Pwning Tomorrow - Books of Duck Cafe

eBook

English language

Published Dec. 14, 2016 by Electronic Frontier Foundation.

(1 review)

As part of EFF’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, we are releasing “Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier,” an anthology of speculative fiction from more than 20 authors, including Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Cory Doctorow, and Charlie Jane Anders. To get the ebook, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We're releasing the ebook under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license, which permits sharing among users.

We meet many speculative fiction fans in the course of our work to protect digital civil liberties, and the 21 stories in this collection inspire a sharper sense of the futures we may experience and the role of rights and freedoms there. The authors explore the wonders and perils of technology over the next 25 years and beyond, imagining the consequences of everything from abusive intellectual property lawsuits to out-of-control viral marketing, …

As part of EFF’s 25th Anniversary celebrations, we are releasing “Pwning Tomorrow: Stories from the Electronic Frontier,” an anthology of speculative fiction from more than 20 authors, including Bruce Sterling, Lauren Beukes, Cory Doctorow, and Charlie Jane Anders. To get the ebook, you can make an optional contribution to support EFF’s work, or you can download it at no cost. We're releasing the ebook under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International license, which permits sharing among users.

We meet many speculative fiction fans in the course of our work to protect digital civil liberties, and the 21 stories in this collection inspire a sharper sense of the futures we may experience and the role of rights and freedoms there. The authors explore the wonders and perils of technology over the next 25 years and beyond, imagining the consequences of everything from abusive intellectual property lawsuits to out-of-control viral marketing, from over-protective intelligent fridges to violently loyal cyber-pets.

It's also important to know that writers have long been at the forefront of the fight against mass surveillance in the real world. Paranormal romance author Carolyn Jewel is the lead plaintiff in Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s long-running lawsuit against warrantless collection of electronic communications. Her novella, "Free Fall," rounds out the collection.

The full list of contributors includes:

Charlie Jane Anders Madeline Ashby Paolo Bacigalupi Lauren Beukes David Brin Pat Cadigan Cory Doctorow Paul Ford Neil Gaiman SL Grey Eileen Gunn Charles Human Kameron Hurley Carolyn Jewel James Patrick Kelly Ramez Naam Annalee Newitz Hannu Rajaniemi Rudy Rucker Lewis Shiner Bruce Sterling Charles Yu

We’re very grateful to the authors for contributing stories to this collection, Tessellate Media for tireless formatting and device testing, O’Reilly Media and Troy Mott of Backstop Media for epublishing assistance, and the many others who helped bring this project to fruition. The collection is available in ePub, and MOBI formats, which can be downloaded at supporters.eff.org/donate/pwning-tomorrow

3 editions

Barbarius reviewed Pwning Tomorrow by Charlie Jane Anders

Mostly excellent

5 stars

This free collection of futurism/dystopian fiction was pretty much excellent from start to finish. For the most part, each author/story takes a current issue, idea, or topic (e.g.: copyright law, patent trolls, crowd sourcing, etc.) and extrapolates it into a possible future whereby it was left to go unchecked and how that would possibly look, giving you a Wellesian warning of why these seemingly innocuous issues are important to consider and/or deal with in our present here-and-now. The stories are excellent, and the list of included authors are top-quality!

...and then there's the final story... which has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned issues at all, and is mostly a fantasy erotic romp. It has no futurism, dystopian, or tech themes at all, except that one of the two main characters is a hacker, apparently, and it's mentioned (twice, in a completely unconnected fashion) that he has a …

This free collection of futurism/dystopian fiction was pretty much excellent from start to finish. For the most part, each author/story takes a current issue, idea, or topic (e.g.: copyright law, patent trolls, crowd sourcing, etc.) and extrapolates it into a possible future whereby it was left to go unchecked and how that would possibly look, giving you a Wellesian warning of why these seemingly innocuous issues are important to consider and/or deal with in our present here-and-now. The stories are excellent, and the list of included authors are top-quality!

...and then there's the final story... which has nothing to do with any of the aforementioned issues at all, and is mostly a fantasy erotic romp. It has no futurism, dystopian, or tech themes at all, except that one of the two main characters is a hacker, apparently, and it's mentioned (twice, in a completely unconnected fashion) that he has a server room in his house. It honestly feels like it's the author equivalent of "I'm a bunny, duh!":

Editor: Hey! Yeah, thanks for your submission. Umm... We're not quite sure it aligns with the theme of the collection though... Author: He's a hacker, duh!