Cory Doctorow was born July 17, 1971 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada to Trotskyist teachers. His first book was The Complete Idiot's Guide to Writing Science-Fiction.

Currently he is a Creative Commons activist, blogger, journalist and science fiction author in favor of reforming copyright laws. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, filesharing, Socialist utopias and Disney.

Doctorow lives in London where he works as European Outreach Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is a frequent public speaker on copyright issues, and two of his speeches have been released into the public domain and widely disseminated: Ebooks: Neither E Nor Books http://craphound.com/ebooksneitherenorbooks.txt and a 2004 address http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt on Digital Rights Management to Microsoft's Research group.

He won the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 2000, the Locus Award for Best First Novel for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in 2003, and in 2004 he won the Sunburst award for best Canadian Science Fiction Book for his short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More. This collection also contained his short story 0wnz0red http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/ , which was a finalist for the 2003 Nebula Award.

Doctorow's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was licensed under an expanded Creative Commons license in March 2003, to allow non-commercial derivative works such as fan fiction. Most of the derivative works involve machine conversions to different file formats. Several public collaborative projects, including an audiobook adaptation http://www.craphound.com/down/archives/2004_04.php#000123 and a Spanish translation http://www.cyberf.org/down/index.php?Pr%F3logo , are underway.

Doctorow's nonfiction works include his contributions to Boing Boing http://boingboing.net , the weblog he co-edits, as well as regular columns in Popular Science http://www.popsci.com/ and Make http://make.oreilly.com/ magazines. He is a Contributing Writer to Wired http://www.wired.com/wired/ magazine, and contributes occassionally to other magazines and newspapers such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the Globe and Mail, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, and the Boston Globe.

Bibliography

• The Complete Idiot's Guide to Publishing Science Fiction http://www.kschroeder.com/guide/ (self-help)
• Essential Blogging http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/essblogging/ (tech help)
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [1] http://craphound.com/down/ (novel) released under the Creative Commons License.
• A Place So Foreign and Eight More [2] http://craphound.com/place/ (short story collection)
• Eastern Standard Tribe [3] http://craphound.com/est/ (novel) released under the Creative Commons License.
• Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (novel; forthcoming; preview excerpt http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/show.html?fn.preview_doctorow )
• /usr/bin/god (working title) (novel; forthcoming)
• Themepunks (working title) (novel; forthcoming)

See also

• Boing Boing

External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about Cory Doctorow .

• Cory Doctorow's website http://www.craphound.com
• The blog Cory co-edits, Boing Boing http://boingboing.net
• Cory Doctorow, unofficially - fan site http://neologasm.org/doctorow/