Rebecca Giblin).

Much of his short fiction has been collected in A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2003), Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (2007), Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now (2008 in graphic format with James Anthony Kuhoric, Dara Naraghi, Dan Taylor, and J. C. Vaughn), With a Little Help (2009), Overclocked: More Stories of the Future Present (2016), and Radicalized (2019). Alongside Holly Phillips, Doctorow co-edited Tesseracts Eleven: Amazing Canadian Speculative Fiction (2007).

All of us at Tachyon, wish the visionary Cory a happy birthday. Bet he saw that coming.