Latest news with #Doctorow
The Spinoff
09-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Spinoff
The Unity Books bestseller chart for the week ending May 9
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books' stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington. AUCKLAND 1 Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic, $30) 'Believe the hype,' said Unity Bookseller Eden Denyer in their review of this latest instalment of the Hunger Games. 2 Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $26) Samantha Harvey is touching down on Aotearoa soil any day now as the Booker Prize winner is starring in this year's Auckland Writers Festival. 3 Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Pan UK, $40) From surviving shark attacks to surviving Meta, this is the exposé of the year. Read Julie Hill's review of Wynn-Williams' words on her previous place of work on The Spinoff. 4 Eurotrash by Christian Kracht (Serpents Tail, $30) A mother-son story like no other. 5 Butter by Asako Yuzuki (Fourth Estate, $35) Asako Yuzuki is also winging her way to Aotearoa for the Auckland Writers Festival and we hope she has a delicious time! 6 Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Fourth Estate, $38) Auckland Writers Festival's digital event with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has been cancelled ('due to unforeseen circumstances') and replaced by this one, which looks extremely different but extremely interesting. 7 Red Team Blues by Cory Doctorow (Ad Astra, $37) Doctorow did a whirlwind tour of Aotearoa over the weekend and brought hordes of fans to Unity's doors. Red Team Blues is a novel about a forensic accountant in Silicon Valley and crypto and crime. 8 Chokepoint Capitalism by Cory Doctorow & Rebecca Giblin (Scribe Publications, $37) A huge deal when it came out in 2022, this nonfiction book is about what exactly chokepoint capitalism is and why it's choking us. Here's the blurb: 'In Chokepoint Capitalism, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we're in a new era of 'chokepoint capitalism', with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct 'anti-competitive flywheels' designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. In the book's second half, Giblin and Doctorow explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work.' 9 Better the Blood by Michael Bennett (Simon & Schuster, $27) Brilliantly done crime novel from an Aotearoa king of crime (and guest curator at Auckland Writers Festival). Here's the blurb: 'Detective Senior Sergeant Hana Westerman is a tenacious Māori detective juggling single motherhood and the pressures of her career in Auckland's Central Investigation Branch. When she's led to a crime scene by a mysterious video, she discovers a man hanging in a hidden room. With little to go on, Hana knows one thing: the killer is sending her a message. As a Māori officer, there has always been a clash between duty and culture for Hana, but it is something that she's found a way to live with. Until now. When more murders follow, Hana realises that her heritage and past are the keys to finding the perpetrator.' 10 Safekeep by Yael Van Der Wouden (Viking Penguin, $38) A terrific, terrific novel that was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024 and whose author is … you guessed it, appearing at next week's Auckland Writers Festiva l. Here's the blurb: 'It's 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season… Eva is Isabel's antithesis: sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn't. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house-a spoon, a knife, a bowl-Isabel' suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel's paranoia gives way to desire – leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva – nor the house in which they live – are what they seem.' WELLINGTON 1 The Art and Making of Arcane: League of Legends by Elizabeth Vincentelli (Titan Books, $99) 'The Art and Making of Arcane is an immersive journey behind the scenes of the Emmy Award-winning Animated Series!' 2 Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins (Scholastic, $30) 3 Careless People: A Story of Where I Used to Work by Sarah Wynn-Williams (Pan UK, $40) 4 Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend (Lothian Children's Books, $25) The fourth instalment in the absolutely brilliant fantasy series set in the world of Nevermoor. In this novel Morrigan Crow is about to turn 14 and her life is only getting more complicated: this hefty adventure includes finding lost family, a whole new part of Nevermoor we've never seen before, new friends as well as new enemies, and murder! A must-read series for ages seven to those who feel at least 700. 5 Amma by Saraid de Silva (Moa Press, $38) Welcome back The Spinoff's best book of 2024 according to our readers! 6 The Cat Who Saved the Library by Sosuke Natsukawa (Picador, $25) Another cosy, bookish, cat-filled novel to comfort you during the long, chilly months of winter. 7 The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing (Picador, $28) Welcome back! This beautiful book marries memoir with research into the why and the what of gardens. Laing details the making and breaking of her own garden alongside research into what gardens and gardening means to humanity at large. 8 How to Be Enough: Seven Life-Changing Steps for Self-critics, Overthinkers and Perfectionists by Ellen Hendriksen (Bonnier, $40) Phwoar. Attacked. 9 Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference by Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury, $39) Whoa! Double punch. 10 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, $40) 'In 38 Londres Street, Philippe Sands blends personal memoir, historical detective work and gripping courtroom drama to probe a secret double story of mass murder, one that reveals a shocking thread that links the horrors of the 1940s with those of our own times,' reads the publisher's blurb. 'The house at 38 Londres Street is home to the legacies of two men whose personal stories span continents, nationalities and decades of atrocity: Augusto Pinochet, President of Chile, and Walther Rauff, a Nazi SS officer responsible for the use of gas vans.' The Spinoff Books section is proudly brought to you by Unity Books and Creative New Zealand. Visit Unity Books online today.
CBC
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
Cory Doctorow writes science fiction to come to terms with his tech anxiety
Canadian writer Cory Doctorow has written six books in the past three years — and his work, both fiction and nonfiction, often grapples with the way we use the Internet, the need for conversation around digital rights and the changing world of corporate technology. Doctorow's latest title is Picks & Shovels, the third book in his crime series about Martin Hench, which examines the early days of the PC and the possibilities for both exciting innovation and dangerous fraud it presented. Picks & Shovels takes us back to the 1980s, the start of Hench's career as a forensic accountant in Silicon Valley, where he exposes the finance crimes and shady dealings of tech bros. In this novel, he teams up with three brilliant young women to take down a pyramid scheme masquerading as a computer company. Doctorow is a Toronto-born author, activist and journalist living in Burbank. His writing, spanning nonfiction, fiction, and adult, YA and childhood audiences, has seen him inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame and earned him the Sir Arthur Clarke Imagination in Service to Society Award for lifetime achievement. On Bookends with Mattea Roach, he discussed why technology is such an important subject in his writing. Mattea Roach: You're constantly writing and speaking about technology and policy, but at the same time, you're also crafting these fun adventure crime novels. I tend to think of these as two very different types of work, but how do they work together for you, the fiction and the nonfiction and analysis? Cory Doctorow: Well, the first thing I should say is that writing novels is an artistic activity. The point of art, irrespective of what medium, is to take a big, numinous, irreducible feeling that is in a creative person's head and embody it in some intermediary medium. [Artists] hope that when an audience experiences the dance or the song or the painting or the photo or the book, that some facsimile of that big numinous, irreducible thing appears in their head. The big, numinous, irreducible ideas that are mostly occupying my head are about how we relate to technology — both the promise and peril of ubiquitous technology. It's not necessarily that the fiction is didactic, although admittedly sometimes it is. It's just that the feeling, the structure of the feeling is the same. MR: You've also talked before about writing being a therapeutic practice, that it's a way of processing your anxieties on the page. What are you anxious about that you feel like you need to process in fiction? CD: Well, how long have you got? We are standing on the brink of incipient fascism and climate collapse and xenophobia, genocide, a pogrom against trans people, like you name it, it's happening. Technology is very intimately interwoven into all of this. Technology is the medium through which these pathogenic views transmit themselves. It is the medium through which it traverses. Technology is also the medium through which we fight it. -Cory Doctorow It's also the medium through which we fight it, I think. I can't tell you how many long nights I spent riding a bicycle around the streets of Toronto with a bucket of wheat paste and a stack of flyers trying to get people out to protest marches. I don't ever want to organize a demonstration with wheat paste and flyers again. So, if this is our future, and I think it is, we better figure out how to make this digital nervous system fit for purpose, for human civilization, which involves necessarily creating some kind of response to the spread of these very dangerous currents through our technology. MR: I want to talk about the character Martin Hench. We meet him in your first novel in the series, Red Team Blues, as this grizzled and hard-hitting forensic accountant who's got one job left before he retires. Can you tell us a bit more about him as a character? And what is forensic accounting? CD: If you've watched CSI or whatever, forensics is figuring out what happened from the evidence available. So forensic accounting is figuring out where the money went — and there are a lot of people who make the money go places it's not supposed to go. Marty Hench's origin story is that at the moment where a sizable fraction of the people who are first encountering a spreadsheet in the 1980s were thinking, "I can steal a lot of money with this," he was one of the very few people who are like, "Boy, I'm going to find a lot of money stolen by people dumber than me using this thing." That is his story. 40 years in Silicon Valley being the Zelig of finance crime, unwinding every baroque scam that every self-important tech bro who thinks that they can design a system so fiendish that no one can ever unravel it. MR: How do you see the role of fiction in helping us address some of these policy or moral, ethical, philosophical issues that we've been talking about? CD: The reason I do this stuff is because I'm really worried about a world where technology is not under the control of the people who use it. What that world is going to look like. Recently, I was at the University of Toronto to give an Ursula Franklin lecture. Ursula Franklin's jam was that the important thing about technology isn't the technical specifications of the gadget. It's who gets to use it and who gets it used upon them? What does it do and who does it do it to? And those social arrangements are up for grabs. They are not determined with the technology. I write a lot of stories set in the future and what it can do is expose you to just how malleable the things we think of as eternal are. - Cory Doctorow I write a lot of stories set in the future. Writing a science fiction novel set in the 1980s in 2025, like Picks & Shovels, is admittedly a little weird. But I write a lot of stories set in the future and what it can do is expose you to just how malleable the things we think of as eternal are. This idea that the configuration we landed on in this first blush of the Internet is the last one we should have. The people who won the last round of this game should be declared the eternal champions and allowed to reign supreme for all time this is a mind zap. It's a thing that traps people.
