Eastern Standard Tribe

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Macmillan, Apr 1, 2005 - Fiction - 224 pages

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

Scathing, bitter and funny, Eastern Standard Tribe examines the immutable truths of time, and of societies rebuilt in the storm of instant, ubiquitous communication.

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, 24 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....

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

 

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About the author (2005)

Canadian-born Cory Doctorow is the author of the science fiction novels Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom; Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town; and Makers, as well as two short story collections. He is also the author of young adult novels including the New York Times bestselling Little Brother and For the Win. His novels and short stories have won him three Locus Awards and the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He is co-editor of the popular blog BoingBoing, and has been named one of the Web's twenty-five "influencers" by Forbes Magazine and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

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