I first spoke with Cory Doctorow two years ago. I was trying to get a handle on the sci-fi genre known as cyberpunk, most famously associated with the work of William Gibson. (It also served as the inspiration for a recent video game, Cyberpunk 2077, which had a famously tumultuous rollout.) Doctorow, who is often described as a post-cyberpunk writer, is both a theorist-practitioner of science fiction and a vigorous commentator on technology and policymaking; his answers to my questions were long, thoughtful, and full of examples. And so, after that first talk, I made plans to speak with him again, not for research purposes but as the basis for the interview below.
Doctorow, who is fifty-one, grew up in Toronto, the descendant of Jewish immigrants from what are now Poland, Russia, and Ukraine. Before becoming a novelist, he co-founded a free-software company, served as a co-editor of the blog Boing Boing, and spent several years working for the nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation. Our first conversation, in late 2020, took place just after he had published the novel “Attack Surface,” part of his Little Brother series; it dramatizes the moral conflict of cybersecurity insiders who try to strike a balance between keeping their jobs and following their consciences.
The second time we spoke, Doctorow told me that he had eight books in production. “I’m the kind of person who deals with anxiety by working instead of by being unable to work,” he explained, when I asked how he was handling the ongoing pandemic. Among those eight books were “Chokepoint Capitalism,” co-written with the law professor Rebecca Giblin and published this past September, and “Red Team Blues,” a novel set in the world of cryptocurrency, which will come out in April. In the course of two interviews, Doctorow discussed the right and wrong lessons that one can learn from science fiction, the real dangers of artificial intelligence, and the comeuppance of Big Tech, among other topics. Those conversations have been edited for length and clarity.
I wanted to talk to you about cyberpunk because you’ve written eloquently about its historical and cultural underpinnings. Has your conception of what the genre is and what it can be shifted over the years?
Certainly. I mean, my first encounters with it were short stories in Asimov’s and OMNI. As a kid born in 1971, who was thirteen when “Neuromancer” came out, it was just dazzling, right? I quite side with Gibson on this: he says, although people called it dystopian, it was actually optimistic—because he wrote in the mid-eighties about worlds where there had only been limited nuclear exchanges and the human race still continued! I was involved with the anti-nuclear-proliferation movement from my earliest years—my parents were political organizers—and I was moderately convinced that there was a good chance that we would all be radioactive ash by the time my eighteenth rolled around.
I am identified with a group of writers who are loosely called post-cyberpunk. And I think one of the defining features of us is the idea that computers are dealt with as things in the world and not as metaphors. The writer who probably best epitomizes that shift is Neal Stephenson, who starts off very much as a techno-metaphorist—even though he’s a computer-industry professional, or has a background in the computer industry—and then becomes increasingly techno-realist in his approach, sometimes even excruciatingly.
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