Eastern Standard Tribe - Softcover

Doctorow, Cory

3.47

3,780 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0765310457 ISBN 13: 9780765310453

Publisher: Tor Trade, 2005

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A comedy of loyalty, betrayal, sex, madness, and music-swapping
Art is an up-and-coming interface designer, working on the management of data flow along the Massachusetts Turnpike. He's doing the best work of his career and can guarantee that the system will be, without a question, the most counterintuitive, user-hostile piece of software ever pushed forth onto the world.

Why? Because Art is an industrial saboteur. He may live in London and work for an EU telecommunications megacorp, but Art's real home is the Eastern Standard Tribe.

Instant wireless communication puts everyone in touch with everyone else, twenty-four hours a day. But one thing hasn't changed: the need for sleep. The world is slowly splintering into Tribes held together by a common time zone, less than family and more than nations. Art is working to humiliate the Greenwich Mean Tribe to the benefit of his own people. But in a world without boundaries, nothing can be taken for granted-not happiness, not money, and most certainly not love.

Which might explain why Art finds himself stranded on the roof of an insane asylum outside Boston, debating whether to push a pencil into his brain....

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Review:

Cory Doctorow�s Eastern Standard Tribe is a soothsaying jaunt into the not-so-distant future, where 24/7 communication and chatroom alliances have evolved into tribal networks that secretly work against each other in shadowy online realms. The novel opens with its protagonist, the peevish Art Berry, on the roof of an asylum. He wonders if it's better to be smart or happy. His crucible is a pencil up the nose for a possible "homebrew lobotomy." To explain Art's predicament, Doctorow flashes backward and slowly fills in the blanks. As a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, Art is one of many in the now truly global village who have banded together out of like-minded affinity for a particular time zone and its circadian cycles. Art may have grown up in Toronto but his real homeland is an online grouping that prefers bagels and hot dogs to the fish and chips of their rivals who live on Greenwich Mean Time. As he rises through the ranks of the tribe, he is sent abroad to sabotage the traffic patterns and communication networks in the GMT tribe. Along the way, he comes across a humdinger of an idea that will solve a music piracy problem on the highways of his own beloved timezone, raise his status in the tribe and make him rich. If only he could have trusted his tightly wound girlfriend and fellow tribal saboteur, he probably wouldn't be on the booby hatch roof with that pencil up his nose.

As a musing on the future, Doctorow's extrapolation seems entirely plausible. And, not only is EST a fascinating mental leap it's a witty and savvy tale that will appeal to anyone who's lived another life, however briefly, online. --Jeremy Pugh

From the Inside Flap:

"I know many science fiction writers engaged in the cyber-world, but Cory Doctorow is a native....We should all hope and trust that our culture has the guts and moxie to follow this guy. He's got a lot to tell us." -Bruce Sterling

A powerful and funny novel about time, tribalism, and a young man's dismaying discoveries about his own life

"Cory Doctorow is the most interesting new SF writer I've come across in years. He starts out at the point where older SF writers' speculations end."
--Rudy Rucker, author of Spaceland

"Cory Doctorow doesn't just write about the future--I think he lives there."
-Kelly Link

"Cory Doctorow rocks! Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is about a world that is visible in its outlines today, if you know where to look, from reputation systems to peer-to-peer ad-hocracies. Doctorow knows where to look."
--Howard Rheingold, author of The Virtual Community and Smart Mobs

"Nicely understated: meringue laced with caffeine."
-Publishers Weekly on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

"It's cool, it's hip, and it's fun-but more important, it's about something. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a sleek, tightly written book that, as the best science fiction should, engages with the world."
-Locus

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