Cory Doctorow
See first quotes from Cory Doctorow
9 Quotations from Cory Doctorow
| galactic n. 1 | 2012 Rapture of the Nerds 288 The cloud is an immature matryoshka. It’s going to grow up to be a Dyson sphere; masses of free-flying processor nodes trapping the entire solar output and using it to power their thinking, communicating via high-bandwidth laser. But it’s not there yet, and the Galactics are. There’s a thing you can do with a matryoshka cloud if you’re sufficiently annoyed with the neighbors: You just point all those communications lasers in the same direction and shout. |
| meat puppet n. | 2005 When the Singularity is No Longer a Literary Device in Asimov’s Science Fiction June 12/2 We like to view ourselves as ambulatory brains, plugged into meat-puppets that lug our precious grey matter from place to place. |
| meatspace n. | 2007 When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth in Overclocked 26 I wanted my kid to grow up in a world where cyberspace was free—and where that freedom infected the real world, so meatspace got freer, too. |
| pew n. | 2012 Pirate Cinema (2013) Laser hats were scorchingly bad-arse because they put lasers on your head and you went pew-pew-pew when you walked down the street. |
| positronic adj. | 2005 I, Robot in Year’s Best SF 11 (2006) 465 But it gave Arturo the willies. It was a machine designed to kill other machines, and that was all right with him, but it was run by a non-three-laws positronic brain. Someone in some Eurasian lab had built this brain—this machine intelligence—without the three laws’ stricture to protect and serve humans. If it had been outfitted with a gun instead of a pulse-weapon, it could have shot him. |
| power-up n. | 2004 Anda’s Game in Salon.com 15 Nov. (unpaged) On screen, The Lizanator was fighting an army of wookie-men, sword in one hand, laser-blaster in the other, rocket-jumping, spinning, strafing, making impossible kills and long shots, diving for power-ups and ruthlessly running her enemies to ground. |
| problem story n. | 2022 Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature in Locus 3 Jan. The history of science fiction is rife with stories of people who seize the means of production. The classical ‘problem story’—in which an engineer has to figure out how to repurpose some machine or system to make it work in ways its creator never intended—is, at root, a story about technological self-determination. It’s a story that says that the person who uses the machine matters more than the person who designed it or bought it. |
| trufan n. | 2012 Pirate Cinema xxii. 305 If my imaginary interrogators wanted proof of my Scot Colford trufan status, they’d just have to look at the passwords they forced out of me: I’d made them up by taking the first letter of each word from some of Scot’s best-ever speeches, then rotating them forward one letter through the alphabet. |
| uplifter n. | 2006 I, Row-Boat in Overclocked (2007) 185 ‘The reef told us who they were when they arrived.’ ‘Hold on, what? The reef?’…. So Robbie told him what he knew of the uplifted reef and the distant and cool voice of the uplifter. ‘It’s an uplifted coral reef? Christ, humanity sucks. That’s the dumbest fucking thing—’. |