Cory Doctorow (1971– ) is an award-winning and bestselling Canadian science fiction writer, critic, and public speaker born in Toronto who serves as coeditor of the website Boing Boing. In the 1990s he founded the free software corporation Opencola. Later, he relocated to London and worked as the European affairs coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helping to establish the Open Rights Group, before becoming a full-time writer in 2006. Doctorow was named the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright chair for public diplomacy; the position included a one-year residency at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
In the context of science fiction, Doctorow attended the 1992 Clarion writers’ workshop and won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2000. He has won multiple other awards, including the Locus Award in 2004 for his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003); the Sunburst Award (2004); and two Prometheus Awards (2009 and 2014). He has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and his career has at times been intertwined with that of Charles Stross, with whom he has collaborated on fiction.
Doctorow as writer and activist is highly aware of the transformations the human race is facing. Much of his work consists of nonfiction advocacy, as collected in Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future (2008) and Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free (2014). He has complex views on the relationship of the information-dense world we now inhabit and the free flow of information within this network, where (he feels) we now essentially live and work. His most influential novel is Little Brother (2008), which was nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Awards. It won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Ontario Library Association White Pine Award, as well as the Indienet Award for bestselling young adult novel in independent bookstores. The novel is also the most consciously near-future of his science fiction work. Prior to Little Brother, much of Doctorow’s science fiction was fairly far-future in its approach. A sequel to Little Brother, Homeland, was published in 2013.
Doctorow first came to wide attention in the science fiction community for his story “Craphound,” reprinted here, in which aliens turn out to conceive of the marks and detritus of our human passage over the planet as collectible. It is a fascinating exploration of the modern “culture of things” and also deeply funny and wise.