- Paperback: 352 pages
- Publisher: Running Press (Aug 23 2003)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1568582862
- ISBN-13: 978-1568582863
- Product Dimensions: 21.3 x 13.2 x 1.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 254 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #354,530 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
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.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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."
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
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
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Map for Territories that Don't Yet Exist.,
By roy christopher "roychristopher-dot-com" (Austin, TX, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: A Place So Foreign and Eight More (Paperback)
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.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
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
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: A Place So Foreign and Eight More (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 (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 (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.
|
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Horror > United States
- Books > Literature & Fiction > Genre Fiction > Horror > United States
- Books > Literature & Fiction > Short Stories
- Books > Mystery & Thrillers > Mystery
- Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > High Tech
- Books > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Short Stories
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
