December 12, 2011
This short collection harnesses the harmlessly nihilistic title story with the essay “Creativity vs. Copyright” and Terry Bisson’s interview with Doctorow. In the novella, a young man wanders an America where extremist factions armed with powerful technology have shattered the old social order, replacing it only with often violent chaos. The essay is classic Doctorow on copyright, denouncing its extreme applications as destructive and counterproductive. The rambling interview discusses the Web site BoingBoing, where Doctorow’s an editor; his work habits; and the present state of young adult fiction. “The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” is harmlessly nihilistic. The interview is the high point of this short book, particularly the examination of the parallels between BoingBoing and Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, a 1970s collection presenting tools both technophile and traditional. Agent: Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency.
January 1, 2012
Doctorow is a highly respected blogger (as coeditor of Boing Boing), a journalist, and a tireless advocate for the open-source movement to allow greater freedom to distribute content on the web, in such areas as digital-rights management and file sharing. He is also an award-winning writer of contemporary science fiction. In this bleak yet vibrantly populated novella (part of the PM Press Outspoken Authors series), Doctorow takes readers into the futuristic wasteland of Detroit, a toxic post-Disney dystopia where a wumpus-hunting Jimmy Yensid, a transhuman teenager, must choose between immortality and sex with Lacey Treehugger, the forbidden meat girl of his fantasies. This slim yet thought-provoking volume, which is available online as a free download via a Creative Commons license, will have Doctorow's hard-core fans buzzing, but it may be a bit too dark and dense for the casual sci-fi reader. A transcript of his Creativity vs. Copyright address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention and a lively interview with the outspoken author are also included.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)