Cory Doctorow writes science fiction to come to terms with his tech anxiety
The Canadian journalist and writer discussed his latest novel Picks & Shovels on Bookends with Mattea Roach
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow has written six books in the past three years — and his work, both fiction and nonfiction, often grapples with the way we use the Internet, the need for conversation around digital rights and the changing world of corporate technology.
Doctorow's latest title is Picks & Shovels, the third book in his crime series about Martin Hench, which examines the early days of the PC and the possibilities for both exciting innovation and dangerous fraud it presented.
Picks & Shovels takes us back to the 1980s, the start of Hench's career as a forensic accountant in Silicon Valley, where he exposes the finance crimes and shady dealings of tech bros. In this novel, he teams up with three brilliant young women to take down a pyramid scheme masquerading as a computer company.
Doctorow is a Toronto-born author, activist and journalist living in Burbank. His writing, spanning nonfiction, fiction, and adult, YA and childhood audiences, has seen him inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and earned him the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award for lifetime achievement.
On Bookends with Mattea Roach, he discussed why technology is such an important subject in his writing.
Mattea Roach: You're constantly writing and speaking about technology and policy, but at the same time, you're also crafting these fun adventure crime novels. I tend to think of these as two very different types of work, but how do they work together for you, the fiction and the nonfiction and analysis?
Cory Doctorow: Well, the first thing I should say is that writing novels is an artistic activity. The point of art, irrespective of what medium, is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that is in a creative person's head and embody it in some intermediary medium. [Artists] hope that when an audience experiences the dance or the song or the painting or the photo or the book, that some facsimile of that big numinous, irreducible thing appears in their head.
The big, numinous, irreducible ideas that are mostly occupying my head are about how we relate to technology — both the promise and peril of ubiquitous technology. It's not necessarily that the fiction is didactic, although admittedly sometimes it is. It's just that the feeling, the structure of the feeling is the same.
MR: You've also talked before about writing being a therapeutic practice, that it's a way of processing your anxieties on the page. What are you anxious about that you feel like you need to process in fiction?
CD: Well, how long have you got? We are standing on the brink of incipient fascism and climate collapse and xenophobia, genocide, a pogrom against trans people, like you name it, it's happening.
Technology is very intimately interwoven into all of this. Technology is the medium through which these pathogenic views transmit themselves. It is the medium through which it traverses.
Technology is also the medium through which we fight it.-Cory Doctorow
It's also the medium through which we fight it, I think. I can't tell you how many long nights I spent riding a bicycle around the streets of Toronto with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of flyers trying to get people out to protest marches.
I don't ever want to organize a demonstration with wheat paste and flyers again. So, if this is our future, and I think it is, we better figure out how to make this digital nervous system fit for purpose, for human civilization, which involves necessarily creating some kind of response to the spread of these very dangerous currents through our technology.
MR: I want to talk about the character Martin Hench. We meet him in your first novel in the series, Red Team Blues, as this grizzled and hard-hitting forensic accountant who's got one job left before he retires. Can you tell us a bit more about him as a character? And what is forensic accounting?
CD: If you've watched CSI or whatever, forensics is figuring out what happened from the evidence available. So forensic accounting is figuring out where the money went — and there are a lot of people who make the money go places it's not supposed to go.
Marty Hench's origin story is that at the moment where a sizable fraction of the people who are first encountering a spreadsheet in the 1980s were thinking, "I can steal a lot of money with this," he was one of the very few people who are like, "Boy, I'm going to find a lot of money stolen by people dumber than me using this thing."
That is his story. 40 years in Silicon Valley being the Zelig of finance crime, unwinding every baroque scam that every self-important tech bro who thinks that they can design a system so fiendish that no one can ever unravel it.
MR: How do you see the role of fiction in helping us address some of these policy or moral, ethical, philosophical issues that we've been talking about?
CD: The reason I do this stuff is because I'm really worried about a world where technology is not under the control of the people who use it. What that world is going to look like.
Recently, I was at the University of Toronto to give an Ursula Franklin lecture. Ursula Franklin's jam was that the important thing about technology isn't the technical specifications of the gadget. It's who gets to use it and who gets it used upon them? What does it do and who does it do it to? And those social arrangements are up for grabs. They are not determined with the technology.
I write a lot of stories set in the future and what it can do is expose you to just how malleable the things we think of as eternal are.- Cory Doctorow
I write a lot of stories set in the future. Writing a science fiction novel set in the 1980s in 2025, like Picks & Shovels, is admittedly a little weird. But I write a lot of stories set in the future and what it can do is expose you to just how malleable the things we think of as eternal are.
This idea that the configuration we landed on in this first blush of the Internet is the last one we should have. The people who won the last round of this game should be declared the eternal champions and allowed to reign supreme for all time this is a mind zap. It's a thing that traps people.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was produced by Katy Swailes.
