Cory Doctorow Books in Order

This early collection gathers nine inventive science fiction stories, from time traveling diplomats to AI uprisings and strange alien junkyards. It showcases Doctorow's fascination with free culture, politics, and ordinary people caught at the sharp edge of technological change.

Co written with Karl Schroeder, this handbook demystifies the business side of writing science fiction. It covers markets, agents, contracts, workshops, and career strategy, aiming to help new writers understand how the field works without losing heart or their rights.

Written at the dawn of the blogging era, this practical guide helps readers choose tools, set up sites, and build an audience. It mixes technical how tos with advice from working bloggers on writing, community, and the culture of early web publishing.

In a post scarcity future where reputation called whuffie is the only currency, Disney World lifer Julius fights to preserve the Haunted Mansion from high tech rivals. Resurrection backups make death reversible, but theme park politics and jealousy still threaten everything he cares about.

In a world where people align their lives to online time zone "tribes," user experience designer Art Berry secretly works for the Eastern Standard Tribe while employed in London. When love, loyalty, and a clever music sharing scheme collide, he ends up committed and fighting to prove his sanity.

In a world where a single corporation has seized total control of robotics, detective Arturo Icaza de Arana Goldberg searches for his missing daughter. His investigation exposes a tightly controlled quasi totalitarian city and asks what happens when only one company is allowed to build the future.

Alan seems like an ordinary hardware geek helping a friend blanket Toronto with free Wi Fi, but his family history is pure myth: his father is a mountain and his mother a washing machine. As past and present collide, he must keep both magical and human worlds from tearing apart.

After a cascade of biological, nuclear, and digital attacks devastates the planet, a handful of systems administrators trapped in data centers struggle to keep the internet alive. Their grim, practical heroism raises hard questions about what is worth preserving when civilization crashes.

Overclocked collects six of Doctorow's best known novellas and stories, including Anda's Game, I, Robot, and When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth. Each tale explores a different way information technology can be twisted for control, or reclaimed by those who understand it best.

This self published collection brings together a dozen stories about copyright, surveillance, and everyday heroism, plus author afterwords about how each piece came to be. It also serves as an experiment in new publishing models, from custom editions to pay what you want audio.

Collecting columns, speeches, and essays, Content explores digital rights management, file sharing, fan culture, and the economics of free. Doctorow explains why he releases his own books under open licenses and what that experiment reveals about creativity and control online.

This graphic novel adapts six of Doctorow's science fiction stories into comics, including tales of gold farming, robot laws, sysadmin heroes, and besieged cities. It offers a visual, accessible entry point into his recurring obsessions with technology, power, and resistance.

After a terrorist attack in San Francisco, 17 year old hacker Marcus Yallow is swept into a secret prison and then released into a city turned police state. Using his tech skills and a guerrilla network, he leads a risky fight against Homeland Security.

Lawrence belongs to a cloistered order of programmers whose monastic campus keeps them focused on code. When he ventures into the outside world, he collides with paranoid security forces and discovers how hard it is to stay gentle and principled in systems built on suspicion.

In this cosmic scale collaboration with Benjamin Rosenbaum, two vast AI minds wage war across the universe, converting matter into computation as they go. Their struggle over identity, loyalty, and embodiment turns abstract ideas into literally world shaping stakes.

In a collapsing economy, hardware hackers Perry and Lester build wild mashup inventions and a fan driven "New Work" movement around them. As their improvisational culture collides with big corporations, media circuses, and boom and bust cycles, they learn how innovation can be co opted.

Originally written as a conference paper, this short work examines how ebooks change reading, publishing, and ownership. Doctorow argues that digital texts are neither simple versions of print nor disposable files, but something stranger that demands new ways of thinking about books.

Across China, India, and North America, young gamers grind for virtual gold in massive online worlds while ruthless bosses skim the profits. When organizers try to unionize these players across borders and games, a struggle over virtual economies spills into real world streets.

This satirical novella follows a product designer tasked with inventing something a practically immortal quadrillionaire will still want to buy. As he digs into the client's past, the story skewers extreme wealth, dubious philanthropy, and the notion that markets alone can save the world.

This essay collection gathers Doctorow's writing on technology, culture, and politics in the twenty first century. He ranges from parenting and productivity to platform monopolies and maker culture, always asking how ordinary people can keep agency in a networked world.

In a ruined near future Detroit, nearly immortal teenager Jimmy prowls the empty city in a giant mecha while his father tries to preserve it as a museum. As feral cleanup machines eat the remnants of civilization, Jimmy must choose between static nostalgia and messy change.

In a copyright obsessed near future Britain, teen remix artist Trent McCauley loses his internet access and home after repeatedly downloading movies. Living on the streets of London, he joins activists and misfits who use guerrilla cinema to fight a draconian media crackdown.

Technophobe Huw is drafted onto a global jury that decides which bizarre post singularity technologies should be unleashed on the world. What begins as reluctant civic duty becomes a wildly comic tour through uploads, body swaps, and civilization bending experiments gone wrong.

Back from the events of Little Brother, Marcus Yallow is broke, out of college, and looking for work when a whistleblower hands him an encrypted trove of government secrets. Choosing what to leak, and how, pulls him into a new battle with state and corporate power.

Set between Homeland and Attack Surface, this novella finds Marcus coping with a catastrophic Oakland earthquake. Working with friends and hacker allies, he uses improvised networks and crowdsourced drones to restore communication and expose officials who would rather surveil than save.

This brief essay story hybrid unpacks the idea that every complex system naturally attracts parasites, from spam and malware to fraud and exploitation. Doctorow argues that the messiness is the price of openness, and that a system with zero abuse is usually a system with zero freedom.

Teen gamer Anda loves raiding in a massively multiplayer game until she discovers that some of the "enemies" she hunts are low paid workers in overseas gold farms. Her friendship with one of them forces her to rethink fairness, labor, and how games connect to real life.

A compact guide to creative work in the digital age, this book tackles copyright, digital locks, and online sharing. Doctorow offers blunt, practical advice on how artists can build audiences and earn a living without surrendering control to gatekeepers or criminalizing their fans.

Drawing on stories from Doctorow's grandmother about the siege of Leningrad, this harrowing tale follows young Valentine through a fantastical city under prolonged attack. Magical bureaucracy and cruel rationing make survival as much about navigating power as about dodging bombs and hunger.

Twelve year old Anda becomes a star player in an online game, paid to hunt down other avatars. When she discovers her targets are kids working in virtual sweatshops, she must decide whether to keep earning easy money or stand up for exploited players she has never met.

Set in the world of Walkaway, two high school seniors in Burbank organize a "Communist party" at a shuttered factory whose owners have stolen workers' final paychecks. Their wild night of music and sabotage becomes a crash course in taking over the means of production for real.

In a near future ravaged by inequality and climate disasters, a group of young people simply walk away from default society to build open, cooperative communities using abandoned infrastructure and open hardware. Their fragile utopia soon attracts the violent attention of the ultra rich.

This quartet of near future novellas tackles immigration, police brutality, health insurance, and bunkered billionaires. From a refugee hacking locked appliances to an online forum of angry men targeting insurers, each story turns current headlines into sharp, character driven fiction.

In this novella from Radicalized, refugee Salima moves into subsidized housing filled with locked down smart appliances. When the companies behind them go bust, she jailbreaks the devices to keep her neighbors fed, turning a fight over toasters and elevators into quiet rebellion.

Years after Little Brother, surveillance contractor Masha Maximow makes a living building tools to track protesters around the world. When those same systems are turned on her friends back home, she must choose between a lucrative career and sabotaging the panopticon she helped create.

This Little Brother universe short story follows Marcus Yallow as he discovers invasive stalkerware on phones and laptops. Trying to help a friend escape digital abuse, he confronts how everyday technology can be weaponized and what real solidarity looks like when privacy is already compromised.

This picture book stars Poesy, a determined little girl who refuses to sleep because she is too busy defeating the monsters that visit her room. Armed with toys and a monster manual, she outwits werewolves and vampires while her exhausted parents think she is just misbehaving.

Co written with legal scholar Rebecca Giblin, this nonfiction book explains how dominant platforms and media companies chokepoint creative markets. It dissects the power of major firms, then outlines legal and collective strategies to win fairer deals for artists and workers.

Sixty something forensic accountant Martin Hench is drawn into a dangerous cryptocurrency scheme when an old friend loses control of critical security keys. Chasing stolen data through Silicon Valley and beyond, he learns that following the money can put a target on your back.

Set in the same future as The Lost Cause, this short story follows Canadian disaster responders working in a flooded Mississippi. As they rebuild and treat survivors, they face local mistrust, election year politics, and questions about help that comes with values attached.

Here Doctorow digs into how laws that criminalize interoperability let big tech companies lock in users and crush competitors. He explains why fixing the internet means restoring the right to plug new tools into old systems and offers policy ideas for seizing back computation.

In a mid century California already deep into climate adaptation, teenager Brooks joins Canadian disaster response crews and local organizers reshaping a divided America. Between family conflicts and eco socialist politics, he learns that rebuilding a livable world is messy and hopeful.

In this later Little Brother novella, Marcus and fellow activists travel to a pipeline protest where police, corporate security, and online disinformation collide. The story focuses on mutual aid, Indigenous leadership, and how movements survive when surveillance and repression move faster than news.

Set earlier in Martin Hench's career, this thriller drops him into a web of private equity scams built around California's prison system. A vacation on Catalina Island leads to a decade spanning fight against financiers who treat incarcerated people as just another asset class.

In this Little Brother story, schools deploy intrusive monitoring and discipline technologies that turn classrooms into war zones. When students push back, they must outthink both software and administrators to protect each other and reclaim their education.

Expanding on his viral essays, Doctorow argues that many platforms follow a predictable arc: they start out good for users, then for business customers, before being hollowed out for shareholders. The book dissects that pattern and suggests practical ways communities can push back.

This origin story for Martin Hench flashes back to 1980s San Francisco, where a young ex MIT student discovers spreadsheets and the power of forensic accounting. Hired by a religious computer firm, he switches sides to help three women build an ethical startup and survive the blowback.