Stephen Rees's blog

I was surprised and charmed to get an email from Cory Doctorow this morning. He had my email address since I wrote to him back in 2013 about an error I found in an ebook of his.

I am also authorised by his email to share its content with you. 

Tell your friends!  Social media is actually good for something,
every once in a while!

So I am going to share with you the opportunity to buy his latest audiobook for less than it will cost when it is published on October 13. 

Now I am going to overshare with you material that is about me – and you really want to read about this opportunity – but you can always scroll down now and come back later if you want. I don’t like audiobooks. I don’t listen to them. Or podcasts come to that. I don’t like my attention being monopolized any more. Which is odd because back in the day I was often entranced by radio – especially stories and drama. In fact for while I liked radio better than tv. When I first encountered “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”, that was on radio. Now I like reading and  prefer old fashioned dead tree books, but put up with ebooks because sometimes they are free and occasionally more convenient than a real book. For instance in the old days when travelling. I haven’t been anywhere at all since January and don’t plan to go anywhere anytime soon. So when I got this offer I wasn’t sure that I was going to take this offer up.  

What Cory Doctorow has done is to start crowdfunding. And when I went to his page I found that there was a great more on offer than just one new audiobook

you can pre-order the ebook – and also buy the previous
ebooks and audiobooks (read by Wil Wheaton and Kirby Heyborne) – all DRM free, all free of license “agreements.”

The deal is: “You bought it, you own it, don’t violate copyright law and
we’re good.”

So to backtrack just a little, here is the deal that Cory offered which I am passing along:

Attack Surface – AKA Little Brother 3- is coming out in
5 weeks. I retained audio rights and produced an AMAZING edition that
Audible refuses to carry. You can pre-order the audiobook, ebook (and
previous volumes), DRM- and EULA-free.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book

That’s the summary, but the details matter. First: the book itself.
ATTACK SURFACE is a standalone Little Brother book about Masha, the
young woman from the start and end of the other two books; unlike
Marcus, who fights surveillance tech, Masha builds it.

Attack Surface is the story of how Masha has a long-overdue moral
reckoning with the way that her work has hurt people, something she
finally grapples with when she comes home to San Francisco.

Masha learns her childhood best friend is leading a BLM-style uprising –
and she’s being targeted by the same cyberweapons that Masha built to
hunt Iraqi insurgents and post-Soviet democracy movements.

I wrote Little Brother in 2006, it came out in 2008, and people tell me
it’s “prescient” because the digital human rights issues it grapples
with – high-tech authoritarianism and high-tech resistance – are so
present in our current world. But it’s not so much prescient as
OBSERVANT. I wrote Little Brother during the Bush administration’s
vicious, relentless, tech-driven war on human rights. Little Brother was
a bet that these would not get better on their own.

And it was a bet that tales of seizing the means of computation would
inspire people to take up digital arms of their own. It worked. Hundreds
of cryptographers, security experts, cyberlawyers, etc have told me that
Little Brother started them on their paths.

ATTACK SURFACE – a technothriller about racial injustice, police
brutality, high-tech turnkey totalitarianism, mass protests and mass
surveillance – was written between May 2016 and Nov 2018, before the
current uprisings and the tech worker walkouts.

But just as with Little Brother, the seeds of the current situation were
all around us in 2016, and if Little Brother inspired a cohort of
digital activists, I hope Attack Surface will give a much-needed push to
a group of techies (currently) on the wrong side of history.

As I learned from Little Brother, there is something powerful about
technologically rigorous thrillers about struggles for justice – stories
that marry excitement, praxis and ethics. Of all my career achievements,
the people I’ve reached this way matter the most.

 

 

So I am having so much fun trying to get this blog post to format properly thanks to WordPress imposing its new block system – where the old “classic” method is just another block.

What I can tell you is there is something mesmerising about watching this crowdfunder takeoff in front of your eyes. Click that kickstarter link to see how far he has got. Last time I looked it was four times the goal already with another 29 days to go.

And I started typing this before I had decided which of the offers I was going to choose. Ebooks of course. But just this one or all three? Hmmm.

I can tell you that a Doctorow book is all engrossing, hard to put down and gets under your skin. I also follow @doctorow on twitter – and there is also Boing Boing and Craphound – where you can also find all of this content too. And there is also pluralistic.net

Good luck Mr Doctorow – you deserve it!