Cory Doctorow - Eastern Standard Tribe

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Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe 1

Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory Doctorow

doctorow@craphound.com

http://www.craphound.com/est

Tor Books, March 2004

ISBN: 0765307596

Blurbs:

“Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar—a hard

combination to beat (or, these days, to find).”

- William Gibson,

Author of Neuromancer

“Cory Doctorow knocks me out. In a good way.“

- Pat Cadigan,

Author of Synners

“Cory Doctorow is just far enough ahead of the game to give

you that authentic chill of the future, and close enough to home

for us to know that he’s talking about where we live as well as

where we’re going to live; a connected world full of

disconnected people. One of whom is about to lobotomise

himself through the nostril with a pencil. Funny as hell and

sharp as steel.”

- Warren Ellis,

Author of Transmetropolitan

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe 2

A note about this book:

Last year, in January 2003, my first novel

[http://craphound.com/down] came out. I was 31 years old, and

I’d been calling myself a novelist since the age of 12. It was the

storied dream-of-a-lifetime, come-true-at-last. I was and am

proud as hell of that book, even though it is just one book

among many released last year, better than some, poorer than

others; and even though the print-run (which sold out very

quickly!) though generous by science fiction standards, hardly

qualifies it as a work of mass entertainment.

The thing that’s extraordinary about that first novel is that it

was released under terms governed by a Creative Commons

[http://creativecommons.org ] license that allowed my readers

to copy the book freely and distribute it far and wide. Hundreds

of thousands of copies of the book were made and distributed

this way. Hundreds of thousands.

Today, I release my second novel, and my third

[http://www.argosymag.com/NextIssue.html], a collaboration

with Charlie Stross is due any day, and two

[http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/show.html?fn.preview_do

ctorow] more

[http://www.craphound.com/usrbingodexcerpt.txt] are under

contract. My career as a novelist is now well underway—in

other words, I am firmly afoot on a long road that stretches into

the future: my future, science fiction’s future, publishing’s

future and the future of the world. The future is my business,

more or less. I’m a science fiction writer. One way to know the

future is to look good and hard at the present. Here’s a thing

I’ve noticed about the present: more people are reading more

words off of more screens than ever before. Here’s another

thing I’ve noticed about the present: fewer people are reading

fewer words off of fewer pages than ever before. That

doesn’t mean that the book is dying—no more than the advent

of the printing press and the de-emphasis of Bible-copying

monks meant that the book was dying—but it does mean that

the book is changing. I think that literature is alive and well:

we’re reading our brains out! I just think that the complex

social practice of “book”—of which a bunch of paper pages

between two covers is the mere expression—is transforming

and will transform further.

I intend on figuring out what it’s transforming into. I intend on

figuring out the way that some writers—that this writer, right

here, wearing my underwear—is going to get rich and famous

from his craft. I intend on figuring out how this writer’s words

can become part of the social discourse, can be relevant in the

way that literature at its best can be.

I don’t know what the future of book looks like. To figure it

out, I’m doing some pretty basic science. I’m peering into this

opaque, inscrutable system of publishing as it sits in the year

2004, and I’m making a perturbation. I’m stirring the pot to see

what surfaces, so that I can see if the system reveals itself to

me any more thoroughly as it roils. Once that happens, maybe

I’ll be able to formulate an hypothesis and try an experiment or

two and maybe—just maybe—I’ll get to the bottom of book-

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe 3

in-2004 and beat the competition to making it work, and maybe

I’ll go home with all (or most) of the marbles.

It’s a long shot, but I’m a pretty sharp guy, and I know as much

about this stuff as anyone out there. More to the point, trying

stuff and doing research yields a non-zero chance of success.

The alternatives—sitting pat, or worse, getting into a moral

panic about “piracy” and accusing the readers who are blazing

new trail of “the moral equivalent of shoplifting”—have a zero

percent chance of success.

Most artists never “succeed” in the sense of attaining fame and

modest fortune. A career in the arts is a risky long-shot kind of

business. I’m doing what I can to sweeten my odds.

So here we are, and here is novel number two, a book called

Eastern Standard Tribe, which you can walk into shops all over

the world and buy as a physical artifact

[http://craphound.com/est/buy.php ]—a very nice physical

artifact, designed by Chesley-award-winning art director Irene

Gallo and her designer Shelley Eshkar, published by Tor

Books, a huge, profit-making arm of an enormous,

multinational publishing concern. Tor is watching what

happens to this book nearly as keenly as I am, because we’re

all very interested in what the book is turning into.

To that end, here is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file.

A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an

instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very

quickly from one place to another; and using personal

computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange

collections of bits. These tools demand that their users copy

and slice and dice—rip, mix and burn!—and that’s what I’m

hoping you will do with this.

Not (just) because I’m a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not

because Tor is run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have

been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because

you—the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers—hold in your

collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers

are a dime a dozen. Everybody’s got a novel in her or him.

Readers are a precious commodity. You’ve got all the money

and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network

that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten,

and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its

author, changing the world in some meaningful way.

I’m unashamedly exploiting your imagination. Imagine me a

new practice of book, readers. Take this novel and pass it from

inbox to inbox, through your IM clients, over P2P networks.

Put it on webservers. Convert it to weird, obscure ebook

formats. Show me—and my colleagues, and my

publisher—what the future of book looks like.

I’ll keep on writing them if you keep on reading them. But as

cool and wonderful as writing is, it’s not half so cool as

inventing the future. Thanks for helping me do it.

Here’s a summary of the license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe 4

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-

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Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe 8

Dedication

For my parents.

For my family.

For everyone who helped me up and for everyone I let down.

You know who you are. Sincerest thanks and most heartfelt

apologies.

Cory

I once had a Tai Chi instructor who explained the difference

between Chinese and Western medicine thus: “Western

medicine is based on corpses, things that you discover by

cutting up dead bodies and pulling them apart. Chinese

medicine is based on living flesh, things observed from vital,

moving humans.”

The explanation, like all good propaganda, is stirring and

stilted, and not particularly accurate, and gummy as the hook

from a top-40 song, sticky in your mind in the sleep-deprived

noontime when the world takes on a hallucinatory hypperreal

clarity. Like now as I sit here in my underwear on the roof of a

sanatorium in the back woods off Route 128, far enough from

the perpetual construction of Boston that it’s merely a cloud of

dust like a herd of distant buffalo charging the plains. Like now

as I sit here with a pencil up my nose, thinking about

homebrew lobotomies and wouldn’t it be nice if I gave myself

one.

Deep breath.

The difference between Chinese medicine and Western

medicine is the dissection versus the observation of the thing in

motion. The difference between reading a story and studying a

story is the difference between living the story and killing the

story and looking at its guts.

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe 9

School! We sat in English class and we dissected the stories

that I’d escaped into, laid open their abdomens and tagged their

organs, covered their genitals with polite sterile drapes,

recorded dutiful notes en masse that told us what the story was

about, but never what the story was. Stories are propaganda,

virii that slide past your critical immune system and insert

themselves directly into your emotions. Kill them and cut them

open and they’re as naked as a nightclub in daylight.

The theme. The first step in dissecting a story is euthanizing it:

“What is the theme of this story?”

Let me kill my story before I start it, so that I can dissect it and

understand it. The theme of this story is: “Would you rather be

smart or happy?”

This is a work of propaganda. It’s a story about choosing

smarts over happiness. Except if I give the pencil a push: then

it’s a story about choosing happiness over smarts. It’s a

morality play, and the first character is about to take the stage.

He’s a foil for the theme, so he’s drawn in simple lines. Here

he is:

Art Berry was born to argue.

There are born assassins. Bred to kill, raised on cunning and

speed, they are the stuff of legend, remorseless and

unstoppable. There are born ballerinas, confectionery girls

whose parents subject them to rigors every bit as intense as the

tripwire and poison on which the assassins are reared. There

are children born to practice medicine or law; children born to

serve their nations and die heroically in the noble tradition of

their forebears; children born to tread the boards or shred the

turf or leave smoking rubber on the racetrack.

Art’s earliest memory: a dream. He is stuck in the waiting

room of one of the innumerable doctors who attended him in

his infancy. He is perhaps three, and his attention span is

already as robust as it will ever be, and in his dream—which is

fast becoming a nightmare—he is bored silly.

The only adornment in the waiting room is an empty cylinder

that once held toy blocks. Its label colorfully illustrates the

blocks, which look like they’d be a hell of a lot of fun, if

someone hadn’t lost them all.

Near the cylinder is a trio of older children, infinitely

fascinating. They confer briefly, then do something to the

cylinder, and it unravels, extruding into the third dimension,

turning into a stack of blocks.

Cory Doctorow Eastern Standard Tribe 10

Aha! thinks Art, on waking. This is another piece of the secret

knowledge that older people posses, the strange magic that is

used to operate cars and elevators and shoelaces.

Art waits patiently over the next year for a grownup to show

him how the blocks-from-pictures trick works, but none ever

does. Many other mysteries are revealed, each one more

disappointingly mundane than the last: even flying a plane

seemed easy enough when the nice stew let him ride up in the

cockpit for a while en route to New York—Art’s awe at the

complexity of adult knowledge fell away. By the age of five,

he was stuck in a sort of perpetual terrible twos, fearlessly

shouting “no” at the world’s every rule, arguing the morals and

reason behind them until the frustrated adults whom he was

picking on gave up and swatted him or told him that that was

just how it was.

In the Easter of his sixth year, an itchy-suited and hard-shoed

visit to church with his Gran turned into a raging holy war that

had the parishioners and the clergy arguing with him in teams

and relays.

It started innocently enough: “Why does God care if we take

off our hats, Gran?” But the nosy ladies in the nearby pews

couldn’t bear to simply listen in, and the argument spread like

ripples on a pond, out as far as the pulpit, where the priest

decided to squash the whole line of inquiry with some half-

remembered philosophical word games from Descartes in

which the objective truth of reality is used to prove the

beneficence of God and vice-versa, and culminates with “I

think therefore I am.” Father Ferlenghetti even managed to

work it into the thread of the sermon, but before he could go

on, Art’s shrill little voice answered from within the

congregation.

Amazingly, the six-year-old had managed to assimilate all of

Descartes’s fairly tricksy riddles in as long as it took to

describe them, and then went on to use those same arguments

to prove the necessary cruelty of God, followed by the

necessary nonexistence of the Supreme Being, and Gran tried

to take him home then, but the priest—who’d watched Jesuits

play intellectual table tennis and recognized a natural when he

saw one—called him to the pulpit, whence Art took on the

entire congregation, singly and in bunches, as they assailed his

reasoning and he built it back up, laying rhetorical traps that

they blundered into with all the cunning of a cabbage. Father

Ferlenghetti laughed and clarified the points when they were

stuttered out by some marble-mouthed rhetorical amateur from

the audience, then sat back and marveled as Art did his thing.

Not much was getting done vis-a-vis sermonizing, and there

was still the Communion to be administered, but God knew it

had been a long time since the congregation was engaged so

thoroughly with coming to grips with God and what their faith

meant.

Afterwards, when Art was returned to his scandalized, thin-

lipped Gran, Father Ferlenghetti made a point of warmly

embracing her and telling her that Art was welcome at his

pulpit any time, and suggested a future in the seminary. Gran

was amazed, and blushed under her Sunday powder, and the

clawed hand on his shoulder became a caress.

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CoryDoctorowEasternStandardTribe1EasternStandardTribeCoryDoctorowCopyright2004CoryDoctorowdoctorow@craphound.comhttp://www.craphound.com/estTorBooks,March2004ISBN:0765307596Blurbs:“Utterlycontemporaryanddeeplypeculiar—ahardcombinationtobeat(or,thesedays,tofind).”-WilliamGibson,AuthorofNeuromancer“Co...

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