Art & Creativity Quote by Cory Doctorow

“Weirder” and “more surprising” is Doctorow staking out a defense of difficulty in a culture that treats readability as virtue and strangeness as indulgence. He’s not just hyping novelty; he’s signaling a deliberate break from the safe grammar of earlier work. The phrase “more reality bending, deliberately so” does double duty: it frames the book’s formal experiments as craft, not accident, and it preempts the skeptical reader who hears “weird” and assumes self-indulgent worldbuilding. Doctorow’s tell is that adverb - “deliberately.” This isn’t chaos; it’s strategy.

The subtext is journalistic, even if he’s talking about fiction. Doctorow has built a career on interrogating systems (surveillance, platforms, IP law) where reality already feels distorted by design. “Reality bending” lands as a metaphor for contemporary life: algorithmic feeds, corporate narratives, politicized facts. Calling attention to the bending is a way of making readers feel how malleable the “real” has become, and how complicit our habits are in that malleability.

Then he pivots to “emotionally raw,” a phrase that quietly rebukes the stereotype of the idea-heavy, thesis-forward sci-fi writer. He’s suggesting that the book’s strangeness isn’t a cold experiment; it’s the vehicle for exposure. Weirdness becomes cover for intimacy: you can say sharper truths about fear, grief, desire, and moral compromise when you tilt the world. The context here is an author arguing that escalation in form is matched by escalation in vulnerability - the point of bending reality is to stop pretending the emotions underneath are tidy.