Cory Doctorow's Reading List

"My first pick is Sarah Wynn-Williams's book Careless People. It's a great example of the Streisand effect that when a company tries to suppress something, it brings it interest."

"My second choice is a book by Bridget Read. It's a book called Little Bosses Everywhere — a history of the American pyramid scheme. An incredibly illuminating, beautifully researched book."

"It's funny. It's mad cap. It's gonzo. It's full of heart. It is like everything great about a kids book. I cannot recommend it highly enough."

"Schneier is a famous cryptographer: he wrote the basic textbook, Applied Cryptography , he’s now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and after a couple of decades of writing about security thinking he’s now thinking about security in the context of geopolitics and economics. (He’s also an old friend of mine: he designed my wedding ring, which is a cipher wheel, and he wrote the afterword to my novel Little Brother ). We hear a lot about design thinking. After 9/11 and 7/7, there were a lot of ill-considered measures taken in the name of security. Schneier states that to make things secure, we have to take a rigorous approach. So, if you’re making everybody take off their shoes, you have to think about where else they might conceal something. If you remove all the rubbish bins from Central London, you have to imagine where else someone from the IRA might plant a bomb. After all, the IRA’s campaign was not a litter-oriented campaign. Nor was Osama bin Laden an opponent in civil aviation. You need to approach this in a systematic way. He says when we think about the tax code, real estate regulation, financial rules, and security problems, we need to apply security thinking. If we plug this loophole, what remaining loopholes might our adversaries switch to? If we design a system of this degree of complexity, what lurking unsuspected bugs might it contain that we can never address, which might be eliminable if we reduce the complexity of the system through fundamental refactoring? Schneier is adding power to the story of security and moving beyond the technical dimension, and even the social dimension, into the political economy. Security experts have long understood that there’s a social dimension to security. One of the easiest ways to break into a computer system is to call the owner and pretend to be a police officer and say, “I really need you to give me this information from your system.” That works surprisingly well. What we’re learning from things like the Twitter Files is that it isn’t always someone pretending to be a police officer. Sometimes someone calls up and says, truthfully, “I am with the FBI—or the Home Office, or a very large corporation that you’re very dependent on—and I require you to do these things that violate your policies and put other people at risk.” When that happens, no policy and no technology can defend against it. The only things that defend against that are accountability, pluralism, and deconcentrating power. Chokepoint Capitalism is a book I co-authored with copyright scholar Rebecca Giblin from the University of Melbourne. It’s about concentration in the labor market for creative work and what we can do about it. The first half of the book is composed of case studies that dig into the complex accounting scams that allow the entertainment industry to steal from its workforce. The second half of the book presents detailed systemic solutions that are shovel-ready. Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. As the creative labor markets have lurched from crisis to crisis, the absence of well-developed proposals for alternatives has led us to keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different outcome. Our theory of change is that if we can introduce these ready proposals, when crisis strikes again, we can do something different. I mention this because the first half of the book is so enraging that readers have told us: “I got to chapter six and I heard this high-pitched whining that I realized was an incipient rage aneurysm. For my own well-being, I had to put the book down.” I’m here to tell you that you’ve got to finish the book. The second half of the book provides relief by telling you what we can do about it. I promise you don’t need to only buy fair-trade music. It’s about how we can systematically alter the arts market so that workers get a larger share of the outcome and capital gets a smaller share. Workers within the creative industries (including editors, people who work at labels, and so on) and everyone in our audiences are class allies against the forces that want to drain all of our pocketbooks and treat us as badly as they can. Chokepoint Capitalism is about what’s wrong and about what to do about it. All of our answers are systemic solutions presented as alternatives to what we’ve done for the last 40 years whenever copyright has been in crisis, which is to add more copyright. In a world where there are only five major publishers that can bring your book to market, any copyright given to authors is transferred to those publishers. Just as if your kid gets beaten up for his lunch money every day and you give him extra lunch money, he’s going to get beaten up for the extra lunch money, too. We have to think about power as an important mechanism here. When sampling arose, at first no one knew how to manage it within copyright. It wasn’t considered part of the copyright question. If you go to New Orleans and hear a jazz band, the horn player will drop a couple of bars of something familiar in the middle of a solo, and it’s not a copyright violation. It’s not even fair dealing or fair use; it’s just cultural practice. That was how sampling was treated. Over time, through precedent, and through business practice, we created an exclusive right to control samples. Immediately, the Big Three labels amended their standard terms so that you couldn’t license a sample without signing a label contract. Every label contract now required you to sign away the rights to profit from your own samples, which meant that everyone who wanted to use samples had to pay the shareholders of the record labels. Musicians didn’t get any more money. As a class, musicians got less money. Taylor Swift is the most powerful bargainer in music today, the most popular recording artist and touring artist in the Western world, and she couldn’t get control of her masters back. A private equity weirdo acquired those masters and refused to sell them back to her at any price. He sold them to a private equity fund owned by the Disney family. He made sure that he would get a long-term revenue stream from that, not because he needed it but because he vindictively wanted her to know that every time her music gave someone pleasure, he would make money from it. However, everyone in the world has the right to record a Taylor Swift song under this thing called the compulsory license. It’s a collective right owned by everyone who cares about music… including Taylor Swift. So Swift recorded cover albums of her own albums. These are available for sale and for streaming from everywhere you can get her albums in their original form. The cover albums are better, they’re blessed by her, and this creep doesn’t get a penny. As we contemplate the rise of AI as a means of displacing creative income, a lot of creators are saying, “We will create the right to decide who can train a model with my work.” However, we already know how that’s going to work. Let’s say you’re a voice actor. The game studios that employ voice actors now begin every session with this kind of ritual recitation: “My name is Cory Doctorow. I freely and permanently assign the right to train a machine-learning system with my voice.” “To be a part of the ruling elite, you must distance yourself as far as possible from any productive activity” The game studios, and all the entities who have chokeholds over our creative labor markets, have motive, means, and opportunity to transfer any new right to train to themselves. They are the only ones who want to reduce creative labour’s share of the income. Kids making memes on social media don’t want to stop artists from getting paid, nor do they pay artists. They’re orthogonal to the question of how artists get paid. If, in the name of stopping those people, we create a new right to train, that right will land with the giant media conglomerates. Schneier suggests that we approach this as a security problem. What can we do as a countermeasure? We could say, as the US Copyright Office thus far has been very consistent in saying, that there is no copyright on machine-learning-generated works. As copyright adheres at the moment of fixation of the creative work generated by a human, Disney can therefore amend its animators’ contracts to require them to sign away the training rights. They can create models that, based on a prompt, can produce Pixar cartoons while the executive is out at lunch. However, that model will not attract a copyright, and everything in that model’s output doesn’t attract a copyright. Disney can release that movie, but everyone else can take it and sell it. At that point, Disney may say, “We will just pay the animators.” That’s how you think through this security problem that factors in power."

"This book’s inception occurred during this weird speaking gig at a billionaire’s retreat in a desert. Doug is a great writer, and a friend, I’ve followed his career for decades. He thought he was there to be a futurist and talk about futuristic stuff, and he goes to the session and it’s just five guys in a room. He says, “I have a speech.” They say, “We don’t want to hear the speech. We want to ask you what we should do to prepare for the end of the world. If we’re in a luxury bunker and we have mercenaries keeping us safe from the slobbering hordes outside, how do we keep the mercenaries from killing us to take the food in our bunker? We need your help with this stuff.” They’re all sitting there, larping Mad Max . Survival of the Richest addresses what has happened to rich weirdos and what is going on in their minds. Doug writes that the increasing trend of financialization over 40 years is to go meta. Rather than providing a service, you intermediate a service. Rather than intermediating a service, you sell intermediation tools for services. Rather than selling intermediation tools for services, you sell futures in intermediation tools for services. Rather than selling the futures, you sell derivatives of the futures. The productive economy exists as a chip in a casino where the people who participate in the productive economy aren’t welcome. To be a part of the ruling elite, you must distance yourself as far as possible from any productive activity or anything tangential to the productive activity. This describes the arts market, which keeps moving away from being the helpmeet and service provider to creative labor, to becoming a parasitic intermediator. In Chokepoint Capitalism , in the second half of the book where we present the solutions, we have a case study that relates to unionization. The Writers Guild of America in Hollywood had found that the number of agencies they dealt with had dwindled because four firms had acquired all their competitors. Two of these firms had been backed by private equity companies and saddled with huge amounts of debt that would tank the companies if they couldn’t figure out a way to get more profits. “I think that we underrate solidarity” These four agencies abandoned the traditional model, where the agent bargains for the best deal they can get for the writer and then takes a 10 per cent commission, and moved to a packaging model instead. They would approach the studio and say, “We’re going to get you a writer, a director, and a couple of stars from our talent pool. We’re not going to charge any commission to those creators because we’re such good-natured souls. Instead, we’re going to take a fee from you.” As productions have fixed budgets, every dollar that goes to an agent in fees is a dollar that doesn’t go to a writer in salary. The writers discovered that, very often, the 90/10 split had become a 10/90 split, and their agents were getting nine times as much as the writers were. The agents were intending to expand on this even more. The four agencies started building their own studios, and a couple of them did build studios. They then negotiated deals with their own studios on behalf of their own clients. The Writers Guild created a code of conduct and said, “No more packaging deals, no more studios. You sign it or we fire you.” The agencies said, “You’re never going to fire us.” On one day, all 7,000 members of the Writers Guild fired every agent in Hollywood. They ground out a 22-month strike until every single one of those agencies, including the ones that were indebted to their private equity owners and would not survive if they couldn’t go on exploiting writers in this way, caved. As it turns out, you can make a Hollywood movie without a Hollywood agent, but you can’t make a Hollywood movie without a Hollywood writer. The agencies are an example of going meta. This is survival-of-the-richest business. The fact that they were backed by private equity is not a coincidence. Private equity is about going meta. It’s about moving from a posture of delivering value and facilitating valuable production to extracting a rent from it. It was solidarity. We talked to David Goodman, who was our interlocutor for our LA launch at the Beverly Hills Public Library. He’s the showrunner for Family Guy and has done a lot of other great stuff, and he was running the Guild at that time. He told us there were writers who the agencies didn’t dare to exploit in this way. There were writers who got a great deal out of this. They walked out too, because they understood that their own personal fortunes were less important than the fortune of their field. And that, because they were not getting screwed over, they were better positioned to eschew their income for twenty-two months than these baby writers who were just coming up. It was solidarity, and it made all the difference in the world. It was quite remarkable. I think that we underrate solidarity. People are wise to the divide-and-conquer wheeze more often than we would think. If you go to a fun fair, and at 10 o’clock in the morning you see someone walking around with a giant teddy bear that you win by throwing five balls in a peach basket, that poor sod did not throw five balls in a peach basket. The carny working the basket said, “I’ll tell you what, mate. I’m going to charge you three dollars instead of five dollars. If you can get one ball in, I’ll give you a keychain. If you win two keychains, I’ll let you trade it for a teddy bear.” The reason isn’t that the carny wants to give away teddy bears. The carny wants someone to walk around all day with a giant teddy bear so that other people will line up to put down a fiver. There are writers out there who were getting giant teddy bears from the big four agencies. These writers knew it and they said, “I don’t owe you a shred of loyalty for this giant teddy bear. I cannot be bought for a giant teddy bear.” And they stayed out for 22 months."

"Robinson is the founder and editor-in-chief of Current Affairs , which is a leftist journal. His unique selling proposition among lefty writers, editorialists, and reporters is that he spends an awful lot of time comprehensively consuming right-wing media. He reads all the books, including biographies and memoirs. He watches Fox News. He watches weird documentaries about conspiracies–everything from 9/11 to vaccines . He systematically lays out what the argument is and what its nuances are, and where the cleavage lines are among the right. He breaks these down into about 25 different right-wing beliefs, then he describes the underlying factual matter. There are areas in which the right is not entirely wrong. I was just talking about this with a reporter. When they say that the Davos crowd is sinister and has it in for us, they’re not wrong. I’m speaking as a Davos attendee. I didn’t pay to go; I was a speaker. Then he lays out what you can say back. He creates what you would call in the union movement an organizing conversation about how to address these arguments. What to say to people who are enmeshed in them, but much more importantly, people who have encountered them and are like, “I just heard this thing. It sounds plausible. I don’t know what to make of what you have to say.” Rather than saying, “Oh my God! That’s a racist dog whistle. You’re a bad person for even thinking it,” he gives you the tools to have a systematic conversation that will actually change minds."

"Speaking as someone who wrote a book about monopolies , telling the monopoly story is really hard. The ways that monopolies extract income (rent) from the rest of us is performatively complicated. Some things are hard to understand because they’re complicated, but, very often, things are complicated specifically so they will be hard to understand. Think about the Great Financial Crisis and the way that collateralized debt obligations, synthetic collateralized debt obligations, and derivatives of collateralized synthetic debt obligations all work. They were complicated so that you would not be able to understand them. The term in finance is MEGO, which stands for My Eyes Glaze Over. The idea behind it is that if you give a mark a prospectus that’s thick enough, they will assume that there’s something good in it. If you have a pile of shit that’s big enough, there must be a pony underneath it. Dayen pulls these apart in a way that is very entertaining, and he does it sector by sector. He’s got a very good throughline. In one part, he writes about military procurement, which seems to be a very weird and esoteric area. The US military builds a lot of jets. It relies on four primary aerospace contractors, such as Boeing, to build those jets, and then it services the jets in-house. I live in Burbank, which is a city basically created by Lockheed Martin, one of these primary contractors. When we bought our house, we got a letter from the council saying: “When Lockheed Martin left, they left a bunch of unmarked fuel depots. If you find out that your yard is full of cancer, just let us know, because we’ve got this trust fund. We will come and remove all your dirt and give you some clean fill.” Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . These primary contractors rely on secondary contractors to build the components. Some private equity weirdos got together, and they did a research project to identify all the single-source component manufacturers. The private equity weirdos bought every manufacturer who makes a widget that no one else makes and they rolled them up into a single firm. Then, they reduced the price for primary aerospace contractors to below cost. As many of these widgets as possible are now appearing in the materiel owned by the US Air Force, US Army, and so on, and they charged Uncle Sucker a 25,000 per cent markup on replacement parts. It’s such a scam! Abraham Lincoln refused to buy guns for the Union Army unless they used interoperable tooling and ammunition, specifically because he was worried about this shit. But here we are, in the 21st century, building billion-dollar fighter jets without the nous of a guy who learned to practice law while ploughing his dad’s field. It’s incompetence that must be deliberate. Once is accident; twice is coincidence; three times is enemy action. They have bought these jets more than three times—many more. Dayen says that even if you hate American imperialism and know that the only thing those jets are doing is bombing Yemenis , it doesn’t matter. In addition to the sins of those American jets, there’s also the fact that a bunch of people out there are getting unbelievably rich and using that wealth to corrupt our public processes, including by demanding that America fight in more wars. This requires building more airplanes, and they’re doing it through this scam. Dayen lays it all out in a very relatable way. He takes this performatively complicated material and opens the outer shell of the matryoshka. He removes the next shell, and the next, until he gets to the middle, and he says, “Do you see? There’s nothing good in the middle. If you keep on unwrapping it, it’s a pile of shit in the middle.” It’s really quite masterful. Dayen is a great researcher, writer, and investigative journalist—he’s the current editor-in-chief of The American Prospect , which is a wonderful magazine. He’s a great writer on many subjects but on monopoly, I think he’s one of the best. Chokepoint Capitalism is about labor markets in the creative industries, but it’s mostly a book about market concentration . You can’t talk about labor markets in the creative industries without talking about the fact that we have five publishers, four studios, three labels, and two ad tech companies that are also app companies. One of them is the same company that does all the audiobooks and e-books. That is the result of deliberate policy choices that arise out of a right-wing doctrine called consumer welfare, that says monopolies are beneficial because they allow the latent giants who walk among us–heroes from Ayn Rand novels –to run big enterprises better than any normal human being could. Think of the way that weirdos worship Elon Musk. “I think that we underrate solidarity” That is how we got to this place. It’s not a mystery how these companies grew to the scale they’re at. The way that Universal, Warner and Sony became the three labels that control 70 per cent of all sound recordings and 65 per cent of all compositions was not by investing in the best music that other people didn’t have the vision to invest in; they used their access to capital markets to do anticompetitive acquisitions. The reason we did not enforce black letter law to prevent those acquisitions—such as the Clayton Act or the Sherman Act—was because of this right-wing doctrine that came out of the Reagan era, has spread all over the world and is at breaking point. It is finally reaching the point where people are no longer willing to tolerate it. In the UK, you have the Competition and Markets Authority taking very muscular action, and in the European Union, you have the European Commission. Here in the United States, there’s the Federal Trade Commission. Congress has introduced bipartisan legislation, co-sponsored by Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren, to break up the ad tech giants. Canada, where I’m from, has the world’s least fit-for-purpose competition law, which allows for the most grotesque anticompetitive mergers. They are finally reopening the question of whether that law is fit for purpose and contemplating amendments to it. There is, at least, some progress in the frozen north."

"Break ‘Em Up is a law professor’s history of anti-monopoly law: how we came to stop enforcing it, why we should continue to enforce it, and what we should do about it. Zephyr does a lot of MEGO unraveling. For example, she introduces an idea out of labor economics called ‘chickenization.’ In America, there are three poultry processors who have bought out all the poultry processors that competed with them. These three poultry processors have colluded to divide up the country, like the pope dividing the New World. If you’re a poultry farmer, there’s only one poultry processor that will buy your birds, so that poultry processor has you over a barrel. When you enter a deal with the poultry processor, they say: “You have to buy your chicks from us. These are the vets you’re allowed to use and the medicines the vets are allowed to give them. This is the food you’re allowed to give them and how often you’re allowed to feed them. Here is the coop that you have to build. This is how often the lights go on, and this is when the lights go off.” They control everything about your raising of those birds except for the price. The price is determined the day you bring the birds to market. The poultry processor uses their overview of the entire market to pay you just enough money to roll over your loans and do it again next year. It’s never enough to get ahead. Anyone who speaks out against the poultry processors is struck off and blacklisted, and this is comprehensive. When someone who spoke at a state hearing on these processes was struck off and became a coop repairman, the processor said “anyone who hires this guy to fix their coop will also be struck off.” “You’re not going to shop your way out of a monopoly” The term chickenization describes what is formally called a monopsony: when there’s a powerful buyer instead of a powerful seller. No one knows this word because there isn’t a family-destroying board game with this name. This monopsonistic market appears in many different sectors. It’s the motif of the tech sector. Think of Uber, where you have to supply the car; you have to drive it the way they tell you; and everything you do is scripted, down to the finest details. But you don’t know how much you’re going to get paid until you pick up your fare. Amazon drivers have machines watching their faces and their eyeballs. The company can dock their pay if they fail to comport themselves facially in the way they’re supposed to. Their payment is determined post facto, unilaterally, by the employer. This is a very powerful employer that wields a lot of political influence. This is the kind of thing Zephyr unravels. It resembles the creative labor market on the platform. If you work for YouTube or TikTok as a performer, your boss is an algorithm that docks your weekly pay packet according to which of its rules you’ve broken. It will not tell you what the rules are, so that you are more likely to keep breaking them. You invest your own money and spend weeks producing a video, and the algorithm doesn’t show it to anyone—not even the people who follow you—because it violated a rule. This looks a lot like Uber, the poultry market, and many labor markets. Zephyr Teachout is her real name, by the way. It’s an old Quaker name. She’s a hard-fighting lawyer who started out in copyright law and is now a law professor. I know her through the Netroots, which was the insurgency within the Democratic Party of Gen Xers around the time of the Kerry v. Bush elections in 2004. A bunch of people who understood the internet said, “Let’s get the Democratic Party to use the internet well.” The Dean campaign, especially, was a test case for this. I’ve known Zephyr for a very long time. Zephyr concludes this book with an important note about individual choices. She says that you’re not going to shop your way out of a monopoly any more than you’re going to recycle your way out of a climate emergency. If you allow the dogma of individual responsibility to override your common sense intuition that these are systemic societal problems, then you will be paralyzed. If you’re on your way to protest the labor conditions in your local Amazon factory, but you never make it because you drive around for hours looking for artisanal magic markers with which to make your protest sign because you don’t want to buy them on Amazon—Amazon wins. It’s the difference between being a vegan and having orthorexia. Being a vegan is about making some choices to make your little corner of the world a little better. Having orthorexia is being so maniacally concerned with making sure you eat in a specific way that sometimes you don’t even eat. Instead of taking systemic action to improve animal welfare or agriculture and the climate, you sit there worrying endlessly about the composition of your macronutrients and the names and labor conditions of the people who picked your soybeans. We should care about that stuff. But if you care about that at the micro level to the exclusion of macro change, then the other side wins and you lose."

"Most people will have heard of Discworld . There are 41 books in the series. Pratchett was an amazing and prolific writer, and he got good in public. I don’t mean that snarkily. There was a time in publishing when a writer who had a middling couple of books—which were promising and good but not great—could attract an audience and build that audience, even with relatively low sales figures, and continue to be featured in bookshops and so on. That time ended not long after Pratchett began his career, with the so-called death of the midlist. You saw a massive contraction of the number of titles being carried because of a massive consolidation in the number of stores where those books were carried. You had both consolidation in the trade, which is booksellers like Waterstones (and Borders, in the old days), and consolidation in the mass market, which is chemists, grocers, train stations, and so on. That consolidation saw a much more high-stakes environment, where a writer who had been historically successful and had a bad outing, but even more so, writers who were at the start of their career and had a bad second book (say) found themselves unable to be carried by anyone else. Either that’s where their careers ended, or they took on pen names and restarted their careers. Pratchett is an example of what we lost with that because Pratchett’s early novels, including his early Discworld novels, are merely okay, and his later novels are great. Snuff is one of those great ones, and it stands alone quite well. It is a cozy murder mystery set in a stately manor in the equivalent of the English countryside—a place called The Shire, in which the local magistrates are the great and the good, and in which they are all complicit in a murder. That murder is of a person who is considered subhuman, and therefore the murder is—by the lights of the town and the local system of justice—not a murder at all. At worst, it’s poaching. Someone’s taken a game animal, rather than murdered a person. “The gamekeepers are all poachers” The hero of this book is Sam Vimes. He’s one of the most important heroes of the Pratchett canon. He’s a cop and he’s on vacation. A delightful trope of the police procedural is the cop on vacation who stumbles upon a murder, and this novel has some of the best little tasty elements of that. His loving and quite well-drawn wife, Sybil, has told him he’s overworked and has conspired with his colleagues and his boss (who’s effectively the dictator of the city for which he is chief of police) to force him to go on vacation. Of course, Vimes immediately literally stumbles upon a murder. The character I want to highlight here is a bit of a recurring character in Pratchett. He is a forensic accountant-turned-copper, AE Pessimal. In an earlier Sam Vimes book, Pessimal is set against Sam Vimes as his overseer, to find out about the out-of-control spending in the police force. He shows up as a pecksniff, second-guessing all of the expenditure the police force is making, and doing this very difficult job. Out of desperation, and maybe sadism, Sam Vimes sticks a truncheon in Pessimal’s hand and says, ‘You’re coming down on the line with us.’ Pessimal turns out to be someone who likes being out there. He’s got the affect of the rabbit and the spirit of the wolf, and he goes after the miscreants. But what he really specializes in is going over their finances. Repeatedly, there are Sam Vimes adventures in which he does combat against the great and the good, the elites of Pratchett’s milieu, and the coup de grâce is delivered by an accountant who goes over their books. And this, I think, is one of the best of those (another one that’s quite notable is Making Money ). In Snuff , Pessimal turns up as they are cleaning house with these corrupt local magistrates, who are also the great landowners of the territory, and figures out how they’ve also all been involved in smuggling and tax cheating and so on. That is what actually breaks the back of the conspiracy , in a way that merely holding them to account for a murder wouldn’t have done. It can be seen as a variation of the noir formula in which the unlicensed cop thinks the cops can’t do things and then discovers that the cops won’t do things. In this case, Pessimal is coming in as an unlicensed tax inspector and doing something that I think we all can relate to in an era in which the Prime Minister is married to a non-domiciled billionaire who doesn’t pay tax: He’s turning up and taking people who, by dint of privilege and power, are spared the universal of death and taxes that everyone else is subject to, and he’s bringing them to justice. He is a beautifully drawn character, and the comeuppance is so sweet that it makes for a wonderful denouement to an absolutely stellar book."

"Lethem is quite a literary science fiction writer. He had a rocket takeoff to his career. He had written ten or so unsuccessful novels before he finally sold his first one, a noir book called Gun, With Occasional Music , that’s Raymond Chandler by way of Salvador Dali. Whatever it was he cracked in writing that book gave him the wherewithal to go back to those ten trunk novels and fix them up, and so he had this incredible firecracker string of brilliant books come out, one after the other. At the tail end of that, we got Motherless Brooklyn , which is a story about a private eye who has Tourette’s. He is part of a gang of private eyes. They’re the muscle men, leg men, bag men and goons of a well-known private eye about Brooklyn. They are all orphans that this guy took out of an orphanage and raised to be his sidekicks. I’m not really doing this justice, because this sounds like quite a silly premise, and it is. Part of the charm of this book is its self-awareness about the silliness of this. The book opens with their mentor and father figure, Frank Minna, going missing. It’s the story of how the Minna men—this gang, his sidekicks—try and solve the mystery of what happened to their boss. One of the things that very quickly becomes apparent is that the boss was the brains of the outfit, and none of them knows much about how to solve a mystery. Another thing that becomes apparent is that the protagonist, who has Tourette’s and is often belittled or mocked by his peers, is the smartest of the bunch but is roundly ignored. We learn very early on that he is heartbreakingly naïve, and that his worship of his boss, his understanding of his place in the world, and the importance that he brings to his life as a Minna man are all grossly misplaced. This is another one of those disillusionment novels. It’s not a novel about an unlicensed cop, but it is a novel about someone who thinks that they’re doing good in the world, who discovers that they have been someone else’s patsy all along. The voice of the character is, for obvious reasons, quite distinctive and very good. Lethem is quite a lyrical, comic, and absurdist writer. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music , is a hardboiled mystery about furries—not humans in fur suits, but actual anthropomorphic animals—and while this is set in a gritty, contemporary Brooklyn, it’s no less willing to be a little self-deprecating, a little surreal, and quite funny. It also has quite a sting in its tail because you fall in love with this character, and you see what’s coming before he does. There’s a sense of watching the protagonist in a horror movie go into the basement, when you know what’s there but for some reason, they keep heading towards it."

"Stephen Brust is an amazing fantasy writer. For literally forty years—since I was twelve years old—he has been publishing this long-running noir sword-and-sorcery series called the Vlad Taltos books . He’s nearly done with them. He’s grown to be quite a pal of mine, although he’s a good generation older than me. We have the same editor. It is clear that Brust is deeply conflicted about finishing the series that has been his life’s work. He keeps getting stuck on it and doing other things to not write it, including writing other books. This is one of those. It’s a book about a conspiracy to do good things in the world, a conspiracy to make other people happy. It shares its lineage with a Hugo Award-winning short story by Bruce Sterling called “Maneki Neko.” It is a crossover between noir and conspiracy novels. Conspiracies play a large part in noir. Often, the thing that’s being unwound by the noir protagonist is a conspiracy. In this case, the noir protagonist is the conspiracist. He’s part of a conspiracy, and it is in the nature of conspiracies that they often contain conspiracies of their own. They nest inner conspiracies. Think of Winston Smith meeting O’Brien in Orwell’s 1984 , and discovering that the party has another sub-party within it that is a conspiracy against the party, which turns out to be a conspiracy against the conspiracy against the party. It’s those wheels within wheels that give this some of its noir flavor. What really conveys the noir flavor, as with all of Brust’s work, is his impeccable, absolutely brilliant, dry, noir voice. It’s funny, it’s wry, it’s understated. He is a genius in every way. The language is delicious, and the dialogue and the characters are great. You want to be around a bar with this group of characters. As with every group of Brust characters, you just want to be hanging out with them in a con suite at a science fiction convention. Brust is a musician and I’ve actually been in con suites with him and other musicians bantering, drinking, singing. He is one of those guys. He’s a bard, and the book shows it. Yes, the protagonist, Donovan is tasked with solving a string of increasingly grisly murders, and the result is a police procedural—with magic."

"Richard Kadrey is another one of those great, longstanding writers who found his milieu with noir. He started off as one of the OG cyberpunk writers. He has a short story in Bruce Sterling’s Mirror Shades , which is the seminal, original, genre-defining anthology of cyberpunk published in the mid-80s. He wrote a great cyberpunk novel in the 80s called Metrophage , which I read as a teenager. I actually wrote the introduction for its reissue. Richard’s career really took off with a book called Sandman Slim , which is a noir novel. A man who’s a sorcerer is part of a magic circle in contemporary Los Angeles. The other magicians murder him, and they send him to hell, where he becomes a gladiator and pit fights for the demons. In so doing, he wins the favor of a demon prince and then steals an artifact that allows him to return to Earth and take his revenge. That was the first volume of 13, and the series is now complete. Sandman Slim, the monster who kills monsters, the unkillable man, comes back from hell and faces a series of escalating existential challenges. He saves Los Angeles, and then he saves America, and then he saves the Earth, and then he saves the solar system, and then he saves our reality, and then he saves heaven, and then he saves hell—over and over again, in this very noir way. It’s a great series of journeys. It’s in hell, it’s in heaven, it’s in limbo, it’s in other dimensions, it’s in Los Angeles, it’s all over. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . As he was closing in on the end of this, Kadrey must have wanted a palate cleanser. He wanted to catch his breath before he brought it in for a landing, and he wrote The Grand Dark . This is a very fucking weird book. It’s set in an alternate interwar period. It’s an analogy to Weimar , so think of Berlin in the ’20s. War is on the horizon. The city is full of mutilated veterans, many of whom, for complex reasons related to chemical weapons, have lost some or all of their face and go about wearing tin prostheses. The city is moving from a loose post-war liberalism into a drums-of-war-beating authoritarianism. It’s a murder story about a guy who is a down-and-outer, who ends up trying to investigate a murder because he is part of the underclass to whom no one in the temporal authorities wants to pay attention. Kadrey’s noir is Vantablack. It’s what made him such a great cyberpunk writer. He, alone among the cyberpunks, was an actual punk. That’s not quite true, because John Shirley wrote music for the Blue Oyster Cult, but Kadrey was a reformed car thief who’d done time in juvie. His noir is pretty goddamn noir. It’s not leavened with the humor of Steve Brust. Think of a Tom Waits album that’s been dragged through the gutter, and now it skips over and over again on Tom Waits growling. That’s where we’re at with Kadrey. It’s a stunning read; it’s beautifully plotted. The setting is amazing, and it’s got some great twists."

"Yes. There is a small but important subgenre of alternate Israel novels. There’s a novel by Simone Zelitch called Judenstaat , which imagines that after the war what became East Germany instead became the Jewish homeland. It makes a certain kind of sense; you could imagine that happening. In this one, in Chabon’s telling, it’s Alaska. It’s given over to the world’s Jews as a homeland but on a 50-year lease. The novel is set on the eve of the handback, so imagine Hong Kong in 1997. The protagonist is a policeman—not an unlicensed policeman, an actual policeman—trying to solve a murder on which the actual police authority has effectively given up, on the eve of the state’s dissolution. The murder is bound up with the overall project of pursuing a Jewish homeland, the contradictions and complexities of Zionism, its militaristic arm, its socialist arm, and the questions of what Jewish identity are. Both Chabon and I are Jewish. I support a two-state solution in Palestine and oppose apartheid in Israel. This is a book that speaks in a very sly and important way about what it means for there to be an indigenous population in a land that is given over as a form of reparation, and how those tensions play out. The fact that he has set it on the eve of this dissolution, this last-chopper-out-of-Saigon moment, makes for urgency. In these cases—and in every case of settler colonialism and truth and reconciliation, be that in Canada, where I’m from; in the United States, where I live; in South Africa; in Israel; in Australia—there is this temptation to kick the can down the road, to say, ‘There’s some stuff here we can’t resolve, and let’s see if time makes that easier to solve.’ But because this is the eve of the handback, all of these questions need to be resolved or forever buried. The liquidation of this temporary arrangement creates an urgency in circumstances where, far too often, we treat urgent things as not being urgent at all. The fact that it’s a murder that no one wants to pursue, that it involves factional and sectarian differences both within the Jewish faith and within Jewish culture and politics, and that it is played out against seized indigenous land that was seized long before it became a Jewish homeland, which is part of a wider issue of colonialism and settlerism in the Americas, all makes for a really rich foment. The voice is great. The voice is a wise, smartass, Lenny Bruce-ish, Jewish, Yiddish voice, and it’s a voice I love. I grew up speaking Yiddish. It was my father’s first language. I went to socialist Yiddish school at the Workmen’s Circle. Yiddish is an amazing language that has—even more so than English—this hybrid character. It has no formal grammar, it is all dialectical. I know we have the Queen’s English and Received Pronunciation, but those are relatively modern inventions. There is no formally correct English, Yiddish, even less so. There’s a phrase in Yiddish that’s really telling, which is ‘he speaks a beautiful Yiddish.’ Which is to say, the speaker borrows, on the fly, words from other languages and innovates grammars and structures that incorporate those borrowed words in ways that make for delightful wordplay, that are expressive, funny, and interesting. That carries over into the book itself. It’s a very Yiddish book. It could be Sholem Aleichem in translation. Or Rosa Luxemburg, for that matter. It’s terrific. The final thing I want to say about this novel is that it has one of Will Staehle’s all-time great covers—just an astoundingly good cover. Staehle is the artist who does all of my covers now as well. I love what he does with mine. If you want to get a sense of the versatility that Staehle has in his work, compare this cover to the cover of any of my books. You would never believe that they came from the same artist. Throw in a couple of his other ones—he does Victoria Schwab’s covers, and Charlie Jane Anders’s covers—and lay them out like a tarot deck. Ask yourself, how could one person be so versatile as to produce all of these brilliant, distinctive, extremely eye-catching covers? None of them are seemingly of a piece with each other. Absolutely. Someone called it Panama Papers fanfic. It’s a noir detective novel in that tradition I was talking about earlier. Marty, like Pessimal, is an unlicensed tax inspector. He’s a forensic accountant who spent forty years in Silicon Valley unwinding the weirdest, most baroque scams that tech bros can come up with. At 67, he is at the end of his career. He, at one point, has taken in trade for his services a luxury tour bus that a rockstar had fitted out for a perpetual end-of-life tour that he reckoned he would have to take because his manager had stolen all of his money, which is a thing that actually happens to rockstars all the time. Leonard Cohen toured till he dropped dead for that reason. George Clinton’s still on the road, not merely because he’s an unstoppable funk god but because his scumbag manager stole all his money. Marty’s 37-foot luxury tour bus is called The Unsalted Hash. He drives it from the tip of Baja, California, up to the Oregon coastline, and inland, too, taking retirement on the installment plan, working when his savings get low, and he’s called back for one last job. An old pal, who’s a brilliant, storied cryptographer—from the days when crypto meant cryptography, not cryptocurrency—has, very unwisely, decided to float his own cryptocurrency . Because he’s very good, it becomes a very successful cryptocurrency and is soon worth more than a billion dollars. But because he is prone to the hubris of very talented people, he has hidden in this cryptocurrency system a backdoor that would allow him to move the money around, should it become necessary—should there ever be an error revealed in his maths that allows someone to start stealing things from his blockchain. What’s been stolen is the keys themselves, and with those keys the criminals can take everything—more than a billion dollars. Of course, much of the money in that blockchain belongs to the kinds of money launderers and criminals who don’t take those losses lightly and who will hunt down Marty’s friend and flay him alive if their money goes missing. Marty agrees to find the keys, which turns out to be easier than you might imagine, because the low-level goons who are charged with stealing these keys are Millennials and so most of it just ends up on Instagram. But he then has to contend with the fact that the two criminal gangs who double-crossed each other and the various US three-letter agencies who are complicit to one degree or another in all of these shenanigans blame him. Marty has spent his whole career playing on the red team. In security, the people who attack are the red team and the people who defend are the blue team. Attackers need to be quite methodical and uncover a single mistake that the defenders have made and figure out how to exploit it. Defenders have to be perfectly methodical and make no mistakes that the attackers can discover. When Marty goes from hunting for the keys to being hunted for having found them, he switches from the red team to the blue team—the place he does not want to be. The book is mostly the story of how he figures out how to get back on the red team and how to go after the bad guys. It’s a very pacy novel. As you might imagine, if you’re the kind of person who writes eight books during lockdown, my partner cannot keep up with everything I do. My wife has got plenty to do. While she enjoys my books, she’s definitely not going to be able to read all of them. With this one, when I finished it, I handed it to her. I’d written it in six weeks flat. It came battering out of my fingertips. I said, ‘Darling, I think I’ve really got something here. Would you mind reading the first couple of pages?’ I rolled over in bed at two in the morning, and she was sat up in bed with her phone. I said, ‘What on Earth are you doing?’ She said, ‘I just had to figure out how it ended.’ Then, I sent it to my editor. My editor is a lovely chap and has edited every novel I’ve ever written. I’ve known him since I was a teenager. He’s an older brother figure to me, and we are great pals. He would not think that I was disparaging him if I were to note that he is not the world’s most reliable email correspondent. He is prone to taking a very long time to get back on routine matters. When I sent him the book, I figured it’d be a month or two before I heard back from him. Instead, I heard back the next morning: ‘That was a fucking ride. Whoa.’ He immediately bought two more. I had just written the last adventure of Marty Hench, and now he wanted two more of them. There’s precedent for how to manage this. When Queen Victoria offered Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a knighthood to bring back Sherlock Holmes, he brought Holmes back over Rickenbacker Falls. I didn’t want to bring Marty back over Rickenbacker Falls. My editor is a very powerful man in New York publishing but he can’t offer me a knighthood. Instead, I decided I would tell the story backwards, that I would go back in time to all of Marty’s earlier adventures. I discovered as I started doing this that there is a huge advantage to it. If you tell the story backwards, you have no continuity problems because causality runs in the other direction. If there’s a detail that appears later, you can always put it in. Backshadowing actually becomes foreshadowing when you’re writing the books backwards. “Conspiracies play a large part in noir” There are two prequels. The next one is The Bezzle . It will come out in February 2024. The one after that is Picks and Shovels , and it will come out in January 2025. I’m working on a couple more, and they each visit a different time in tech history—the different inflection points when we lived through these bubbles, these periods that seemed promising and sometimes were promising, including the web, the various deaths of VR, and so on and talk about what was going on in the scammiest, most self-deluded, frothiest, most bubble-licious parts of the tech sector, and how the people who dreamt of a technology that would be a force for liberation and connection contended with the money changers who showed up hoping that technology would be a source of control and extraction, and how they lost that fight, and how the forces of finance won that fight and made tech into, as Tom Eastman says, “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.” To a certain extent, although the point of this book is not to smuggle a tutorial in through a detective story. For one thing, it was pretty clear, even when I wrote this, that crypto was moving out of the spotlight and would wither away over the coming years. It’s really a tutorial in how technology and technical talk can be a smokescreen for all kinds of jargon. Think of the towel in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy . If you’ve got the towel, they’ll assume that you’ve got everything else. We all know that technology can be transformative. We’ve all lived through multiple cycles of tech transformation, and it’s that fact that makes stories or crimes in which grifters show up and say, ‘Here is the next transformational technology,’ sound plausible. Cryptocurrency is an especially virulent version of that because it’s not just about exploiting the fact that we’ve all lived through tech bubbles, it’s also exploiting the fact that we’ve all lived through finance bubbles. Anyone in the United Kingdom has lived through this period in which having the incredible foresight and acumen to have a place to live in the 1970s made you a multimillionaire by the 2000s. We’ve all seen multiple programs on the Beeb and Channel Four about buying and flipping homes. We all have an elderly relative who fancies themselves the second coming of Warren Buffett and think they’re quite good at picking properties, merely for having lived in a place. In a world in which sharp operators make a fortune by selling dodgy PPE down at the pub to a Tory donor, crypto seems very plausible. I just saw an advertisement on the Tube for an unbelievably scammy digital service that lets you rent your driveway to commuters who need a place to park during the day. ‘This is a great way to make back the seven thousand pounds you lost on crypto.’ That’s the actual text of the ad. In the same way scam emails say, ‘I am a police detective investigating a scammer who ripped you off. Please get in touch with me so that I can help you get your money back.’ It’s like a filter to identify and prioritize people who are already vulnerable to this kind of scam. A scam is a way of grooming people to be scammed in the future. That is the Western economy writ large—the American economy especially, and I think the British economy doubly so, whether that’s illegally selling PPE, or the absolute human garbage driving around in Minis emblazoned with the Foxtons logo destroying every neighborhood. There’s a story that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Albania was gripped by a pyramid scheme that everyone, including the finance minister, was involved in. After it collapsed, people said, ‘we knew it was a pyramid scheme, but we figured that the finance minister would bail it out because he was involved in it. We knew it was a scam, but we thought we were on the winning side, not the losing side. We thought we were the scam artists, not the marks.’ Crypto is a way for people who are scam artists to convince other people that they can be scam artists—which is to say, successful gamblers—and in so doing, steal all their money. I have lived in Silicon Valley, and I tried to make it as true to the milieu as I could. That’s a thing many critics have noted favorably. Maria Farrell wrote something quite effusive about this. She’s also the person who identified that a noir story is about an unlicensed cop and that Marty’s an unlicensed tax inspector. It is meant to capture that milieu, that place, as much as, say, The Hobbit is meant to capture The Shire. Even if you’ve never been there, it’s meant to make you understand what life there must be like."