Cory Doctorow Has A Posse

image source: Wikimedia Commons

Cory Doctorow has a posse. That’s right. He’s a blogger with a mission: to open up writing as a free, open-source medium—kind of like Linux without the software part. What does Doctorow do? He writes mainly. But he’s founded a web image that surpasses most other authors out there on the market—he’s allowed the internet to give him an identity with his audience. He’s helped make writers really, really cool again.

His website craphound.com contains all of his writings online, for free. He is an activist for open-source media, and has sought to break open the bounds of publishing. He is taking the science fiction genre and using it—as science fiction often does surprisingly well—to comment on the culture. For example, in one short story called, “Anda’s Game,” which borrows its title from the classic sci-fi novel, Ender’s Game, Doctorow writes about people in third world countries working in a kind of new world sweatshop, where poor people play videogames to mine gold for players in more wealthy countries.

Doctorow is also strangely fascinated with Disney. His first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, received a lot of critical acclaim and allowed him to move to the forefront of digital publishing for fiction. He published it online for free, and still made money from it. He uses online ads, and believes that hardcopies of novels will never go away. With all that is going on in the digital publishing market, more authors like Doctorow will inevitably arrive on the scene, changing the face of “new authors,” as well as “new texts.”