Eastern Standard Tribe [Anglais] [Relié]

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

John W. Campbell Award-winner Doctorow lives up to the promise of his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003), with this near-future, far-out blast against human duplicity and smothering bureaucracy. Even though it takes a while for the reader to grasp post-cyberpunk Art Berry's dizzying leaps between his "now," a scathing 2012 urban nuthouse, and his "then," the slightly earlier events that got him incarcerated there, this short novel's occasionally bitter, sometimes hilarious and always whackily appealing protagonist consistently skewers those evils of modern culture he holds most pernicious. A born-to-argue misfit like all kids who live online, Art has found peers in cyber space who share his unpopular views-specifically his preference for living on Eastern Standard Time no matter where he happens to live and work. In this unsettling world, e-mails filled with arcane in-jokes bind competitive "tribes" that choose to function in one arbitrary time or another. Swinging from intense highs (his innovative marketing scheme promises to impress his tribe and make him rich) to maudlin lows (isolation in a scarily credible loony bin), Art gradually learns that his girl, Linda, and his friend Fede are up to no good. In the first chapter, Doctorow's authorial voice calls this book a work of propaganda, a morality play about the fearful choice everybody makes sooner or later between smarts and happiness. He may be more right than we'd like to think.
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Art belongs to the Eastern Standard Tribe, which is linked by its members' circadian rhythms to a time zone in a world in which human loyalties are no longer contingent to physical proximity. Art and his friend Fede are EST agents in Greenwich Mean Time, working for Virgin/Deutsche Telecom and thinking up ways to mire Europe in ridiculous bureaucratic tangles. Art also has something clever to sell to New Jersey: a way to siphon profits from music pirates on the toll roads. Fede, and Art's lover, Pacific time-zone transplant Linda, double-cross him, though, upsetting everything he thought he knew about tribal loyalty. Declared insane and locked safely away from Fede and Linda's machinations in an asylum on Route 128 in Massachusetts, Art tells us his story. Doctorow's fast, bizarre follow-up to Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom [BKL Ja 1 & 15 03] is a reaction to the impact of instant global communication in which it is hard to tell whether the phenomena being reacted to have actually been observed or are the consequences of his imagination. Regina Schroeder
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A powerful and funny novel about time, tribalism, and a young man's dismaying discoveries about his own life rt is a member of the Eastern Standard Tribe, a secret society bound together by a sleep schedule. Around the world, those who wake and sleep on East Coast time find common cause with one another, co-operating, conspiring to help each other out, coordinated by a loose network of encrypted instant messag-ing, secret protocols, and a love of Manhattan-style bagels. Or perhaps not. Art is, after all, in the nut-house. He was put there by a cabal of his friends and loved ones, fellow travelers from EST hidden in the bowels of Greenwich Mean Time, masquerading as management consultants who strive to wire Europe in oatmeal-thick bureaucracy. Scathing, bitter and funny, Eastern Standard Tribe examines the immutable truths of time, of sunrise and sunset, and of societies rebuilt in the storm of instant, ubiquitous communication.

Cory Doctorow cofounded the Internet search-engine company OpenCola.com and now works for the Electronic Frontier Foundation.His weblog Boing (boingboing.net), coedited with Mark Frauenfelder and David Pescovitz, is read by more than 130,000 unique visitors every month. In 2000, the World Science Fiction convention voted him the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He lives in San Francisco.