Cory Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

“See you in ten to the hundred,” Dan said, and headed to the airlock. I started after him, but Jeanine caught my hand.

“He hates long good-byes,” she said.

“I know,” I said, and watched him go.

The universe gets older. So do I. So does my backup, sitting in redundant distributed storage dirtside, ready for the day that space or age or stupidity kills me. It recedes with the years, and I write out my life longhand, a letter to the me that I’ll be when it’s restored into a clone somewhere, somewhen. It’s important that whoever I am then knows about this year, and it’s going to take a lot of tries for me to get it right.

In the meantime, I’m working on another symphony, one with a little bit of “Grim Grinning Ghosts,” and a nod to “It’s a Small World After All,” and especially “There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow.”

Jeanine says it’s pretty good, but what does she know? She’s barely fifty.

We’ve both got a lot of living to do before we know what’s what.

I could never have written this book without the personal support of my friends and family, especially Roz Doctorow, Gord Doctorow and Neil Doctorow, Amanda Foubister, Steve Samenski, Pat York, Grad Conn, John Henson, John Rose, the writers at the Cecil Street Irregulars and Mark Frauenfelder.

I owe a great debt to the writers and editors who mentored and encouraged me: James Patrick Kelly, Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Martha Soukup, Scott Edelman, Gardner Dozois, Renee Wilmeth, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, Claire Eddy, Bob Parks and Robert Killheffer.

I am also indebted to my editor Patrick Nielsen Hayden and my agent Donald Maass, who believed in this book and helped me bring it to fruition.

Finally, I must thank the readers, the geeks and the Imagineers who inspired this book.

Cory Doctorow

San Francisco

September 2002

As you will see, when you read the text beneath this section, I released this book a little over a year ago under the terms of a Creative Commons license that allowed my readers to freely redistribute the text without needing any further permission from me. In this fashion, I enlisted my readers in the service of a grand experiment, to see how my book could find its way into cultural relevance and commercial success. The experiment worked out very satisfactorily.

When I originally licensed the book under the terms set out in the next section, I did so in the most conservative fashion possible, using CC’s most restrictive license. I wanted to dip my toe in before taking a plunge. I wanted to see if the sky would fall: you see writers are routinely schooled by their peers that maximal copyright is the only thing that stands between us and penury, and so ingrained was this lesson in me that even though I had the intellectual intuition that a “some rights reserved” regime would serve me well, I still couldn’t shake the atavistic fear that I was about to do something very foolish indeed.

It wasn’t foolish. I’ve since released a short story collection:

A Place So Foreign and Eight More

http://craphound.com/place

and a second novel:

Eastern Standard Tribe

http://craphound.com/est

in this fashion, and my career is turning over like a goddamned locomotive engine. I am thrilled beyond words (an extraordinary circumstance for a writer!) at the way that this has all worked out.

And so nowI’m going to take a little bit of a plunge. Today, in coincidence with my talk at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference:

Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/et2004/view/e_sess/4693

I am re-licensing this book under a far less restrictive Creative Commons license, the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. This is a license that allows you, the reader, to noncommercially “remix” this book—you have my blessing to make your own translations, radio and film adaptations, sequels, fan fiction, missing chapters, machine remixes, you name it. A number of you assumed that you had my blessing to do this in the first place, and I can’t say that I’ve been at all put out by the delightful and creative derivative works created from this book, but now you have my explicit blessing, and I hope you’ll use it.

Here’s the license in summary:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/

You are free:

* to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work

* to make derivative works

Under the following conditions:

Attribution. You must give the original author credit.

Noncommercial. You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.

* For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work.

* Any of these conditions can be waived if you get permission from the author.

Your fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

And here is the license in full:

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0

CREATIVE COMMONS CORPORATION IS NOT A LAW FIRM AND DOES NOT PROVIDE LEGAL SERVICES. DISTRIBUTION OF THIS DRAFT LICENSE DOES NOT CREATE AN ATTORNEY-CLIENT RELATIONSHIP. CREATIVE COMMONS PROVIDES THIS INFORMATION ON AN “AS-IS” BASIS. CREATIVE COMMONS MAKES NO WARRANTIES REGARDING THE INFORMATION PROVIDED, AND DISCLAIMS LIABILITY FOR DAMAGES RESULTING FROM ITS USE.

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