WIJFR: Homeland

While attending the Burning Man festival, Marcus receives a USB drive from a hacker, Masha, with more than 800,000 incriminating government documents, and she advises Marcus to publish the material if anything happens to her. Meanwhile, a contact at the festival recommends Marcus to California Senate Independent candidate Joe Noss as a webmaster, and he …

Continue reading ‘WIJFR: Homeland’ »

WIJFR: Pirate Cinema

Trent McCauley is sixteen, brilliant, and obsessed with one thing: making movies on his computer by reassembling footage from popular films he downloads from the net. In the dystopian near-future Britain where Trent is growing up, this is more illegal than ever; the punishment for being caught three times is that your entire household’s access …

Continue reading ‘WIJFR: Pirate Cinema’ »

WIJFR: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

It’s only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow’s fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he’s the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately …

Continue reading ‘WIJFR: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town’ »

WIJFR: Eastern Standard Tribe

Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe is a soothsaying jaunt into the not-so-distant future, where 24/7 communication and chatroom alliances have evolved into tribal networks that secretly work against each other in shadowy online realms. The novel opens with its protagonist, the peevish Art Berry, on the roof of an asylum. He wonders if it’s better …

Continue reading ‘WIJFR: Eastern Standard Tribe’ »

WIJFR: Little Brother

Seventeen-year-old techno-geek “w1n5t0n” (aka Marcus) bypasses the school’s gait-recognition system by placing pebbles in his shoes, chats secretly with friends on his IMParanoid messaging program, and routinely evades school security with his laptop, cell, WifFnder, and ingenuity. While skipping school, Marcus is caught near the site of a terrorist attack on San Francisco and held …

Continue reading ‘WIJFR: Little Brother’ »

WIJFR: Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present

In these quirky, brashly engaged “stories of the future present” Cory Doctorow shows us life from the point-of-view of the plugged-in generation and makes it feel like a totally alien world. — Claude Lalumiere, Montreal Gazette “Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present” is a collection of short stories by Cory Doctorow. It consists of: Printcrime …

Continue reading ‘WIJFR: Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present’ »

Down(pour) and out in the Magic Kingdom

We’re in Orlando this weekend for our annual Labor Day mini-vacation at Walt Disney World. The day started out great: blue sky, white clouds, nice temperature. We got up early and headed over the Disney’s Hollywood Studios (formerly MGM Studios) since it opened an hour earlier for resort guests. Once inside, we made a bee-line …

Continue reading ‘Down(pour) and out in the Magic Kingdom’ »