Eastern Standard Tribe

By Cory Doctorow

Book Overview

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....

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0765310457
• ISBN13: 9780765310453
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Tor Trade
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.6" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

Brilliant Post-Cyberpunk Novel from Internet Savvy Cory Doctorow

Haven't heard of Cory Doctorow before reading his recent novel, "Eastern Standard Tribe", but I'm glad I have. This is a hilarious, quite engaging, and well-written novel that's as irrelevant as Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash", and, maybe, just maybe, far more accessible. Doctorow is a most perceptive observer of contemporary Internet culture, tweaks it up a bit, and offers a near future world that's not so radically different from our own. His chief protagonist, Art, an "interface designer", comes across as an online version of Job, replete with his own peculiar brands of bad accidents and other hilarious mishaps. Without question, Doctorow is a relatively fresh face in science fiction, and one destined to blaze his own particular path to critical - and hopefully, commercial - success.

Good, but a bit short

A fast-paced pseudotechno-thriller, EST kept me hooked from the very start. The timeline of the book skips back and forth, with the "past" timeline finally catching up to the "present" timeline at the very end. This leads to information revealed in the "present" chapters finally making sense in the "past" chapters, and vice versa. The supporting characters were fairly static, but I think the main character, Art, developed nicely throught the book - personalitywise, he even seemed quite similar to my husband! *lol* As a side note, even though I read the printed copy, you can download the book from the author's website - for free!

High Speed Connection!

Art is some kind of really wired techno-geek, from Toronto but working in London. Linda is his new girlfriend (they met when he knocked her down with his car), exciting but emotionally unstable. Fede is his boss. Art and Fede have come up with a really far out scheme to make money by pirating music from the computer systems of cars on the Mass. Turnpike. They stand to make millions, but now the deal is unraveling. Is Fede trying to doublecross him? And what about Linda? Who can you trust? Especially when you find yourself committed to a mental institution. Worse yet, trapped on the roof. I can't explain it any better than that. You'll just have to read the book. Author Cory Doctorow writes a fast paced, adrenaline-soaked novel of a world like ours but faster, more driven, more wired, more sleepless. People are constantly interacting with communication devices but hardly anyone really communicates. Author Doctorow creates a kind of cyber-babble language full of odd abbreviations and acronyms that is perfectly suited to such a world. You may not understand it but you keep reading.This is a frenetic page-turner. You may not understand all the intricacies of the plot, or the snip-snap, slangy cyberspeak, but you will find yourself quickly engaged with this quirky, entertaining story. I can recommend this one for an entertaining read. Reviewed by Louis N. Gruber

Clever and imaginative

Closer to today than _Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom_. Doctorow's world is a convincing glimpse of what the world might well become. No farfetched gadgets, no space warps or cyber anything. A captivating story of betrayal and redemption, but with the humor you'd expect from Doctorow. The institutional mindset and integral inanity is dead on the mark. The story jumps back and forth from two time points--more interesting than a strictly linear narrative, but not hard to follow. I'd give it 4.5 stars, but it deserves to be rounded up not down.

This book is great!

I really liked this novel. Though it may not be as masterfully written as some other modern day novels, it is still incredibly captivating and the book is hard to put down once you start reading. I found its themes especially interesting and some of them true as I think I sometimes spend too much of my own time online. I'd definitely recommend this book if you're an internet addict.