Cory Doctorow

Thirty years from now and the effects of climate change are overwhelming the planet – but so are the global efforts to combat it.For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn’t controversial, it’s a fact of life.But there are still those Americans who cling to their red trucker caps, their anger, their nostalgia for the golden age of assault rifles. Their ‘alternative’ news sources reassure them their resentment is right and pure and ‘climate change’ is a con.They’re your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. They’re not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth.

It's thirty years from now. We're making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can't let go? For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks. But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam. And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they're armed to the teeth. The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's The Bezzle is a high stakes thriller where the lives of the hundreds of thousands of inmates in California's prisons are traded like stock shares. The year is 2006. Martin Hench is at the top of his game as a self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long guerrilla war between people who want to hide money, and people who want to find it. He spends his downtime on Catalina Island, where scenic, imported bison wander the bluffs and frozen, reheated fast food burgers cost 25$. Wait, what? When Marty disrupts a seemingly innocuous scheme during a vacation on Catalina Island, he has no idea he's kicked off a chain of events that will overtake the next decade of his life. Martin has made his most dangerous mistake yet: trespassed into the playgrounds of the ultra-wealthy and spoiled their fun. To them, money is a tool, a game, and a way to keep score, and they've found their newest mark--California's Department of Corrections. Secure in the knowledge that they're living behind far too many firewalls of shell companies and investors ever to be identified, they are interested not in the lives they ruin, but only in how much money they can extract from the government and the hundreds of thousands of prisoners they have at their mercy. A seething rebuke of the privatized prison system that delves deeply into the arcane and baroque financial chicanery involved in the 2008 financial crash, The Bezzle is a sizzling follow-up to Red Team Blues.

2024 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST, BEST SF NOVELMoney-laundering, cyber-knavery and shell-company chicanery: Marty Hench is an expert in them all. He's Silicon Valley's most accomplished forensic accountant and well versed in the devious ways of Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (and there’s more crossover than you might imagine). **In cyber-security, RED TEAM plays attack. BLUE TEAM plays defence.Marty Hench’s career in tech is almost as old as Silicon Valley. He’s the most accomplished forensic accountant in town, an expert on the international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (there’s more crossover than you might imagine).Marty was born to play attack. If there’s a way to get under the walls and bring the castle down, he’s the one to do it. There’s no better financial Red Teamer in the Valley.Now he’s on the trail of a stolen key, one that unlocks an illicit backdoor to billions in crypto. More than reputation and fortune is on the line – Marty’s adversaries are implacable criminal sadists who will spill oceans of blood to get what they want.Finding the stolen key is going to be the least of Marty’s problems: now he has to save his skin. To do that, he’ll have to play defence. And Marty hates playing the Blue Team.

New York Times bestseller Cory Doctorow's Red Team Blues is a grabby next-Tuesday thriller about cryptocurrency shenanigans that will awaken you to how the world really works. Martin Hench is sixty-seven years old, single, and successful in a career stretching back to the beginnings of Silicon Valley. He's a--contain your excitement--self-employed forensic accountant, a veteran of the long war between people who want to hide their money and people who want to find it. He knows the ins and outs of financial records that are designed to conceal rather than reveal. He's as comfortable with social media as people a quarter his age, and he's a fingertip-level expert in the techniques of money laundering and shell-company games practiced by Fortune 500 companies, extremely-divorced billionaires, and international crime lords alike. He also knows all the secret histories of charismatic company founders and Sand Hill Road VCs, because he was there at all of their beginnings. He's not famous, except to the people who matter. He's made some pretty powerful people happy in his time, and he's been paid pretty well. It's been a good life. He's always been on the red team, the attacking side, hunting down grifters, fraudsters, and crooks. In this kind of combat, the defenders, the blue team, have to win 100% of the time, while the red team needs to win only once. But now, Martin's been roped into a job that's more dangerous than anything he's ever done before, and worse, he's playing on the blue team. It'll take every ounce of his skill to get out alive. Sparkling, fast-moving, and endlessly engaging, Red Team Blues is a novel for anyone with a lively curiosity about how today's world actually works.

It’s thirty years from now and we’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry people who can’t let go?For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn’t controversial, it’s just an overwhelming fact of life. But so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programmes cannot be stopped in their tracks.But there are still those Americans who cling to their red trucker caps, their grievances, their anger, their nostalgia for the golden age of assault rifles. Their ‘alternative’ news sources reassure them their resentment is right and pure and ‘climate change’ is a con.They’re your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. They’re not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth.

When the tech platforms promised a future of "connection," they were lying. They said their "walled gardens" would keep us safe, but those were prison walls.The platforms locked us into their systems and made us easy pickings, ripe for extraction. Twitter, Facebook and other Big Tech platforms are hard to leave by design. They hold hostage the people we love, the communities that matter to us, the audiences and customers we rely on. The impossibility of staying connected to these people after you delete your account has nothing to do with technological limitations: it's a business strategy in service to commodifying your personal life and relationships.We can - we must - dismantle the tech platforms. In The Internet Con, Cory Doctorow explains how to seize the means of computation, by forcing Silicon Valley to do the thing it fears most: interoperate. Interoperability will tear down the walls between technologies, allowing users to leave platforms, remix their media, and reconfigure their devices without corporate permission.Interoperability is the only route to the rapid and enduring annihilation of the platforms. The Internet Con is the disassembly manual we need to take back our internet.

A call to action for the creative class and labor movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers)--or both. In Chokepoint Capitalism, scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we're in a new era of "chokepoint capitalism," with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well-illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon's use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook's siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels' use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere. By analyzing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct "anti-competitive flywheels" designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. In the book's second half, Giblin and Doctorow then explain how to batter through those chokepoints, with tools ranging from transparency rights to collective action and ownership, radical interoperability, contract terminations, job guarantees, and minimum wages for creative work. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that's being heisted away--before it's too late.

Featuring stories by Cory Doctorow, Brent Lambert, Cynthia Zhang, Kevin Wabaunsee, Izzy Wasserstein, Jeremy Szal, and more Cyberpunk and solarpunk are, in many ways, two parts of the same story. Cyberpunk is all about people surviving and fighting back in high-tech, low-life dystopias. Solarpunk is a more utopian subgenre of cyberpunk that tells stories of communities surviving, adapting to, and solving the climate crisis in decidedly post-dystopian worlds. But the foundational aspect shared by both genres is people and communities fighting for a better future. The context around that struggle may be different from one genre to the next, but the fight-the struggle-is one and the same. In this way, cyberpunk and solarpunk are sibling genres, and we feel like it couldn't make any more sense to pair the two into a single short story anthology. The anthology has three kinds of stories. There are cyberpunk stories, solarpunk stories, and stories that straddle the line and bring the two genres together in one narrative. In addition, the anthology comes with a companion TRPG game in which readers and their friends collective create their own cyberpunk-solarpunk universe and fight for a better future.

A Place so Foreign, a classical book, has been considered essential throughout the human history, and so that this work is never forgotten we at Alpha Editions have made efforts in its preservation by republishing this book in a modern format for present and future generations. This whole book has been reformatted, retyped and designed. These books are not made of scanned copies of their original work and hence the text is clear and readable.

Money-laundering, cyber-knavery and shell-company chicanery: Marty Hench is an expert in them all. He's Silicon Valley's most accomplished forensic accountant and well versed in the devious ways of Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (and there’s more crossover than you might imagine). ** In cyber-security, RED TEAM plays attack. BLUE TEAM plays defence. Marty Hench’s career in tech is almost as old as Silicon Valley. He’s the most accomplished forensic accountant in town, an expert on the international money-laundering and shell-company chicanery used by Fortune 500s, divorcing oligarchs, and international drug cartels alike (there’s more crossover than you might imagine). Marty was born to play attack. If there’s a way to get under the walls and bring the castle down, he’s the one to do it. There’s no better financial Red Teamer in the Valley. Now he’s on the trail of a stolen key, one that unlocks an illicit backdoor to billions in crypto. More than reputation and fortune is on the line – Marty’s adversaries are implacable criminal sadists who will spill oceans of blood to get what they want. Finding the stolen key is going to be the least of Marty’s problems: now he has to save his skin. To do that, he’ll have to play defence. And Marty hates playing the Blue Team.

A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR A call to action for the creative class and labour movement to rally against the power of Big Tech and Big Media. Corporate concentration has breached the stratosphere, as have corporate profits. An ever-expanding constellation of industries are now monopolies (where sellers have excessive power over buyers) or monopsonies (where buyers hold the whip hand over sellers) — or both. Scholar Rebecca Giblin and writer and activist Cory Doctorow argue we’re in a new era of ‘chokepoint capitalism’, with exploitative businesses creating insurmountable barriers to competition that enable them to capture value that should rightfully go to others. All workers are weakened by this, but the problem is especially well illustrated by the plight of creative workers. From Amazon’s use of digital rights management and bundling to radically change the economics of book publishing, to Google and Facebook’s siphoning away of ad revenues from news media, and the Big Three record labels’ use of inordinately long contracts to up their own margins at the cost of artists, chokepoints are everywhere. By analysing book publishing and news, live music and music streaming, screenwriting, radio, and more, Giblin and Doctorow deftly show how powerful corporations construct ‘anti-competitive flywheels’ designed to lock in users and suppliers, make their markets hostile to new entrants, and then force workers and suppliers to accept unfairly low prices. Chokepoint Capitalism is a call to workers of all sectors to unite to help smash these chokepoints and take back the power and profit that’s being heisted away — before it’s too late.