“Stories can change world politics by describing a path.”

Solar and Ollie had a chance to sit down with Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, activist, journalist, blogger, member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and co-founder the UK Open Rights Group. He’ll be speaking in the Marriott Library Gould Auditorium tomorrow, April 5th, at 6:30pm. Tickets are sold out for the event, but spare seats will be given away at the door once the lecture has started. More details right here.

While his talk tomorrow will be on Privacy and Surveillance, we wanted to talk to him a little bit about storytelling. And we were not disappointed, Doctorow had a wealth of knowledge to share about the way that science fiction describes possible futures, the way it models repeating history, and how even more fantastical stories like zombie thrillers are related to our current social conditions. “Predicting the future is boring, inspiring the future is interesting” he says.

We also delve a little bit into his opinions on gaming, and how much of modern free-to-play gaming has lost the benefits that playing games should be providing. Doctorow describes the Zynga-era of games as the “Empty Calories Version” of video games, “compelling without being satisfying”.

You can follow Cory Doctorow on Twitter, or check out his website craphound.com.