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As someone who suffered intermittent jet lag for about three weeks following a vacation involving a six hour time difference, the aspect of the novel that should have resonated with me the most was the idea of trying to live in one part of the world while maintaining an internal clock for somewhere else. Alas, that's the part that Doctorow seems to pay the least attention to, despite it being sort of central to his whole premise.This is the first novel I've read from Doctorow, who I don't know m...
This is another great read, but I've found that Doctorow's first two books (This and Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) are a bit different to his later novels. They're both set further into the future, and while the concepts are interesting, it's all a bit more vague as to how the technology that supports them would actually function. This is to be expected when it comes to speculative fiction I suppose, but I much prefer the detail of the later books. I found the first couple of sections of th...
Art Berry lives in a world just slightly askew from the rest of us. In our increasingly wireless world of instant and constant communication, he gives his loyalty not to a state or a company or family and friends he sees regularly, but to the Eastern Standard Tribe—a largely faceless collection of people whose home time zone is the Eastern Standard Zone, who are locked in cutthroat competition with other tribes aligned with other time zones. Art himself is currently working in London, engaged in...
It’s hard to put my finger on exactly why I didn’t like Eastern Standard Tribe. The writing is engaging and clever, the editing is spot on, the topic is interesting, but something about the book is just ... off. Maybe I’m not hip enough, not a proud enough member of the target technorati audience, or simply not plugged into the prevailing zeitgeist of cultural change. If that sentence sounded pretentious to you, boy do I have some bad news for you. Of course it’s also possible that Eastern Stand...
Surprisingly prescient from 2004. People glued to phones - check. People the most connected they've ever been, yet disconnected - check. Stifling bureaucracy - check.Goodreads says I read this in 2009 and even gave it a somewhat middling review then. I have no memory of this. Somehow that seems appropriate for a book about a guy with a pencil up his nose on the rooftop of a mental hospital.This book has a lot of depth, and I think perhaps I didn't credit it with that on my first reading in 2009....
An interesting idea that about how the Internet has changed social & work groups, although it ultimately doesn't make a lot of sense. Still, it was a fun, near future trip that pokes a lot of fun & holes into our current conditions. The main character isn't particularly likable which didn't help the story. The few other characters weren't very well fleshed out. All in all, not a bad way to pass the time. It's fairly short.
I liked parts of this; there were some interesting ideas and a few things that made me chuckle or even laugh out loud. It was short, so the things I didn't like didn't go on too long. I did like how things turned out for the main character, although the resolution involved a somewhat-too-tidy chain of coincidences.The format/style was peculiar, telling part of the story in 3rd person, past tense and part of it in 1st person, present tense although the main character in both parts is the same per...
When I read this in 2005, Doctorow was being touted as the supposed heir apparent to “cyberpunk” writers like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling who use modern IT tech to extrapolate the near-future. Whatever labels you want to throw on it, this was pretty good, even though the basic premise (that in future, netheads will define their peers by time zones rather than geography) is hard to take seriously. Then again, the main character is a bit of a head case.
Ever like a person but drift off when they start discussing their pet obsession? Like a guy who is pretty well-rounded otherwise, but if you get him started on Warhammer 40K or Quantam Physics or his opposition to DRM, he sort of disconnects from you?That's Cory Doctorow about a 1000 times over. The man appears to be made of pet obsessions. His books are littered with little rants and bits where you see the author poking through the narrative.And it's a shame, because Eastern Standard Tribe has
I'm giving this a 3 because I thought a lot of the world-building was interesting and I found the voice engrossing. However, the book is deeply flawed in some irritating ways.The narrator is sarcastic and not particularly likeable, but he is interesting, I must grant. He's affiliated with a group based in the EST but finds himself in London undercover trying to sabotage other groups. (There's a really interesting theory here about how the internet changes the way that people self-identify; howev...
3.5* I enjoyed this, my first Doctorow, and I will read more of his books. I quite liked the idea of the 'Tribes' as aren't some of us almost like that now? The images of the near future and tech developments were brilliant and clearly imaginable (most of them) and this story did make me laugh at times.
I enjoyed this, but mostly for the 'user experience' ideas that the main character had--the 21st century inventor. Some of them were brilliant. I didn't find the idea of the tribes convincing at all, but the rest of the story was fine.
As I've said before, and will surely say again, I think Cory Doctorow is an amazing human being and I am glad he has sufficient influence to force his vision of the future onto reality, at least a little bit. I mean, seriously, if there are any other modern, (relevant*) authors whose entire literary catelogue I can download without guilt or financial expenditure, someone needs to point me to them immediately. And for a few dozen pages each, Cory Doctorow's books really sing. I mean, really, who
Once again Cory Doctorow presents a weird world view shaped by realistic human interactions with technology. While this book wasn't as bizarre as Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, it is worth reading due to its captivating story and ideas relating to the internet groups being the center of one's sense of community. In many ways, this book reminds me of JD Salinger's The Catcher In the Rye- the main character is a misfit who struggles with interpersonal relationships and is telling the story fr
Here is a near-future novel about an industrial saboteur who finds himself on the roof of an insane asylum near Boston.In a 24-hour, instant communication world the need for sleep is the only thing that hasn’t changed. The world is splintering into tribes based on time zones; those in other time zones will be at lunch or sleeping when you need them. Only those in your own time zone can be depended upon.Art lives in London, and he works for a European telecommunications mega-corporation. His "rea...
Doctorow's voice is so crisp, so clean, it leaps off the page and runs around the house like a puppy on amphetamines. The plot is straightforward, nothing subtle or complex about it. What's subtle is the ease with which Doctorow gets into your head with his ideas. In no time at all you find yourself nodding in agreement, as he explains how tribes work, how they've always worked, and how the global expansion and ease of communication continue to drive such sensibilities. I'm still not sure how mu...
Freaking. Awesome. I used this quote in so many college essays: “So you’re a fish out of water. You live in Arizona, but you’re sixteen years old and all your neighbors are eighty-five, and you get ten billion channels of media on your desktop. All the good stuff—everything that tickles you—comes out of some clique of hyperurban club-kids in South Philly. They’re making cool art, music, clothes. You read their mailing lists and you can tell that they’re exactly the kind of people who’d really ap...
This book was written by Cory Doctorow, one of the writers at BoingBoing.net, so it might not surprise you that you that it's under the Creative Commons license and you can read it for free at his site. Being, however, a chump, I paid real Earth dollars for it in meatspace. Meatspace! I am a hip cyberpunk! From the future!The book is near-future science fiction with just about one cool new idea: in a pervasively connected homogenized world, the most meaningful form of of group identity isn't ge...
Cory Doctorow's amazingly written Eastern Standard Tribe starts out with an amazingly epic first chapter, sebsequently following two stories that follow each other, the beginning of the first connecting with the end of the last just before the book ends. This leads to a very strange style of reading, where you know a little more of what happens in the early plot every time you visit the later, but never enough to make either boring.At times you stop and wonder where the author is going with the
Eastern Standard Tribe reads so quickly and flows so well that it feels like it must be light weight fluff -- a throw away entertainment and nothing more -- but it doesn’t take much, only a little thought and a willingness to engage with “dead bodies” and “living flesh,” to see that it is much more.Cory Doctorow is an unrepentant blogger, and it shows in this, his second novel. His language fizzes and crackles like three bags of Pop Rocks burning their carbonated pleasure on a tongue, popping ou...