Doctorow also writes quite a lot of nonfiction, frequently appearing in magazines such as Wired, Popular Science and MAKE. He's also the co-editor of Boing Boing, an online "directory of wonderful things." For four years, he served as the director of European affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which he describes as "a technology advocacy nonprofit that works to uphold liberty in technology law, policy and standards."

SCI FI Weekly interviewed Doctorow on Aug. 25 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Anaheim, Calif.Your story, "I, Robot," was up for the Hugo Award this year. Before we talk about it, why don't you first give us a brief synopsis.

Doctorow: "I, Robot" is a story set in a world that is the bastard stepchild of Isaac Asimov's Robots future and George Orwell's 1984, a world where the necessary precondition of the robot future—which is a future in which there is only one kind of computer and it's only made by one company and all other computers seem to be outlawed—where that necessary precursor has been achieved and so you actually have a kind of techno-totalitarian state.What were you trying to accomplish by naming your story after Asimov's famous story collection?

Doctorow: I was trying to do couple things with the title. I hope that it served a lot of different purposes. First of all it's not Asimov's title; I, Claudius is the title, then it was Eando Binder's title, then Asimov's title, and now it's my title.

I certainly wanted to make it explicit that I was talking about Asimov. I'd done an assignment for Wired Magazine on the movie, and I'd gone back and reread all of the Robot books. At the time that I [first] read them, I hadn't really noticed how thin the social stuff was, how thin the socioeconomics stuff was, that there is this given that somewhere some wise men in white coats had figured out what robots should do and shouldn't do. And that apparently they figured out to impose their will on everyone else for a period lasting millennia. So I wanted to call out to that.

And finally there has been a controversy in science fiction about whether or not appropriating titles was or wasn't cool that arose out of Ray Bradbury's critique of Michael Moore calling his movie Fahrenheit 9/11. He argued that it was rude. You know, I don't think John W. Campbell asked Eando Binder if he minded if Asimov's collection would be called I, Robot, and certainly all of the Nightfalls out there didn't come with permission. I think it's far from rude; I think it's the essence of free expression that we take our ideas and build atop them. There was a great passage in Judy Merrill's ... Hugo Award-winning autobiography in which she talks about how [she and her writer friends] all used to live in this big geek house together, and they would write each other's stories. They would write under the same pseudonym and borrow ideas from each other and build on each other rapidly. When you look through the history of the field, that's really a big piece of it, and I wanted to be a part of that tradition of stealing from the best.Was the story just your attempt to address those issues, or was there anything personal about it to you?

Doctorow: There are a couple little personal elements buried in there. One of them is that my goddaughter has the same name as the protagonist. Ada Trouble Norton is my little goddaughter, and Ada Trouble is the protagonist's daughter in the story. And it was set in my old neighborhood in Toronto. The house that he and his daughter live in is at 55 Pacola Court, where I grew up, in the suburbs of Toronto. The junior high she goes to is the junior high that was up the road from me in the plaza—Peanut Plaza, the little mall in my neighborhood; it was the first plaza in Canada. They had a little sign out front that said "First Plaza in Canada."

The other thing that is really intensely personal about this is the years I spent in standards bodies and at the United Nations and in other diplomatic and policy fora arguing about technology liberty with technologists who are actually conceiving of plans to design a world in which, for example, only one kind of digital television would be allowed and anything that did something out of spec would be unlawful. Right now we see this with PCs with trusted computing, where there is going to be a means for computers to discriminate against each other based on whether or not they adhere to some restriction system designed essentially by Microsoft. So I have had a lot of experience with that stuff.

We'd been briefed, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, on trusted computing by Microsoft, under an arrangement where they would give us a prepublication briefing and we would agree to a moratorium on commenting on it until they went live. But we would tell them what we thought of it so that when they went live they could have their responses ready, but we could have our critique ready. It was a little bit of nice detente. So after the moratorium ran out I published a story on called "0wnz0red" on Salon. It was up for the Nebula and so on. That story was a critique of trusted computing and was really well received. And I got an email from one of the of trusted computing people at Microsoft saying "How can I rebut a short story?" And I thought, "I found an avenue of attack for which they have no defense. I think I've got to pursue it."In January, you have a collection coming out called Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present. What can you tell us about the stories?

Doctorow: They are a collection of stories that explore the problem space of the singularity, technological liberty and the social impact of technology, which I think is the purest example of what science fiction is for.

The story in it that I am most proud of is a story called "After the Siege," which is a novella which has just had its first publication in Russia in a magazine called ESLI. "After the Siege" is a science-fictional retelling of the Siege of Leningrad.

My grandmother was a little girl [during] the siege of Leningrad, and she lived through it. She never really told us much about it. We'd get into arguments and she'd say "You don't understand, your generation doesn't understand, you haven't lived though what I lived through." [All] I really knew was she had been a war refugee. She ended up in Siberia, where she met my grandfather. She got pregnant and they went to Azerbaijan. My father was born, then they went to Hamburg, where my aunt was born. Then they came to Canada and enjoyed a very good life not long thereafter. They were immigrants who picked themselves up by the bootstraps. I was like, "You weren't in a concentration camp; like, how awful could it have been?" And I knew very little about the siege of Leningrad, which is one of the most horrific and darkest chapters in human history.

We went back to St. Petersburg last summer with my grandmother, saw my family that still live there. I was there with my mother, my father, my brother and sister-in-law, and as we walked around, my grandmother told us the most hair-raising stories that I'd ever heard. For the first time in my life, she opened up and she told us about the siege as a 12-year-old girl. She would point at windows and would say, "I was carrying bodies out of that building, and we were too weak to carry them, and so we threw them out of the window. And then we scraped them up." Or: "On this corner I saw a man who was dead and someone had taken his ass, someone had taken his bottom and they had eaten it." That's what the black marketers did—because it was the last part of your body to rot away when you starve to death—they would harvest the asses of people who had fallen in the street and grind it up and sell it as ground meat.

And so I knew that I had to write about this, and in the back of my mind was a thing that had come up in conversation, where we had been talking about the fact that we live in an era which for the first time it is possible to make all human knowledge available to everyone, at essentially no cost. Well, there were certainly problems with that. Unequivocally a salutary moment to live in, a moment in which all human knowledge is available to all human beings. And in this conversation, we come up with an analogy about hot lunches. Imagine a world where hot lunches were available to everyone, and the restaurateurs started to complain about what it was doing to their business and the future of restaurants. You would have very little sympathy for them, I think.

And I wanted to write a story about a country that had found independence in ending the scarcity of goods, and the world that ganged up on them to force them back to the scarcity box. Right now we have a lot of developing countries around the world that are seeking a future in which scarcity of information goods ends as a means of helping them up the ladder. You know, in South Africa they have a terrible AIDS crisis due in large part to their inability to afford patented pharmaceuticals. Those patents, they only honor them because the TRIPS agreement—which is a part of the WTO [World Trade Organization]—requires them to do so. The president's son died of AIDS. Can you imagine if the First Twins kicked the bucket because they couldn't afford some drugs that were patented by some developing nation? That country wouldn't last 10 minutes, right? And you have these global movements in the developing world, particularly in the south, but also in the former Soviet republics, to resist these incursions of Western-style knowledge goods regimes, the same way the U.S. did in its first 100 years as a country. The U.S. was a pirate nation that stole the copyrights of colonial Europe, and the patents, because exporting their GDP to the countries they fought this bloody and terrible war against was not good for business. So you have these developing countries who want to do the same thing to the U.S. that the U.S. did to England, and are finding themselves incapable of doing it. And so I really wanted to combine all of those things, and so that's how "After the Siege" came about.

You [also] have these very light, sprightly pieces in this collection, like "Printcrime," a little kind of toss-off, and funny stories like "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth," or "I, Row-Boat," or you have these stories that are really intensely personal and political to me. I think it's a good range.You make much of your work available free online as Creative Commons-licensed downloads. What prompted you to give your work away for free, and how difficult was it to convince your publishers to go along with the idea?

Doctorow: It's just good business. As publisher Tim O'Reilly says, an author's worst problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity. Of all the people who failed to buy one of my books today, the vast majority did so because they never heard of them, not because they got a free digital copy from the Internet. Indeed, a digital copy makes the print copy more valuable, since it adds utility in the form of portability, ease of reproduction, searching and archiving, and so on. In short, giving away ebooks sells print books.

It's a great moment to be an SF writer. SF appears to be the only fiction that anyone cares about enough to really aggressively steal over the Internet. I'd rather be in the "worth stealing" camp than the "beneath notice" camp. As with every revolution in information production and dissemination, Internet-based copying will create lots of opportunities for attentive, entrepreneurial artists who don't turn crybaby the minute last year's business model is threatened by next year's. I'm going to be one of the entrepreneurs.

My editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, was behind me all the way on this. It was a no-brainer for him and Tor, and the books have sold well enough that there's never been any question as to whether I'll continue the experiment.You also publish a regular podcast, which features you narrating your short stories, in serialized installments. Do you think your podcast reaches a new audience that otherwise wouldn't read your work? What is it about the audio medium that you (and audiobook listeners) find appealing?

Doctorow: I think it makes it easier for my fans to hook their pals. One way to hook a pal is to send her a copy of a story, but there are lots of people for whom reading isn't a big part of their day who might take a flyer on a new author in the car, on a walk or at the gym.

I just love reading my stuff aloud. It makes me into a better reader, and a better writer. In the case of works in progress, it brings clarity to the work I've just done to read it aloud. It indulges my inner ham.

Having a story read to you is intimate and comforting, like bedtime or campfire stories. The author's voice right there, in your earbuds, it's like a close friend. I don't buy that people "want artists to get paid" any more than they "want busboys to get paid" in the abstract. But I thoroughly believe that people want their pals to get a square deal. What can you tell us about your current projects?

Doctorow: I just finished a YA novel called Little Brother, about hackers who declare war on the Department of Homeland Security. Every chapter has got a real-world how-to about why homeland security does not work, and how you can defeat it. And it talks about the math and computer science and information science behind the war on terrorism, the junk science behind the war on terrorism. But it's also meant to be an instruction kit for teaching kids to be culture jammers and technology jammers. I've been calling it Encyclopedia Brown meets The Anarchist Cookbook. My editor at Tor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, called it Wikipedia Brown. So I just finished it, and finished the outline of book two. It's a two book series. My agent is auctioning it off after Labor Day.

I'm finishing up a novel called Themepunks that was serialized on Salon. And Charles Stross and I have been talking about finishing up these Huw stories that we have been writing: "Jury Service" and "Appeals Court," and writing a third one maybe called "Parole Board." Tor is going to do that as a fix-up.

Ben Rosenbaum and I have been writing another one of those stories with the same title as the famous story. We've been writing "True Names." We're almost done, and that might be it for fiction projects.

I've got some stories, stories that are coming out, stories you may have heard on the podcast. [There's] "I, Row-Boat," Rudy Rucker's publishing that in Flurb on Monday. It would be nice for "I, Robot" to win the Hugo tonight and Flurb published "I, Row-Boat" on Monday. I might write a third one just as a joke, just a 250-word one, "I, Rarebit," about an uplifted cheese sandwich. But I think I am done with the "something that rhymes with robot." I'm not going to do an "I, Rabbit" or "I, Ribbit." I think I'm done. You write quite a lot of nonfiction; any book-length projects in the works?

Doctorow: I'm writing a nonfiction book about the interaction of technology control systems and democracy and culture and competition and free speech. It's called Set Top Cop: Hollywood's Secret War on Your Living Room, and it's part of a Fullbright Chair that I'm on at USC this year. I'm teaching and writing about the subject. I've got a good grad seminar going, some very sharp kids—we're doing some work on this stuff.