Cory Doctorow’s direct involvement with the comics world is a relatively recent occurrence, beginning earlier in the year, when the author leant a number of his works to IDW, for sequential adaptations. Few people in his position, however, have proven quite so vocal and articulate about issues of free speech, the blogger and sci-fi novelist having become one of the most outspoken proponents of the non-profit intellectual property licensing group, Creative Commons, which has published all but on of his works.

With that in mind, the Little Brother author was an ideal fit as the host of a fundraiser for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a title he happily shared last Thursday with turntablist, DJ Spooky.

We spoke with Doctorow shortly before the Manhattan event. In this second part, we discuss the author’s comic book ambitions, the merits of fanfiction, and why Docotorow may have glorified terrorism, just a smidge.

[Part One]

[Doctorow and Spooky speak at CBLDF Fundraiser.]

Most of your books have been licensed under Creative Commons.

All of them, except for the first one, which I didn’t have the rights to—it came out before Creative Commons. But otherwise, all of my novels,and my new collection of essays and comics are CC licensed.

Do you have this extended universe of fan fiction in mind when you work on these books?

No, not at all. It’s actually kind of interesting, I think. The way I approach the creative element of what I do and the critical element are almost completely separate. I sit down and write almost as a therapeutic exercise. When I’m finished writing for the day, I often don’t remember what I’ve written. I go back and review it, and I’m often surprised by it. I’ve written stories and novels and things that have taken me years and years to write and when I got to the ending, I didn’t like it and rethought it entirely and then rewrote the ending and then turned back to the first page, only to realize that I’d foreshadowed that ending, four years before, but hadn’t known until that day.

I have almost no premeditation on cultural-political things when I write. Even on a political book like Little Brother, it was actually an emotional reaction to a bunch of things that I was feeling in regard to the “war on terror.” I didn’t sit down and say, “what’s the best way to alarm children about surveillance?” I sat down and thought, “how can I artistically approach this subject in a way that I find the most aesthetically pleasing?”

But you are hoping that, once it’s out there, readers will adopt the work in creative ways.

Yeah, well, in the same way that there’s a compositional and editorial process,  when you do anything creative, when I finish with the story, look at it, edit it, and prepare it for publication, and show it to my agent, and so on, I certainly do think of that at that stage. But the creative process, for me, is all about getting into a nice space and doing something totally creative that has almost no agenda aside from a creative one.

But you hope that, at some point, it lives on beyond the life you’ve given it.

Oh, absolutely. So, when it’s all done and I tpye “the end,” I really hope that people will talk about it, read it, and that it will have a life of its own and become part of people’s cultural vocabulary. There’s kind of a “have your cake and eat it, too” mentality around people who worry about trademark of character and having their stories very tightly controlled, which is to say that, if your story is successful in becoming part of the cultural make up—the metaphors that we use to frame our society—Orwell is a great example here, Big Brother, double think—all of those ideas that came out of Orwell’s novel became a really important piece of how we talk about the subjects in Orwell’s novel, once that happens, an author can’t say, “well, you can only do this in an authorized way.” That’s the whole point of a piece that has a life of its own—it has a life of its own.

I actually think that fanfiction is an interesting part of this. I think the way that we know and care about people in out lives, like your mom, say, is you’ve got a little simulator in the back of your head that you use to model your mom’s behavior, so when you do something that you think will make your mom proud, what you’re really doing is showing it to that little simulation of your mom and simulating your mom’s reaction. I think that that apparatus is exactly what we tap into when we tell stories. We simulate people in the backs of our head. We simulate terrible things happening to them, and that’s what we call “dramatic tension.”

In order for a story to work, those people have to come to life in some meaningful sense in the audience’s mind. You sometimes hear authors and other storytellers talk about how they wanted a character to do something, and the character didn’t want to do it. I used to think that that was just being a precious artiste, but actually, at this stage in my life, I think that what that means is that you’ve programmed the simulator, and now you’re asking the simulator to do something that doesn’t ring true to the little person in the back of your mind. And I think that same mechanism is exactly what works in the mind of people who write fanfiction. Just because they closed the back cover, that person is still functioning in their heads. It’s a natural thing to want to continue to write the stories about the things that the person is doing, having taken on a semi-autonomous life, since then. I think that the litmus test for whether a story is successful is if the characters go on inhabiting a story in the readers’ heads, after the cover has been closed. To say, “now that I’ve finished telling you the story, you have to stop thinking about it,” is just crazy.

When IDW issued the comic versions of your stories, were there elements that didn’t mesh with the story as it played out in your head?

Well, I have the rights to oversee the scripts. The scripts were very good, and I only had some very small edits. The same with the art. I got to review work from the artists’ portfolio, so, for the alien in Craphound, I took it back to artist about five times to get it right. But that was really fun. It was really collaborative.

There was only one case that was really unfortunate. There was an artist that was really good, but not really right for the story. Rather than doing a sketch or two for me, he was so into the story that he laid out the entire book. I looked at it and it was completely wrong. After the Siege—it was the last of the comics, and it’s really personal to me. It’s a fictionalized version of my grandmother’s memoirs of being a little girl during the siege of Leningrad and being inducted at the age of 12 into the Civil Defense Core and hauling corpses and digging trenches, and doing all of those terrible things that really came to define her whole life—she’s still alive. She told me these stories, and I went from listening to writing about them. He’d drawn it in the style of a political caricature. It was a very political story, but it was wrong. I thought it was just way too cute for a really gritty, horrifying story. We ended up having a discussion about it, and I ended up commissioning someone else. I felt very bad for the artist. There was nothing wrong with what the artist did, it just wasn’t right for the work.

Are you interested in being involved in the creation of a comic from the ground, up?

At the end of the IDW project, I actually wrote my first ever comic strip, having read through all of these scripts. It’s just a real short, very funny throwaway script for eight pages of the last Haunted Mansion comic that’s coming out sometime this summer or autumn for Kitchen Sink. I ran into them at Comic Con and they had the first five or six issues of the book. I’m a giant Haunted Mansion fan. My first novel takes place in the Haunted Mansion in Disneyland. The film was really terrible, but Kitchen Sink had done these great comic books. They’d gotten all of these different writers to write about the origins of all of the ghosts in the Haunted Mansion.

I was just sort of rhapsodizing about it with the editor, and she said, “you know, we’ve got eight pages left in the last issue. Would you like to take a crack at it? We’ll pay you a whopping $150.” So I went back and actually wrote it. And it was really fun to write. I got the actual comic pages and they did such a good job that it really fired me up. So I went out and wrote up a treatment for a graphic novel series and my agent said, “actually, this should just be your next novel.” He sold it to Tor and Harper-Collins in the UK. But I still have hope that it will become a graphic novel, at some point.

Do you feel like you’re more suited to prose?

Well, I don’t know—to my mind, script writing is prose writing, and if I drew figures, it would be stick figures, and not the good kind of stick figures that they draw for XKCD, the really bad stick figures that look like they had been drawn at a rehabilitation facility for someone who had had nerve damage in their hand. I’m definitely never going to be a visual storyteller. But I don’t know, I’ve definitely done a lot more traditional prose writing that scriptwriting, but I’m totally game for trying, anyway.

Getting back to something that you touched on earlier, with regards to your involvement with the CBLDF, you mentioned the cases they defended as being almost specific to the political climate in the US. Do you think they’re unique in that respect?

Well, you know, I haven’t lived [in England] long enough to have encountered that, but I would be surprised if that wasn’t the case. Britain has a worse case history on free speech issues than America. I forget which agency it is, but there’s a UN agency that oversees human rights, and they do an annual report on human rights around the world, and they specifically targeted Britain, giving it a failing grade on freedom of expression. They’ve got a law on the books here that prohibits “writing works that would tend to glorify terrorism.” And it makes it a very serious offense that, even if you don’t intend to glorify terrorism, if someone reading your work decides that you intended to glorify terrorism and decides to become involved in terrorist activities as a result, you can be tried as a “glorifier of terrorism.” This is just a revolting excess of the Blair/Brown government, and I’ll be glad to dance on their grave, after the next election.

But when I had to renewed my visa, a few months ago, I had to sign a declaration saying that I’d never glorify terrorism. And there’s this bit at the end of Little Brother, where this kid has been kind of a terrorist throughout the course of the novel, is watching the news about the US military person who had waterboarded him basically being exonerated and shipped off to Iraq under a cloud of secrecy, rather than facing a trial on American soil that might reveal who ordered her to waterboard as part of an interrogation program.

He says, “oh god, one more terrible thing we’ve done to Iraq. If they sent her to my country, I’d sure become a terrorist.” And his girlfriend says, “well, they sent her to your hometown and you kind of did become a terrorist.” He says, “I guess you’re right.” So here is the hero of the book admitting to having become a terrorist. So I read this to my immigration lawyers and said, “am I glorifying terrorism?” And they said, “just sign the declaration.” And so I did.

But you know, I was a donor to the ANC when they were a terrorist group, according to apartheid laws. I used to wear an ANC badge and go to their marches and give them money. The idea that anyone who has glorified terrorism shouldn’t be allowed in the UK—as we discovered in the US, the definition of a terrorist is so broad that not even Nelson Mandella was allowed to travel there.

–Brian Heater

[Above, Doctorow poses as the XKCD version of himself, as found on Flickr.]

Three months after originally scheduled, Cory Doctorow will finally be landing in New York City this week, to hold court at a benefit for those tireless champions of First Amendment rights in the sequential art world, The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund. The reason for the delay wasn’t Doctorow’s fault, of course—or anyone’s, really, but rather the sort of last minute misfortune that’s capable of derailing even the best of intentions.

Sometimes, however, these matters are blessings in disguise. When Doctorow appears at the Helen Mills Theater in midtown Manhattan, this Thursday, the event will be more than the simple book reading planned for his original appearance, which was more or less an extension of the North American tour for his latest novel, Little Brother. This time out, the writer will be joined on-stage by DJ Spooky, whose recent volume, Sound Unbound, features contributions from a number of prominent digital culture theorists, including Doctorow himself.

As a writer, Doctorow wears a number of different hats, including that of an award-winning science fiction novelist; staff writer for the mega-popular Boing Boing group blog; and most recently, graphic novelist, having released a number of works for IDW and contributed to Kitchen Sink’s Haunted Mansion anthology.

Doctorow’s credentials as a guest spokesperson for the CBLDF go beyond his writing expertise, however. The author is arguably equally well-known for his work with free speech groups, including, most prominently, Creative Commons, which has licensed all but one of his books.

When we sat down with Doctorow earlier today, we planned on discussing the CBLDF almost exclusively, only to embark on any number of tangents along the way. Fortunately, however, when it’s Doctorow talking, half the fun is in trying to guess where the conversation ultimately will end up.

I’m told that you paid out of your own pocket to appear at this event.

The original plan had been that I was going to do this at the end of my Little Brother book tour. But someone at CBLDF had a health problem, and they had to cancel the event. They asked me when I would be back in the States, so they could reschedule it. I’m coming back in for this tiny, tiny convention in Southern Mass, in a town called Springfield, which is kind of equidistant from New York and Boston—it’s actually fairly easy to get to New York from there, so I said I’d come a couple of extra days early and do the event.

I didn’t really think about it at the time, but the other day, when I was finalizing my plans, I was like, “oh yeah, I need a hotel in New York!” I started Googling around—I suppose I could stay with friends, but it’s already so hectic that I just wanted to hole up in a room. The airfare was paid for by the convention, but when it’s all said and done and I’ve ended up paying for hotels and meals and all the rest of it, it’s going to come to a grand or two.

So why make all of these sacrifices for the CBLDF?

First of all, the CBLDF does something that’s really near and dear to my heart, which is defend creators and comic store owners. I’ve worked in science fiction bookstores before, and it’s kind of a holy calling to do that work. On the one hand, it’s kind of every nerd’s dream to work in a comic book store, and on the other hand, it’s a low-income, high-risk business that demands incredibly grueling hours and you have to love it to do it. There’s really no good reason to do it, except that you love it and really want to spread the word of this art that means a lot to you.

The American response to that, I guess since Seduction of the Innocent, has been to demonize those people, and not just prosecute, but persecute them, and the risks that people face for the—admittedly very subversive—act of operating a store in which people can come in and buy literature, those risks have gone through the roof, and supporting that is very important. Making sure that those people have something to fall back on, when those things go bad is really important. Moreover, those people face the risk because their opponents stand to make a lot of money and power by terrorizing people and convincing them that there are bad people in their midst who want to expose them to terrible literature.

The stakes are very high for the other side. You pick a scapegoat group and you demonize them, and it you do so effectively, you can use the so-called threat to justify all kinds of power for yourself and budgets and careers to be made for everyone from senators to local cops on busting people who sell literature to children or do anything else that involves something outside of the norm. There’s a lot of money out there, and it’s an asymmetry, because comics are a low-margin business for retailers and inpendent publishers. The people involved in comics don’t really have a lot of money to defend themselves, and every now and again, you get a nice little bit of poetic justic, like when William Gaines is forced out of doing EC and becomes a millionaire with Mad Magazine. For every one of those, there are a million people who are just chased out and have their lives ruined by political opportunists. So that’s the first part for why the CBLDF is so important.

The other thing is that the CBLDF is, itself, a kind of model for the kind of organizations that other people who are involved in other dangerous cultural acts are turning to. For example, Naomi Novik, she won the Campbell Award last year for best new science fiction writer. She comes out of the fanfic culture of people who make stories out of other people’s universes—this is something that’s pretty common in comics, and obviously, the shared universe is a real common piece of comic storytelling, in the way that comics have always taken place. And even where you have unauthorized, thinly-veiled shared universes—you have things like The Watchmen and so on. So Naomi and her friends, they want to defend the rights of people who are involved in fanfiction, because this is as old as culture, the retelling of stories to suit your own needs.

She said she wanted to make a CBLDF for fanfiction, and that just conveyed so much in just a little phrase. So what the CBLDF has actually done is provided us with a useful vocabularly for describing a certain kind of advocacy organization that’s small, incredibly nimble and intelligent in the way it conducts itself, commited to an important cause, and really fueled by creators and the work they do. So I think for that reason as well, I’m really game for doing stuff for the group.

Are these fan fiction issues primarily copyright problems? Unauthorized use of people’s creations?

Yeah, well trademark. Copyright, trademark, and just a general vilification of people’s work. You have something that’s transformative often making commentary on the work. It’s the kind of classic test for fair use. A lot of it’s political or sexual in nature and sometimes it crosses between those two subjects, where you have people writing about the politics of sexuality. This is the kind of thing that the First Amendment was made to protect. But these people don’t have any money to mount a defense. They are engaged in this massively assymetrical struggle with the people who want to make their work disappear from the Internet.

People are generally not making any money of these pieces of fan fiction, correct?

No. The only commercial piece of fan fiction that I’ve seen in all my years of working in this field was someone who had spiral-bound about five copies of her fan fiction stories and was selling them for about $5 each, in the back room of a science fiction convention, and I don’t think anyone was buying them. So yeah, this is an extremely non-commercial, hand-to-hand activity. But often the case with fan fiction, the aesthetic effect is not from the fiction itself—though sometimes the fiction is very good. Often times, the quality of the actual fiction is not as high as the experience of those who actually wrote the fiction.

Writing fan fiction these days, with the advent of Internet communities, is a very public act. People will write an installment and get feedback from other fanfic writers who will help them along and give them ideas, and they’ll go back and forth. What they end up with is not so nearly as important as the process they took to get there. I think a lot of fan fiction, judging it by what’s left on the page is about as useful as judging a sex act by what’s left on the sheet. The important thing is not what they end up with, it’s how they got there—it’s the journey, not the destination.

So, for these people who are engaged in this extremely recognizable culture activity—sitting around fire and telling each other stories, saying, “well, what if this happened?”—you recognize that in all kinds of cultural institutions and all kinds of binding and defining stories. You can see that they were arrived at in this creative manner, and we have these archetypal stories that we find evidence for in ancient Greece, going all the way forward to the contemporary era, and having been retold to suit each person’s needs. EL Doctorow, in his book, The Creators, talks about the history of Genesis and finds evidence for the Genesis story being told among Babylonians, hundreds of years before the ancient Hebrews. The stories just float around, according to whatever circumstances seem to suit the storyteller best, until someone writes it down.

So this is a really important cultural activity. It’s kind of what makes us what we are. We’re the animal that tells each other stories, and to say, “well, that’s all well and good to say that you’re going to tell stories that are part of your cultural make up, but you’d better not do it with a character from a show that Paramount made,” is just dumb. It completely misunderstands the relationship between audiences and creators. I think anyone who says that content is king is probably a sociopath. If I said, “well, I’m going to send you to a desert island, and you can take your comic books or your friends,” and you chose your comic books, we’d send you for psychiatric evaluation. Content is just stuff that people talk about. The important thing is the talking.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater