A Place So Foreign and Eight More

Rating:
Summary: A Map for Territories that Don't Yet Exist.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Has talent, but skims over his own interesting ideas
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Picky, aintcha?
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: bo-ring
Review: The ideas are trite, the prose is pre-sophomoric, and the little introductions by the author that precede each story are nauseatingly self-centered. One of them (preceding "Shadow of the Mothaship") says: "The way I write stories is really stupid [...]". Hear, hear! I can't imagine why Bruce Sterling endorsed this puerile effluvium.

Rating:
Summary: Challenging the boundaries of science fiction
Review: 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.