Cory Doctorow 12 min read

The coppers come through the door with truncheons swinging, for Da's crime is running a printer, churning out contraband goods from designs, and one of his customers has shopped him.

Cory Doctorow's 2006 short story is a sharp, prophetic cyberpunk tale of home fabrication outlawed. Punchy, provocative, contemporary SF. Read it for a compact story that imagines 3D printing as a criminal act, and the defiant impulse to print anyway.

In its time

Published in 2006, during the 2000s, open-culture and post-scarcity visions.

Reading it

12 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).