Customer Reviews

A Place So Foreign and Eight More

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I suppose I'll lose points on cleverness and critique, but...I read the first page of the first story, and bought the book on that alone; halfway though, it provoked a rare "damn, I'm really glad I bought this book" moment. That's all I'm really looking for in a book anyhow.
***UPDATE 4/18: driving in to work I started randomly thinking about the story "craphound" from this collection...so I guess you could say Doctorow has stay-time, considering it's been a year since I read it and it still occasionally bounces around my brain.

As a co-editor of Boing Boing, former director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, USC professor and anti-DRM activist (to scratch the surface) Mr. Doctorow has his bone fides when it comes to understanding how technology is changing the world.
His writing follows in the tradition of the best of science fiction as a poigniant fun house mirror held up to our own time. No busty women in skintight space suits or ridiculously biceped rogues fighting off alien overlords. If you are looking for stories about them, look elsewhere. If you're looking for stories about people dealing with normal problems in extraordinary (but plausible) circumstance, you'll feel right at home here.

Doctorow (no provable relation to E. L., by the way) made his first big splash with his off-the-wall short stories -- especially the last one in this collection, "Ownz0red," which is a Leet Geek work of narrative art about taking copyright commons to the next level, by way of the personal biosphere. "Craphound," on the other hand, while it's a well-written and entertaining story about junk-hawks, is almost the sort of thing you might have found in the old Analog. "To Market, to Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey," has a strong Gibsonian flavor and is probably the second-best thing in this collection. The title story is a not entirely successful time travel yarn that seems to lose its way at several points. "Return to Pleasure Island" is just strange, and also not enitrely successful. The remaining three stories are sort of a set, sharing a future in which the aliens have come and are shaping us up whether we like it or not, but none of the three shares characters. This is the best single-author collection I've read in several years.

Short story collections tend to frustrate me, as it seems the story hardly gets into the swing of things before a conclusion is hastily tapped on. The best short story collection I have read is "Welcome to the Monkey House" by Kurt Vonnegut, which is one of the most dazzling displays of "modern" writing I've stumbled upon. "A Place SO Foreign and 8 More" does not quite reach Vonnegut level, but is still a very enjoyable collection of stories.

Most of the time I really enjoyed Doctorow's prose. There were a few times he fell into the trap of trying to use too many "smart" phrases in one place, however, overall the writing is sharp and interesting.

The one thing I really like about Doctorow's writing is how he doesn't have to explain things... he SHOWS them. For example, in the story "Return to Pleasure Island," the main character is not human, but Doctorow avoids blantantly saying so. Instead he throws in "clues." Since the story is from the creature's perspective, regular humans are "soft ones." When he takes off his coat, he notices a lot of brown dirt-- a sign he is getting along in age. It's all very nonchalant which allows it to work.

The best story in the collection is "Home Again, Home Again," which is a look at life in a future "bat-house"... a home for mentally unstable people. While Docotorow tinkers with the idea that switching between first person and third person in reference to the same guy is powerful, it's really just confusing and it would have been better in first person only. I understand the concept he was going for, but it just wasn't working. That small bit aside, the story it's self was a stunning peep into different relationships which AREN'T real, but through Doctorow's writing sure do feel like they are.

Indeed, a reoccurring theme in Docotorow's stories is relationships between people-- usually friends and family. Unlike many edgy sci-fi writers who seem to sacrifice the relationships for technology, Docotorow's focus on them keeps the stories grounded and human. Yet his obvious technology obsession gives them the fantasy and future that marks science fiction.

It is exciting to stumble upon such a talent this early in his carreer. Expect bigger and better things from him in the future.

I like Cory Doctorow's writing style and have been a fan since reading 'In the Shadow of the Mothaship'. I was glad to find this compilation so I did not have to hunt down old SciFi magazines. The stories are almost all near future settings that have an element of the fantastic but not scientific, with the exception of the story '0wnz0red' which is the book's capstone piece. Doctorow writes in fast, hip, word-mashing style that others have copied, but at which he excels. Subjects usually revolve around a theme of youthful rebellion and, the young characters while very involved in their own world, tend to dismiss or miss larger issues. This is fine but he never examines it in any detail. All the characters are young or young minded and seem to be in on the joke. It is hard to had empathy with these characters.

Each story is preceded by author notes. The information given is historical, humorous, or biographical. And he talks about issues important to him such electronic rights and 'sampling'. Some of these subjects need more than just a paragraph. On the issue of sampling he asserts that writers should be able to 'lift' pieces of other authors stories; backdrops, character sketches et cetera. Other authors simply claim to have been inspired by books they have read, Doctorow takes this idea a step further. In 'A place so foreign' he admits to having read Fitzgerald's 'The Great Brain' children's books and copies the entire setting of Mormon Utah in the 1860s. Also in 'The Superman and the Bugout' he copies the comic hero Superman; right down to the tights, trunks and cape. These stories are yawnfests. When he uses his own ideas the stories are MUCH better, memorable even. '0wnz0red' is a great story about programming, bio-technology, and pushing the limits of human physiology, the characters and tension are believable.

Doctorow sells himself, and the reader, short by not examining the ideas in each story. He certainly has the talent to do so, but never closes the deal. Only two selections can be considered complete short stores. The rest are slice-of-life, literary snapshots, that are amusing in their telling but lack a equally weighty denouement. I look forward to what he may write the year he turns forty.

Ah, frustrating read -- not because of Cory Doctorow's stories, but because I wish I'd found them earlier. Not that everyone else won't enjoy them too, but these stories are perfect for the Web geek, the technoscience hack, the computer nerd, and others of that ilk. Cory is all-of-the-above and then some. His knowledge and familiarity with all-things-geek comes shining through brightly in the stories in this collection.

The book starts auspiciously with Cory's classic "Craphound," which follows thrifty aliens through rummage sales, out for ephemera of all kinds. The centerpiece, "A Place so Foreign," is an intriguing historical riff on time travel. Cory's Disneyfied California environs crop up in the creepy "Return to Pleasure Island," and another wildly futuristic, yet timeless environment sets the stage for three stories: "Shadow of the Mothaship," "Home Again, Home Again," and "The Superman and the Bugout" -- each of which actually stand quite well on their own two. My favorites here are the twist on ubiquitous marketing, "To Market, to Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey" and the full-on, geeked-out, bio-engineered "0wnz0red."

A Place So Foreign (and 8 More) is a time machine, a map for territories that don't yet exist, and a damn fine read though and through.

After reading one of Doctorow's short stories in another collection, I was intrigued enough to follow up with an entire collection of his and was not disappointed. The stories - for the most part - are all very engaging, funny and draw the reader in, even when the ideas, concepts and sometime technologies that Doctorow has created are a shade on the complex side.

I will say that I was less enamored of the "bugout" stories (of which there are three) mostly because of how little of the world is documented, making it very difficult to understand some of the motivations of the characters described.

All in all a very good collection.

The nine stories contained in _A Place So Foreign_ can only be easily classified together as "imaginative" - any other grouping fails to do them justice. From the cyberpunk (or "Nerdc0re" as the author describes it) story "0wnz0red," the alien buddy story "Craphound," the time-travelling caper "A Place so Foreign," and the dark fantasy "Return to Pleasure Island," the author shows that he can be creative and interesting in many different areas of fiction. "All Day Sucker" and "The Re-Branding of Billy Bailey" represent commentaries on aspects of society, and the three "bugout" stories ("Shadow of the Mothaship," "Home Again, Home Again," and "The Super Man and the Bugout") are also included.

If you're interested in reading imaginative science fiction, then this is the anthology for you. It is one of the most interesting works I've read in years.

The nine short science fiction stories comprising Cory Doctorow's Place So Foreign And 8 More aren't your ordinary everyday tales: it was on the strength of this collection that Doctorow was awarded the John W. Campbell Award for best new science fiction writer, challenging the boundaries of science fiction and detailing worlds which are new and different, from a 19th century Huck Finn in love with Jules Verne's fiction to alien friends obsessed with American ephemera. Thoughtful and often funny are these powerful nine short stories.

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This is newish writer Doctorow's first collection, and it's a nice one. You can easily judge this for yourself, as he's put up six of the nine stories in the book for free download, along with Bruce Sterling's perceptive intro, at http://craphound.com/place/

Still, I'm supposed to provide guidance here, right? OK: the newest and hottest story here is "0wnz0red"....
But why listen to me? Here's Chairman Bruce Sterling's opinion:

[quote]There has been a chunk of science fiction influenced by Silicon Valley, but "0wnz0red" captures the disturbed inner world of the technically sociopathic... This story is fully realized, and it is sarcastic, abrasive, and mind-boggling in a truly novel way. Like Beat writing in its early period, "0wnz0red" has the dual virtues of being both really offensive and genuinely hard for normal people to understand. This work is therefore truly advanced.[end quote]

Well, um, AOL. "If your nerd quotient is high enough, ["0wnz0red"] will blow you away" -- Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com founder.

My favorite Doctorow story so far, the gonzo "Jury Service", isn't here, maybe because it's a collab with Charlie Stross? --but it's just a click away: [OK, a few clicks, since Ammy usually bounces URLS-- g00gle scifi[dot]com]

[quote] Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets...[end quote]

Absolutely not to be missed. See my (and others) comments on "Jury Service" at g00gle groups.

OK, back to what *is* in the book. "Craphound", the leadoff story, was Doctorow's first published story, about an alien who likes thrift shops. Good weird stuff, and online, too.

"A Place So Foreign", an 18,000 word novella (also online) about time-travel from 1898 to 1975, is a fresh take on an old theme, and well-worth reading, though not quite to my taste.

"All Day Sucker" is a neat, clever short-short original. "To Market, To Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey", personal brand-management at Pepsi Elementary, is crackerjack, my second-favorite in the collection (and overall). Neither is online.

"Return to Pleasure Island" is sort of a Disney satire and didn't do much for me. And "Shadow of the Mothaship", a weird scientology/alien invasion tale, went completely by me, though it's a favorite of the author. Go figure. Both are online, so you can judge for yourself (and calibrate your taste against mine). "Home Again, Home Again", an alien nuthouse tale, and "The Super Man and the Bugout", adventures of a Jewish-Canadian superhero, are good stories that share the "Mothaship" background. Both are online.

So that's it. A good collection, from a hot new writer --but they left out two of his four strongest stories!

Review first published at SF Site
Copyright © 2004 Peter D. Tillman