As a daily reader of Boing Boing, as well as a reader/listener of Cory Doctorow‘s novels and stories, I was psyched to see and meet him in Toronto last night, where he held a launch for his new novel, Little Brother. The event was held at the Toronto Library’s Merrill Collection on College Street, where I was able to pick up the book there from Bakka Phoenix Books, a science fiction and fantasy bookstore on Queen St. West. I can’t wait to read it, as the synopsis seems quite enticing: 

“Little Brother’s my first young adult novel, a book about young people who use technology to fight for the restoration of the Bill of Rights to American politics, setting them square in the crosshairs of the war on terror.”

Apart from reading his daily contributions to Boing Boing, the first work I read by Doctorow was the novel Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, a story of supernatural characters and free public-access wi-fi set in Toronto’s Kensington Market. Since then, I’ve been enjoying his podcast and short stories from Overclocked, as well as his latest mindbender, True Names, which pertains to rival post-singularity superintelligences competing in the race to convert all the matter in the universe to pure computronium. Aside from writing some wildly imaginative (and diverse) fiction, he is also occasionally featured on CBC’s Search Engine radio program, in which he discusses civil liberties in the digital universe.

Last night he was able to field some questions ranging from literary style to parenting to civil liberties and copyright reform (in fact, it was his coverage of the recent copyright reform debate in Canada that brought the issue to my attention). Afterwards I was able to meet him, whereupon I discovered he at one point was also a CogSci student such as myself! He then asked me a CogSci-related question in regards to whether his newborn daughter, who has just begun to giggle, is merely mimicking the laughing response of her parents, or if laughing is innate behaviour. My answer: as other primates are known to exhibit the laughing response, I imagine the laughing response is both instinctual AND learned, in that the behaviour is hard-wired, but an infant requires some contextual priming to learn how to evoke that proper response. Hopefully that suffices. I may have to check up on that idea and give an update.