A Place So Foreign and Eight More (Paperback)

by Cory Doctorow (Author), Bruce Sterling (Introduction) "I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather..." (more)
Key Phrases: cowboy trunk, soft ones, Nicola Tesla, The Amazing Robotron, Ronnie Ryan (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Wunderkind Cory Doctrow continues to display his orientation skills at the intersection of Humanity and Technology with the collection of short stories A Place So Foreign and 8 More. In the collection's titular tale, "A Place So Foreign," a 19th-century boy travels with his father, the Ambassador to 1975. But when Pa meets with an accident, young James becomes a living anachronism in 1898. Doctrow twists the time travel tale into a parable of data mining, as mysterious forces work to plunder the past for corporate gain. In one of several stories about a mysterious alien race who offers to give Earthers a hand up, he documents the adolescent rage of those left behind when the "mothaship" takes the anointed few into the brave new world. Finally, in "0wnz0red", Doctrow explores the dark side of Silicon Valley's connection to the military industrial complex by posing the question: What happens when hackers learn to hack the human body?

Doctrow is a new breed in an increasingly literate and valid subgenre of science fiction. He uses the traditional allegories of the form to explore more human and fragile connections. As the 21st century rockets ahead, he examines the consequences of our frenzy to embrace technology and predicts outcomes that are both charmingly optimistic and bleakly hollow. --Jeremy Pugh

From Publishers Weekly
Postcyberpunk Doctorow, a rising Canadian SF star, follows his Orwellian Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) with nine too-near-future tales of aliens and the human alienated-and it's often hard to tell the difference. In "Craphound," the author posits an Earth taken over by "bugouts," aliens obsessed with trading technological expertise for human junk, the ephemera that momentarily defines a society and then becomes silly or naive when some new and more soul-destroying technological amusement arrives. That Faustian central metaphor of the thirst for technology as the ultimate source of spiritual corruption almost guarantees Doctorow's other absorption, his vision of Disneyland in "Return to Pleasure Island," a horrifying sidewise glimpse of the children's entertainment industry. Since the short story form seems somewhat restrictive for him, his best pieces, like his achingly funny reflections on adolescence ("The Year of the Hormone") and a Jewish superman in the era of the Pax Aliena ("The Super Man and the Bugout"), need at least novella-size room. His closing story, "OwnzOred," a shockingly original glimpse of 21st-century mankind tottering at the brink of a mortally steep cliff, is a polemic on fair-use freedom. By relentlessly exposing disenchanted Silicon Valley dwellers caught in a military-industrial web of khaki money, Congress-critters and babykiller projects, Doctorow explores the intersection of social concern and technology-Never-Never land, or 2084?
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Running Press (September 7, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1568582862
• ISBN-13: 978-1568582863
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #470,503 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Picky, aintcha?, January 10, 2005

By	Caster Jack "not him, the other guy" (the East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Map for Territories that Don't Yet Exist., July 5, 2004

By	roy christopher "frontwheeldrivedotcom" (Portland, OR, USA) - See all my reviews

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.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The genre at its best, October 15, 2006

By	Daniel Dadmun (Lakeside, California United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.