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Authors: Cory Doctorow

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Craphound

BOOK: Craphound
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Craphound

Cory Doctorow

From "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," a short story collection published in

September, 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows Press (ISBN 1568582862). See

http://craphound.com/place for more.

Originally Published in Science Fiction Age, March 1998

Reprinted in:

  • Northern Suns

    (Tor, 1999, David Hartwell and Glenn Grant, editors)

    • Year's Best Science Fiction XVI

    (Morrow, 1999, Gardner Dozois, editor)

    • Hayakawa Science Fiction Magazine (Japan)

    September 2001

"Like most aliens-mingling-with-human-society stories, Doctorow's story serves

mostly to hold a mirror up to human nature, but the odd corner of human nature

it examines is fascinating, and the story is smoothly and expertly written, with

some good detail and local color and some shrewd insights into human nature and

human culture, and an almost Bradburian vein of rich nostalgia running through

it (although the nostalgia is quirky enough that perhaps it might more usefully

be compared to R.A. Lafferty or Terry Bisson than to Bradbury)."

  • Gardner Dozois

    Editor, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

--

Blurbs and quotes:

  • Cory Doctorow straps on his miner's helmet and takes you deep into the

caverns and underground rivers of Pop Culture, here filtered through SF-coloured

glasses. Enjoy.

  • Neil Gaiman

    Author of American Gods and Sandman

  • Few writers boggle my sense of reality as much as Cory Doctorow. His vision

is so far out there, you'll need your GPS to find your way back.

  • David Marusek

    Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Award, Nebula Award nominee

  • Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy,

entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of

the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find.

  • Gardner Dozois

    Editor, Asimov's SF

  • He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science

fiction needs Cory Doctorow!

  • Bruce Sterling

    Author of The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction

  • Cory Doctorow strafes the senses with a geekspeedfreak explosion of gomi kings

with heart, weirdass shapeshifters from Pleasure Island and jumping automotive

jazz joints. If this is Canadian science fiction, give me more.

  • Nalo Hopkinson

    Author of Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring

  • Cory Doctorow is the future of science fiction. An nth-generation hybrid of

the best of Greg Bear, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and Groucho Marx, Doctorow

composes stories that are as BPM-stuffed as techno music, as idea-rich as the

latest issue of NEW SCIENTIST, and as funny as humanity's efforts to improve

itself. Utopian, insightful, somehow simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, these

nine tales will upgrade your basal metabolism, overwrite your cortex with new

and efficient subroutines and generally improve your life to the point where

you'll wonder how you ever got along with them. Really, you should need a

prescription to ingest this book. Out of all the glittering crap life and our

society hands us, craphound supreme Doctorow has managed to fashion some

industrial-grade art."

  • Paul Di Filippo

    Author of The Steampunk Trilogy

  • As scary as the future, and twice as funny. In this eclectic and electric

collection Doctorow strikes sparks off today to illuminate tomorrow, which is

what SF is supposed to do. And nobody does it better.

  • Terry Bisson

    Author of Bears Discover Fire

--

A note about this story

This story is from my collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," published

by Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I've

released this story, along with five others, under the terms of a Creative

Commons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyright

normally reserves for me, the creator.

I recently did the same thing with the entire text of my novel, "Down and Out in

the Magic Kingdom" (http://craphound.com/down), and it was an unmitigated

success. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the book -- good news -- and

thousands of people bought the book -- also good news. It turns out that, as

near as anyone can tell, distributing free electronic versions of books is a

great way to sell more of the paper editions, while simultaneously getting the

book into the hands of readers who would otherwise not be exposed to my work.

I still don't know how it is artists will earn a living in the age of the

Internet, but I remain convinced that the way to find out is to do basic

science: that is, to do stuff and observe the outcome. That's what I'm doing

here. The thing to remember is that the very
worst
thing you can do to me as

an artist is to not read my work -- to let it languish in obscurity and

disappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, and

this is doubly true for the short stories. Losing a couple bucks to people who

would have bought the book save for the availability of the free electronic text

is no big deal, at least when compared to the horror that is being irrelevant

and unread. And luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for free

gets me more paying customers than it loses me.

You can find the canonical version of this file at

http://craphound.com/place/download.php

If you'd like to convert this file to some other format and distribute it, you

have my permission, provided that:

  • You don't charge money for the distribution
  • You keep the entire text intact, including this notice, the license below, and

the metadata at the end of the file

  • You don't use a file-format that has "DRM" or "copy-protection" or any other

form of use-restriction turned on

If you'd like, you can advertise the existence of your edition by posting a link

to it at http://craphound.com/place/000012.php

--

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the work for commercial purposes -- unless they get the

licensor's permission.

And here's the license itself:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode

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BOOK: Craphound
3.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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