It Made Us Smart And 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.

Cory Doctorow's second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe, may well be arriving at your local bookstore even as you read this, but as with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Cory's releasing the book under a Creative Commons license. Which means that you can either buy a printed copy or download an electronic version for free. I've been reading it on my Handspring, with a quick-and-dirty PDB file I converted from the raw text, and it's fantastic.

The story itself takes place in one of those Max Headroom "twenty minutes into the future" universes, apparently in the early future of the Down and Out world, but the dynamics of text messaging on cell phones, Internet Relay Chat and smart mobs (among other things) will all be instantly recognizable to anyone who's spent time online. In some ways, Cory's writing old-school science fiction, where the entire story emerges out of particular scientific threads, teased out and amplified so the author can draw out their ramifications, but with the science strongly foregrounded, much discussed by characters, etc. But he knows how to do it without turning the whole thing into a dry philosophical debate or a string of expository dialogues; Art Berry, the protagonist who shifts between first- and third-person narration, is thoroughly believable and his crisis is compelling. The near-future setting is a big help here, as his world is largely the one we all know and have to deal with ourselves.

I don't want to give a whole lot away here, so here's the deal: I have this vague, largely unarticulated theory about science fiction where even when the set decorations are at their most high-tech, things really boil down to the social sciences. So a story that's ostensibly about technology is really about how technology affects society. (No particularly stunning insight, I'm sure, and undoubtedly written about by at least a dozen critics before me.) Anyway, Cory's obviously thought long and hard about how technology changes our lives, and he's equally adept at depicting those changes on the microlevel of the individual as well as the macrolevel of society. If you like science fiction, you'll love this book. And if you don't think you like science fiction, you'll have to adjust your attitudes ever so slightly after you've read this.

UPDATE: They're talking about this at Slashdot now, leading to a swell in-joke:

Is this all it requires to get /. to advertise a product? Release it under the Creative Commons?

No, you also need to have sufficient wuffie.