Cory Doctorow possesses a strange kind of celebrity. He’s famous, but not so famous that you could offhandedly mention him to a stranger on the street and reasonably expect the person to be familiar with Doctorow’s life and work. For other notable people, this situation might connote a kind of ignominious C- or D-List celebrity, but not for Doctorow. In his case, it might be more accurate to say that he is extremely, A-List famous, but only among the subset of the population that uses and understands the internet. This would explain why he was able, last night, to pack the third floor of the Lillian H. Smith public library tighter than a college bar. That’s right. Cory Doctorow: as appealing to nerdy people as beer is to students.
Doctorow was in town promoting his new novel, Makers, which is about a journalist, living in an economically depressed near-future, who takes an assignment that entails embedding herself with DIY entrepreneurs who are using the junk and detritus left over from the world’s economic failure to build ingenious devices and make money. He read an excerpt.
Continue Reading: Cory Doctorow Decends Upon Toronto on the main Torontoist site.
