Computer scientist and visionary Alan Kay famously once told us that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. If that's true, then Cory Doctorow might just be playing both ends against the middle. Not only is he the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), working to make copyrights more flexible and staunchly protecting our digital freedoms; he's also a critically-acclaimed, award-winning science fiction author of three novels and countless short stories which explore some of the changes those freedoms might bring about.

That might be enough for some, but Cory chooses to fend off nervous exhaustion and instead adds another few feet to his resumé. For one thing, he's co-editor of Boing Boing, a blog that's linked to more often than any other on earth. No, wait - he's a lobbyist for the BBC Creative Archive project. Or maybe he's a visiting lecturer at Yale University. Or a columnist for Wired magazine. In fact, he's all these things. So it's perhaps unsurprising that Cory has a lot to say.

A 34-year old Canadian, Cory's looks fuse Drew Carey and Elvis Costello (oddly, so does his name - sort of) while his conversation fuses passions for technology, digital content rights, and contemporary science fiction. Dubbed a prodigy by some, Cory's one of the true celebrities of the internet age.

He lists Disney and garbage as his two obsessions, so I suppose we could have asked him about The Little Mermaid Part II. Instead, we wanted to find out what fuels Cory Doctorow's writing and what lies behind his curious decision to give away his books for free.

What follows is part one of our interview. We'll save the rest for another time.

Photo of Cory Doctorow by Bart Nagel.

Great Writing: You're an activist, a website editor, a public speaker and lecturer, and an SF author. So who are you first and foremost?

Cory Doctorow: I used to change my formal job title every two or three years. The titles that I've inherited at each turn have been job titles that literally didn't exist, sometimes in industries that didn't exist previously. So now I tend to think of myself as just doing what I do.

The marketplace reality of who pays for me to do that stuff changes from year to year, but the essence of what I do has remained pretty static; understanding, explaining and capitalising on technology.

GW: So would you continue whether there was marketplace for it or not?

CD: In the case of writing certainly, since there isn't much of a marketplace for SF writing in any meaningful sense. There are a few freak anomalies, such as William Gibson or Stephen King, but actually they're statistically insignificant within the pool of all the people trying to make a living from writing science fiction. The majority of people who are engaged in writing science fiction are earning so little money that to call it a hobby is an insult to hobbyists.

GW: Presumably there's a contingent of readers who don't know you through any of your other hats; people to whom you're a science fiction novelist and not the Boing Boing guy or the EFF guy.

CD: Actually, I'm not sure that that's true - the market for SF novels is pretty small compared to the market for Boing Boing or EFF. The number of EFF supporters dwarfs the number of readers of all but the most successful science fiction novel. Certainly Boing Boing has more readers than I think any SF novel. So I suspect that science fiction readers are a subset of people who know about EFF and who know about Boing Boing. There are probably a few people who fall outside of that but I don't think they're a substantial market.

GW: What is it particularly about the SF genre that appeals?

CD: It's what I've read all my life. My father was a Marxist and had grown up on Conan comic books, so when I was a little kid and he would retell me Conan stories as Marxist parables, which was very funny.

Then when I was about nine, I discovered the local Science Fiction bookstore and SF Reference Library in Toronto. Toronto is fortunate to be the home of both the largest SF library in the world, and the first SF bookstore in the world which made it a great place to grow up. I started haunting them both, spending all my pocket money and reading a book (or sometimes more) every day. From the age of 11, I knew I wanted to write science fiction.

Science fiction is one of the most vibrant forms of literature. It's one in which traditional storytelling is still very important; using narrative arcs to build tension and having likeable, identifiable and sympathetic characters - they're the key elements of most successful work. In that sense it's a great reaction against a lot of modern literature which tends to deride those things or replace them with more experimental forms - some of which is quite good but it's not something that suits my own palate. I think as a literature of ideas or a literature of speculation SF speaks to me, because we live in an era where the future is not only up for grabs but also steadily overtaking us. It's hard to make sense of those two things without a literature of the ideas of what it means to live in an era of change. The stories and novels that I write are increasingly about change and how people cope with it. Not specific changes per se but about the idea of change in general. Futureshock and then some...

For example, what does it mean to live in a market economy that's almost perfectly competitive - such that your goods go from having a 50% margin at the time that you invent them (because no-one else offers a comparable good in the market and so you can charge whatever you want for it), to basically a 0% margin in six months, when global competitors can move in and drive the costs down and down? What does that mean as a citizen? What does that mean to people as entrepreneurs? I think they're good questions to ask and they're the kind of things I try to answer in the stories that I work on.

GW: There's an incredible speed and density of ideas in your work. In Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom there's at least a dozen concepts introduced in the first 10 pages. Are you pouring this stuff on to the page as fast as you can, or is there a lot of structural planning involved beforehand?

CD: I do hardly any planning. To the extent that I outline, my outlines tend to be very impressionistic treatments. They describe a general scenario and the kind of things that will happen in the course of the book, but if I knew what was going to happen before I started writing it, it wouldn't be any fun to write.

One of the best parts about writing is finding out what's in my own head, and the way that you do that is by putting it on a page. I wrote my latest book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, one page a day; about 250 words every single day, virtually without fail. As I drew closer to the ending I realised that the ending I had been thinking of wasn't going to fit and I needed a better one. I brainstormed for a while and came up with an ending that I thought was just perfect but it was different; a real departure from my original idea. As a result I figured I have to go back and rewrite major sections of the book to ensure continuity with the new ending. And what I discovered when I went back over the book was that in fact from the very first words that I'd said on the page two years before, I'd actually been writing towards the ending that I'd just come up with. I just hadn't known it until that moment.

In terms of density - one of the things that I think SF makes a great game of is describing the world without describing the world. In SF literature and critiquing circles one of the cardinal sins you can commit is ‘info-dumping' where you do what Asimov and Heinlein and the rest used to do in the old days back before people became more discriminating. Info-dumping is where you break off the story for 4 or 5 pages of description of what's going on; how the world came to be; why it's that way. There's a form of dialogue that SF writers used to employ (and still do occasionally) where one character turns to the other and says, "As you know, we're on this generation ship heading towards Mars. We have been on it for a hundred years and we are the descendants of the original settlers. Our captain died in the first month of our journey so we've been limping across space ever since and have found ourselves quite degraded and possessed of a primitive and superstitious religion..."

GW: And that's a problem not just limited to SF is it?
 
CD: No, it's basically anything where you're describing a world that's unfamiliar to the reader. In a historical drama presumably some fraction of the readers know their history, and in a drama about travel abroad, presumably some readers have been abroad. But in a science fiction novel, if you've been very original, no-one knows what your world looks like except you, so you have to find some way to tell all your readers what's going on in the story without stopping the story to do it. So what you end up doing is painting it in. You hint at it; drawing up little tell-tale signs of what it is. In that sense, reading a science fiction novel is a bit like solving a puzzle, because you have to pay close attention to what the author is hinting to you about the nature of the world that she or he is writing.

GW: Are the ideas in your writing driven by the kind of change you're to bring about with your EFF work?

CD: Very much so, and by the reaction to the change that's coming somewhat inevitably. I don't think that social change happens just because technology comes along, I think technology influences people and that they then end up creating that social change as deliberate acts of will. For example, you can invent the wheel over and over again but you don't get wagons and you don't get roman roads until someone has the force of will to create the Roman Empire. I don't think that we solve the technological problems that we face just by inventing more technology, I think we have to explicitly and implicitly undertake to do this.

That said, I think that there is a lot in what I write that reflects how I see people failing to come to terms with technology. I take those people who have failed to come to grips with technology adequately and try and mitigate the harm that they will bring to bear as a result of that.

Right now, the music industry is going berserk over people file-sharing and intending that every one of their customers (all 70 million Americans who are sharing files online) should be hauled into court singly and in bunches, until America once again begins buying CDs. It's wildly improbable that this will somehow solve their problems, but the collateral damage of the widespread lawsuit is astounding. Universities all over America are signing up to wiretap their campus networks so that file-sharing students can be caught and stopped, to avoid the University itself being held liable for the act of infringement. Incidentally the law doesn't actually make the institution liable for that, but universities seem to have decided to err on the side of caution - even when that means a kind of widescale snoopery that never has been contemplated before in the history of academia.

I think my writing is closely related to these conflicts - these complete failures to come to grips.

GW: So are you extrapolating these contemporary conflicts to explore their future repercussions?

CD: I don't really see much of what I do as being extrapolative. I really think that what I write is intended to be parables about the modern world, not extrapolation about what the future world may look like. Actually, I don't think that the future will look anything like anything that I've ever written. I just think that by setting something in the future that you can learn more about the present. By slicing away all the baggage of the present that makes it hard to see the pieces and by imagining an idealised future that serves as a kind of pedestal on which to put your pieces, you can write more clearly about today than you could otherwise. So I'm not really an extrapolator, I like to think that I'm writing about the present day.

GW: Was there a breakthough moment for you when you felt you'd arrived as a writer?

CD: Probably when I won the Campbell Award - the award given at the Hugos (prestigious SF awards - Ed) for best new writer, given on the strength of my short fiction. That was in 2000 and I thought a pretty substantial accolade. A really large number of people who win Campbell Awards go on to have strong careers, although many wags have noted that often the nominees for the Campbell go on to do much better that the actual winner. That said, there are still an awful lot of Campbell winners who've gone very far indeed.

GW: Did the novel come about off the back your short story writing?

CD: In the sense that the way that I learned to write the novel was by writing stories, sure. But I sold the novel through friendships with some of the editorial staff at Tor Books, particularly Patrick Nielsen Hayden who was the senior editor at Tor. Patrick and I were mates and when I was in New York one Christmas he said, "Well, when are we going to see a novel from you?" and I said, "I've been working on it" and he said, "Well, tell me about it." So I told him and he asked if I had three chapters. I lied that I had, and he said "Send that to me and I'll have a look". Well, six months later he asked to see the rest of the book and then he bought it. I don't think that I would have had any problems selling the novel if I hadn't known Patrick, but knowing Patrick is certainly what spurred me to finish the book; it's pretty thankless to labour on your own. But I think that I sold the novel on its merits, which seems to have been borne out by critical and commercial success.

GW: You've generated a lot of interest in your books by distributing electronic versions for free via your website. What has motivated this marketing decision?

CD: It's a three stage process. In the very short term I'm confident that giving away my book attracts more customers than it displaces. Of course, it's hard to statistically verify this because I can't go back in time and not release my book online to compare the sales. What I can verify is that compared to my peers whose first novels came out at around the same time as mine, and whose second novels followed at around the same time as mine, my books are selling better than theirs. I'm confident some element of that can be attributed to the fact that giving the book away puts it in front of enough eyeballs that some fraction of those people become customers for the book, even if a few of them say, "I can get it for free so why bother buying it?" That's step one.

Jumping to step three, it's my belief that someday in the future electronic text will completely or almost completely displace the printed word.  No-one will buy books because of the physical words on the page. They might buy them because the books themselves are well-made artefacts (in the same way that we buy sculptures) but they won't buy them because that's the preferred way of getting the words. Even now, more people read more words off more screens everyday and fewer people read fewer words off fewer pages every day - so the writing is on the wall for everyone to see. I don't know how writers will derive their income then, but I'm confident that the way to find out is not by hoping that it all goes away. And so far the responses of many writers to date has been to fold their arms and glare at the world and demand that it rearrange itself in a more accommodating configuration. And thus far that approach has completely failed to give them any kind of market intelligence about what they should be doing in the future, as electronic text displaces print.

Right now, I feel I'm at the centre of what hundreds of thousands of people do with electronic text, because for example, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has been downloaded half a million times from my website (as well as an unknown number of times from other peoples websites) and getting all that fresh intel makes me better equipped than anyone else in the field to jump in the right direction when it's time to jump.

The middle prospect - the thing that happens between selling more books now and selling more of whatever it is people sell in the future - is that there may be a period during which there is no obvious way to earn direct income from your words. During that period, as today, the successful writers will often derive their income from other kinds of work - public speaking, commissioned magazine articles and stories, endorsements, writers-in-residency, arts grants and so on. All that stuff is directly correlated with your fame; the degree to which you're a well-known writer. My feeling is that in the short term I can give away books and sell more print books, in the medium term the fame that I derive from having the electronic books spread far and wide affords me more opportunities to sell magazine articles and so on, and in the long term, being at the centre of what everyone does with electronic text will help me choose the right thing to do when the time comes and people need to choose. So that's my three-part plan for making money by giving books away on the internet. And the salient thing is that at no point is this a loss-leader. At no point to I concede earning less money than I would have if I had gone the traditional route. At every stage I maximise the revenue that I get today and ensure a more profitable tomorrow.

I'm not in this because I'm a starry-eyed info-hippie. I'm in this because I'm someone who wants to make as much money as humanly possible from his writing.

Cory Doctorow's novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe and the anthology A Place So Foreign and Eight More are available from all good bookshops and as free downloads from Cory's website. His next novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town will be published in July.

Want more? Part two published here...