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Amazon.co.uk Review
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 asking 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, Amazon.com
Review
"As a political activist, gizmo freak, junk collector, programmer, entrepreneur and all around Renaissance geek, Cory Doctorow is a science fiction writer who can really drill down....We should all hope and trust that our culture has the guts and moxie to follow this guy. He's got a lot to tell us."
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First Sentence
I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good tales from a developing author.,
By
This review is from: A Place So Foreign and Eight More Stories (Paperback)
This is the second book I have read by this author.An collection of short SciFi stories, all are interesting and show the authors development. His introductins to each story really help you enjoy them. 0nz0red is the last and probably my favourite story. But all of them are terrfic reads. The book barely left my hands from start to finish! Although very good, it pales slightly in comparision to the authors first full novel "Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom". This again shows the development of an up and coming author. All in all a great collection of modern SciFi tales by an original and entertaining author. Worth every penny of the purchase price!
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.0 out of 5 stars (11 customer reviews) 6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Picky, aintcha?,
By Caster Jack "Minaculous..." - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Place So Foreign and Eight More Stories (Paperback)
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. 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The genre at its best,
By Daniel Dadmun - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Place So Foreign and Eight More Stories (Paperback)
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. 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
From before he was down and out in the Magic Kingdom,
By Michael K. Smith - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: A Place So Foreign and Eight More Stories (Paperback)
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.
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