Customer Reviews

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Cory Doctorow really has his finger on today's high-tech pulse, leading to great sci-fi ideas. I have read one of his earlier efforts, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," and that novel was damaged by too much reliance on techno geekery and not enough story. In this book, Doctorow has endeavored more to construct an engaging plot and more interesting characters, with the high-tech acting as more of a backdrop. This book is fun to read and even suspenseful, and the reading experience is an overall success. However, there are some glaring gaps here. The lead character (usually known as Alan) and his brothers are weird extra-human constructs, with a mountain for a father and a washing machine for a mother, and come from a supernatural cave looked over by golems. Alan enters the world of average humans, trying to escape his one evil brother, and protect his other brothers, while meeting a winged woman named Mimi who may or may not come from the same extra-human realm.

This may all sound eccentrically creative on Doctorow's part, but the problem is that these weird characters and bizarre backgrounds are simply presented as a given, and never actually explained. Are they supernatural demigods, weird mutant freaks, aliens, or what? Their function in the world of regular humans is never explored, nor is there any explanation for the supporting characters who know their secrets (Krishna) or can accept them without judgment or questioning (Kurt). Also, the characters go about their actions with no underlying motives or motivations being made clear to the reader. This problem applies especially to Mimi and the evil brother. And finally, Doctorow was obviously trying to tie the main storyline, of Alan trying to integrate into regular society while fixing his extra-human family's problems, to the secondary storyline of a community effort to build a free wireless network. But these two plotlines never find true connectivity, and with many loose ends all around, the book sometimes feels like a jumble of loose ideas. Granted, this novel earns its props for being fun to read and for making you care what happens to the characters. But Doctorow needs more practice in fleshing out his unique ideas into a truly integrated and empathetic story. [~doomsdayer520~]

I want to say I loved this book. I really dig urban fantasies, especially ones that stay away from the tired tropes of the form, which this book managed to do with great form. Unfortunately the story never really came together for me. Yes, parallel plots and timelines and narratives but even in its resolution I felt it lacking.

Part of it was the feeling that the book was padded by lectures on the viability of wireless networks or the internet v. cell phones inserted solely to pad out the work and give Doctorow an opportunity to share his thoughts on the subject at hand. Which is fine when I'm reading an article or his posts on his blog or at BoingBoing, but in the novel they brought the story to a screeching halt. One moment I'm reading two characters discussing coffee, the next is a three page Socratic dialogue on the nautre of some gadget somewhere.

But mostly I never really felt that I was reading characters, just mannequins who were constructed and (barely) fleshed out so Doctorow could put them through their paces as he needed them. That's the nature of fiction, of course, but the characters that grip me have more to offer the story than the necessary plot coupons or Maguffins. These were mannequinsm artlessly brought into and out of the story as required. I never felt they had any inner life or any glimmer of personality that I would want to read about outside of the story.

The one exception was Mimi, who had a particularly juicy series of secrets to tell, but even she came and went seemingly at the author's whims.

I finished the book to finish it, not because I really cared. Much like Doctorow's other work, it had a strong start that was lost in the face of its own cleverness. I'd suggest giving this one a miss.

The first thing I read by Cory Doctorow was a short story called "Nimby and the Dimension Hoppers." I loved that story's confrontation between an anti-technology deep green society and a technocratic world. I haven't read much from the cyberpunk wing of the sci-fi genre but I get the idea that Doctorow enjoys playing with some of its conventions. He really seems to enjoy it in Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. The book weaves two stories together, one of them concerning the main character's involvement with a bunch of punks and anarchists working together on a free WiFi project. That sounds cyberpunky, but he subverts the usual conventions in a few key ways, one being that there isn't any discussion of a virtual world. It's set in the real world with elements of fantasy. Another is that the main character is not an anarchist or a punk. He doesn't have a mohawk, facial piercings, or tattoos. He also doesn't have a belly button. Because even though he seems to be an almost too-normal middle-aged man, the main character isn't even human. This brings us to the other main thread of the novel: the story of the main character's family. His name is Alan, but he'll answer to anything that starts with "A." Doctorow refers to him using several different "A" names. His father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. For Doctorow this isn't just a dry metaphor for fatherhood and motherhood, though it humorously works on that level. (The mountain stands in for the larger-than-life yet aloof father and the washing machine plays the part of the dependent wife-maid). An even greater achievement is how real Doctorow makes this ridiculous premise seem. (I almost cried for the mother who was unable to truly nurture her children). The story of Alan's family is filled with rich and recognizable feeling, despite the absolute fantasy of the surface. Alan's been trying to fit in his entire life, but it's impossible. He was born in a washing machine, grew up in a cave, and is being stalked by his dead zombie-brother! Normality is most definitely unattainable. I'm not going to give anything else away. I ate this book up and highly recommend it. If I had to compare it to something, I'd call it a sci-fi version of Geek Love. The only thing that sucks about the book is the cover. The character on the cover is supposed to be Mimi, a young winged woman who lives in the house next to Alan's. Doctorow specifically describes Mimi as fat and sexy and this gal on the cover is in no way fat. The cover is annoying and if I'd seen it I probably wouldn't have read it. It looks like a Francesca Lia Block book, and her covers always suck, particularly the headless naked torsos of Violet and Claire. So anyway, definitely don't judge this book by its cover. It's much better than Down and Out...

Even after my disappointment with Eastern Standard Tribe, this still looked really interesting, and this time I wasn't disappointed.

Alan (Andy, Adrian) is the son of a mountain and a washing machine, and he has seven brothers. Alan (Alex, Andreas) is the oldest, and also the one who can pass for human the most easily and comfortably. In fact, only gradually do we learn that there's anything unusual about him at all, except for his parentage and his casual attitude about what name he gives people-as long as it starts with "A". Billy (Bob, Ben) can see the future, Carlo is an island, Doug (Danny,) was a perfectly human-appearing monster until his brothers killed him (which hasn't slowed down his career much), and Ed, Fred, and George are nesting dolls. Alan got his early-childhood care and education from the golems provided by his father, the mountain, and then discovered school and the library. After a childhood attempting to raise his brothers (except for Carlo) with decent educations and the ability to blend in to human society, and after a truly horrific experience ending in the death of Doug, Alan takes off on his own. When we meet him, he's a middle-aged, semi-retired entrepreneur living in Toronto, renovating the house he just bought and getting acquainted with the college-age neighbors next door.

His illusions of normality are about to take a nasty hit.

On the one hand, he's getting sucked into a new project, making free wireless internet access available to the neighborhood, the city, and eventually the world. On the other hand, his brothers, Ed, Fred, and George come to visit, with the news that Doug, whom they thought was safely dead, is back and coming after them. And on the third hand, the kids next door aren't as normal as they look, either. As his brothers start dying and Doug starts collecting allies, Alan clings to his version of normality and pitches free wireless internet access to Bell Canada and tiny city merchants and anarchist bookstore operators, and tries to convince the girl next door that wings aren't a handicap. (Silly Alan; Mimi wants to be normal, too!)

All of this could be a recipe for a disaster of a book, and occasionally it does seem to almost spin out of Doctorow's control-but not quite. Somehow it all gels. These characters are fleshed out and interesting, and the story, alternating in time between Alan's strange childhood and his not-quite-normal middle age, is fully developed and absorbing. I'm never going to be Cory Doctorow's biggest fan, but I recommend this one to anyone who enjoys quirky fantasy.

Another mixed effort from the pen of Mr. Doctorow. SCTSLT starts out well as a gritty urban fantasy with a wonderful description of the main character, Alan, buying a house in Toronto and restoring it. The initial prose is lyrical and augers well for an interesting journey. Unfortunately about half-way through the magical horse starts to falter and the characters become rather less enticing. The mostly pointless violence and secondary stoylines that suddenly appear and sometimes never go anywhere start to overwhelm an otherwise good book and the characters become shallow cutouts lacking any realistic motivation.

Alan's evil brother Doug is apparently just born evil, no explanatiion is ever offered for the hatred or violence he engages in. He's just bad and any hopes the reader has of finding out why and how he got like that are ultimately dashed. Same with Alan's evil neighbour Krishna, he's just cruel and evil for no apparent reason. How and why he teams up with evil Doug is never explained either. He just does.

Alan and his magical brothers Doug, Charlie, Billy, etc. (all spawn of a washing machine mother and a mountain father) change their names throughout the book -- Doug is variously called Dan, David and Dearborne at various points in the text, Charlie is called Clem, Carlos and Cory, and Alan is referred to as Andy, Akin, etc. at various points as well. This is presumably an attempt on the author's part to emphasise how "unusual" the characters are, how non-human they really are and how they don't really fit in. Alas it doesn't work, it's just plain irritating and makes the story hard to follow -- not a good thing to do to your readers.

The use of language in this book is very good in places, descriptions are mostly very well, often beautifully, done and it's because Doctorow can write so well when he wants to that the flaws are so obvious when they turn up. E.g. There's a long section where Alan's love-interest Mimi (who looks human but has wings) is describing her relationship with evil Krishna and how he started cutting off her wings every few months as they regrew. She speaks to Alan in such writerly detail about how he looked, what she did and felt, how the rooms looked, etc. that it's just silly. There's no way a poor traumatized young woman would describe events in such colourful detail; it's great writing but totally out of place given the circumstances.

All in all I liked this better than Doctorow's previous book, "Eastern Standard Tribe", but still not nearly as much as his debut effort "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", which remains his best novel to date (fortunately he is still turning out first-rate short stories, maybe he should stick to that, at least until he can devote the time required to write the really great novel he undoubtably can).

Other reviews have great descriptions of the book, so let me add that the reader is asked to accept an odd world that seems an allegory that hinges on a painful struggle between two brothers (Alan, the "A" character and Davey, the "D" character), and the climax of this tension is "resolved" in the most absurd single and unsatisfying sentence I've ever seen. If you're taking the reader somewhere, you have to go there. Very disappointing, somewhat of a waste of time to read.

There are two stories here: one is the kind of modern-technology-is-cool story that Doctorow is good at, and is a pretty good -- if also low-key and ranty -- story. The other story is an abstract fantasy story that's just a mess, keeps losing track of itself, and ends in nothing BUT loose ends. Cory takes these two stories and randomly shuffles them together, and then does the literary equivalent of the Photoshop smudge tool to kind of sort of make them overlap in a way that doesn't work. It's ugly, but it's still fairly engaging for the first half of the book. In the second half of the book, however, he begins to mix up the chronology of chapters with no rhyme or reason, he starts experimenting with clumsy jumps from third person into first person, and then in the last quarter of the book the main character starts writing a short story, and paragraphs from the short story are interspersed throughout the main story, with no break denoting the shift, to the point that many readers have posted to Doctorow's feedback page for the novel, asking if those paragraphs are typos. And then at the end he resolves absolutely zero of the numerous mysteries he's invented over the course of the abstract fantasy part of the book.

I loved "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", and I will read "Eastern Standard Tribe" soon, but this one was a big disappointment, and gave me the impression that Doctorow should stick to the sci-fi, and maybe dip a little bit into fantasy, but the abstract fantasy of this book was WAY too ambitious for him.

Oh, also, the whole "erotic armpit sniffing" thing really squicked me.

This is the second novel I have read by Cory Doctorow, although I am working on my third. I guess that is a high enough complement to an author itself, the fact that I am read one of his novels and came back for more. This book is different, decided surreal. It is a mark of the author's skill that he can draw a reader into a world as strange as the one he describes.

Cory Doctorow has a gift for inventing characters. The characters in this book leap off the page (which is quite a feat considering some of the characters are decidedly outside the human realm). His setting is well done too. The novel mostly takes place in Toronto, Canada, and is a mixture of the regualar world and a unique fantasy world of Doctorow's own imagination.

Whether there is some deeper meaning to some of the weirder parts of the book, i do not know. What I do know is that I enjoyed this book. The only complaint I have (and this quite possibly has been done intentionally by the author to make this book seem even more weird) is that the plot isn't very tightly woven together. Or rather, there almost seems to be two plots involving some of the same characters. Perhaps one was meant to be a subplot that simply grew larger than the author intended, or perhaps the author is simply giving us an extra treat by including it. I can certainly see some people liking this sort of thing in a novel, like I said, it is quite possibly intentional.

As a side note, this and I believe the rest of Cory Doctorow's work is available in electronic format free of charge from his website, so you can start reading this novel to see if you like it before purchasing it.

Contrary to some reviewers, I didn't find it difficult read at all. I've never read Joyce, so I can neither confirm nor deny that comparison. It reminds me a bit of Neil Gaiman but with a large helping of Rudy Rucker (at his best) on the side and maybe just a hint of Vonnegut. It reminds of the days when science fiction authors were willing to take more chances with their writing by exploring new conceptual frameworks for story telling rather than just remining the same space opera/cyberpunk/heinlein pastiche over and over again.

The quality of prose in this book is comparable to William Gibson’s, but not as accomplished as Ian M. Banks’, which some of the content parallells. Then again, neither is William Gibson’s. The writing moves along at a good clip and doesn’t get bogged down in any significant way, but I would have preferred a more contextually interleaved back story, to avoid a sense of a compilation of stylised anecdotes to fill this out.

After about three quarters the way through, I felt the plot had been somewhat lost to non-essential back story, and it all got a bit too limp for my expectations, with a sort of make-weight ending. But that is a complaint that can be fairly levelled at the majority of writers.

The technicalities border on the unlikely for those with a working knowledge of FreeBSD. For the APs, OpenBSD would have been a cannier choice because of its inherent security features and its recent implementation of wireless protocols and hardware integration, with the recent introduction of OpenBSD 3.7 and, soon to be released, 3.8.

The writing abounds with a dry wit and attention to detail that makes this a good read. But it could have been better for the more seasoned sci-fi fen, such as myself.