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With a Little Help
 
 

With a Little Help [Kindle Edition]

Cory Doctorow
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

Digital List Price: £3.18 What's this?
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Product Description

Product Description

With a Little Help is my first serious experiment in self-publishing. I’ve published many novels, short story collections, books of essays and so on with publishers, and it’s all been very good and satisfying and educational and so on, but it seems like it’s time to try something new.

You see, I’ve always released my work under open licenses from the Creative Commons project, so that my readers could share and remix my works. A good number of these readers wanted to know why I didn’t distribute the physical book as well, and see what a writer working on his own could do.

So here we have it. With a Little Help, consists of 12 stories, all reprints except for “Epoch,” which was commissioned by the Ubuntu project‘s Mark Shuttleworth for $10,000 (this being the most expensive option for buying the book — don’t worry, there are cheaper editions).

Product details

  • Format: Kindle Edition
  • File Size: 596 KB
  • Print Length: 365 pages
  • Page Numbers Source ISBN: 1456576348
  • Publisher: CorDoc-Co, Ltd (1 Dec 2010)
  • Sold by: Amazon Media EU S.à r.l.
  • Language English
  • ASIN: B005HFK95O
  • Text-to-Speech: Enabled
  • Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #56,303 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'm loving this book. Each of the stories is a little gem, clever, well crafted, amusing and with a feeling of being real, of being things happening out there right now, maybe somewhere a little ahead of the curve like New York or Beijing, or maybe just round the corner from you in a dull suburban house you might be living next to.

I didn't expect much from this book becuase it seemed so cheap, I thought it might be leftovers or old stuff, but it is some of the best Doctorow I've read. And new, I've read a fair bit of his work and there was only one story I'd come across before, "The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away", and that is such a good story that it was nice to come across it again (reminds me of a mini Anathem).

The self publishing aspect is pretty interesting too. Jonathan Coulton talks about the Creative Commons license allowing songs, or stories, to be released into the wild to prosper or fail, and the story "Pester Power" in this collection makes me think of them as attempts at new life sending a trickle of information and money back to Cory, who uses it to craft new stories ever fitter to exist. Wouldn't it be a kicker if Cory actually was an AI?

Only quibble is that although there is a table of contents, you can't 'Go to...' it in the Kindle edition, you have to go to the beginning and then turn to the page before.

Try it if you have any interest in the modern world, you'll love it and it will change how you see things just a little.
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Amazon.com:  3 reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
The future will be wonderful and terrifying 30 Mar 2011
By Redhead - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
The unabridged version of this review can be viewed here:
[...]

Cory Doctorow is my favorite kind of futurenaut, one who is only a few years ahead of his time. His ideas are easily possible with existing technology, or nearly so. And that is equally wonderful and terrifying.

If you've been following Doctorow on Boingboing, twitter, or his posts on Publishers Weekly, you know he's been experimenting with Self Publishing. Selfpub/epub/newpub is looking more and more to be the way of the future, and what better way to figure out how it all works than to dive in, head first? Alright, maybe not head first, as Doctorow has been publishing his writings under creative commons with everything downloadable on his website for years now.

Some of these stories made me chuckle. Many of them caused my jaw to drop and my eyes to get all big and a thin whisper of "Holy ****" to escape my mouth. All of them made me think. And that, I believe, is the point.

Every entry in With a Little Help is a gem. Here are my thoughts on a few of them:

Epoch - Odell Vyphus is a lowly sysadmin. Maybe not so lowly, as he's in charge of keeping BIGMAC running. The year is 2037 or, and BIGMAC is a burly, 32bit, old school AI with a penchant for Mycroft Holmes and Hal9000 jokes. And he's a dinasour. BIGMAC eats a ton of energy, kicks out too much heat, no one has published a paper on him in years, and grad students are bored with him. Wait, why am I calling BIGMAC a "he"? BIGMAC is a fancy schmancy computer. Definitely an "it", not a "he". Odell also has a bad habit of anthropomorphizing talking computers. And BIGMAC has developed a bad habit of running a killer endgame. How do you kill a computer that doesn't want to die? If it's not alive, are you really killing it? How do you reconcile a very human reaction to an artificial construct that is begging for its life?

Scroogled - plainly put, this story scared the **** of out me. In this near future, Google is completely transparent about the fact that your search histories never die, adwords can be used to predict future behavior, personality profiles can be built via your blogspot connect friends, youtube searches, your picasa uploads and your gmail contact list. The US government could really use a hand with "Doing Search Right", and a deal is brokered. The technology has existed for years for this to be non-fiction. Do you remember everything you've ever googled and every picture you've ever viewed on someone's Picasa or saved in your GoogleDocs? Google does. Think about that for a minute, and realize nothing is stopping the Google Guys from waking up one day and deciding your search history is worth a pretty penny.
Great find and definitely worth the price here 30 May 2012
By tj - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Kindle Edition
I didn't actually realise that you could get this book for free, and got a bit confused when I read the epilogues. Reading more about the book here makes much more sense.

However, the normal bargain hunter that I am, I do not begrudge "accidentally" paying for a free book. Well, at least I hope some of the money that Amazon has charged goes towards the creators and enablers.

I hadn't really come across this genre of "futurenaut" before, having been put off by actual sci fi which takes place in too distant a future so I have quickly devoured his books.

Perhaps one small criticism I have is the negativity and bias towards some topics (Google operating in China for example, it felt quite pointed to use a real life example amongst the rest of his fantastic imagination/foresight). Though it's literature and of course you can use it to voice your opinion. Perhaps I'm just sad that we didn't meet on some points.

Highly recommended, great writer - I had a wonderful time in the book.
A Great Collection From a Great Writer 29 Jun 2011
By Alexandro C. Telander - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
By now many people will be familiar with the bestselling co-editor of Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow, after the young adult novel Little Brother, and his great adult book, Makers. Doctorow clearly has a knack for not just being to be able to string a bunch of words together creatively and skillfully, but each and every story is an important "What if?" to tell. Sometimes Doctorow offers dates, sometimes not; but readers can usually guess his stories are set in either the near future or within the next hundred years, involving a possible future that will capture, delight, and sometimes terrify. Doctorow seems to grasp at our idle thoughts of this century and the next, transforming them into a believable possibility that really makes us wonder.

With a Little Help collects thirteen of his short stories that have seen publication in anthologies or magazines or other media over the past few years revealing Doctorow's ability to tell a great, captivating science fiction story not just in long form, but also in short with developed characters you can connect with and a story that will haunt you and stay with you long after you have finished it. Whether it's the Internet, government, politics, or religion, Doctorow seems to have a unique take on it all, presenting a world that we're encroaching upon right now, or will be in the ensuing decades.

The book is also an experiment in itself, only available as a print on demand in printed form, or available free as an ebook, though donations are politely requested through his website. One might think in this day and age of piracy and scouring the Internet for illegal free items, this concept would result in failure, and yet this great collection continues to make money, which Doctorow isn't ashamed to hide with monthly financial reports. Perhaps, then, this is the message he is trying to share in his compelling stories: there is still hope . . .

Originally written on June 7, 2011 ©Alex C. Telander.

[...]
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