Before They Were Giants (14 page)

The auctioneer turned to me. “The bidding stands at two. Will you say two-ten, sir?”

I shook my head. The auctioneer paused a long moment, letting me sweat over the decision to bow out.

“I have two -- do I have any other bids from the floor? Any other bids? Sold, $200, to number 57.” An attendant brought Craphound the glasses. He took them and tucked them under his seat.

~ * ~

I was fuming when we left. Craphound was at my elbow. I wanted to punch him -- I’d never punched anyone in my life, but I wanted to punch him.

We entered the cool night air and I sucked in several lungfuls before lighting a cigarette.

“Jerry,” Craphound said.

I stopped, but didn’t look at him. I watched the taxis pull in and out of the garage next door instead.

“Jerry, my friend,” Craphound said.

“WHAT?” I said, loud enough to startle myself. Scott, beside me, jerked as well.

“We’re going. I wanted to say goodbye, and to give you some things that I won’t be taking with me.”

“What?” I said again, Scott just a beat behind me.

“My people -- we’re going. It has been decided. We’ve gotten what we came for.”

Without another word, he set off towards his van. We followed along behind, shell-shocked.

Craphound’s exoskeleton executed another macro and slid the panel-door aside, revealing the cowboy trunk.

“I wanted to give you this. I will keep the glasses.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“You’re all leaving?” Scott asked, with a note of urgency.

“It has been decided. We’ll go over the next twenty-four hours.”

“But
why
?” Scott said, sounding almost petulant.

“It’s not something that I can easily explain. As you must know, the things we gave you were trinkets to us -- almost worthless. We traded them for something that was almost worthless to you -- a fair trade, you’ll agree -- but it’s time to move on.”

Craphound handed me the cowboy trunk. Holding it, I smelled the lubricant from his exoskeleton and the smell of the attic it had been mummified in before making its way into his hands. I felt like I almost understood.

“This is for me,” I said slowly, and Craphound nodded encouragingly. “This is for me, and you’re keeping the glasses. And I’ll look at this and feel. . .”

“You understand,” Craphound said, looking somehow relieved.

And I
did
. I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and sixguns and giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to spend half a month’s rent on four glasses so that he could remember his Grandma’s kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too.

“You’re craphounds!” I said. “All of you!”

Craphound smiled so I could see his gums and I put down the cowboy trunk and clapped my hands.

<>

~ * ~

Cory Doctorow

atirized in the popular webcomic
xked
as the poster child for the “blogosphere,”
New York Times
best seller Cory Doctorow has a reputation far greater than his relatively recent emergence into popular culture might suggest. A fellow of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation and the co-editor of
Boing Boing,
Cory Doctorow is a tastemaker and spokesman for an entire generation of geeks and techies. From his electronic podium, Doctorow has lobbied for liberalization of copyright laws, increased file-sharing, and the death of DRM, preaching that information deserves to be free. Moreover, he’s not afraid to put his money where his mouth is, releasing electronic versions of his own books for free under a Creative Commons license, beginning with his first novel,
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom,
which won the Locus Award.

Yet despite his personal celebrity and prodigious journalistic writings for publications such as
Popular Science, Make,
and
Wired,
it’s Cory Doctorow’s fiction that truly makes him stand out. An author of both short stories and novels, ranging from technology-driven hard science fiction to fairy-tale fantasy, Doctorow maintains a singular mastery of current trends, vernacular, and Internet culture, lending his stories a unique air of authenticity. His writings have won several Sunburst Awards, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Prometheus Award, and Doctorow himself won the 2007 Electronic Frontiers Foundation Pioneer Award for “the empowerment of individuals in using computers.”

Along with his technological acumen, Doctorow has another widely known passion: a fascination with junk and kitsch that first reared its head in the story “Craphound.” Though not technically his first publication, as he had sold several stories to semi-pro zines while still a teenager, “Craphound” represents Doctorow’s first major sale, and is where he feels his writing career truly began.

Looking back, what do you think still works well in this story? Why?

The two things that were really going for the story were, one, the reverence for junk—and not the caliber of junk you get today, but junk when junk really meant something. We’ve been on this steady march of junk . . . when there was very little, everything got recycled and reused, but in that first blossoming after World War II, you got a really nice standard of junk. There were a lot of consumer goods, more than we could readily consume. We could improve stuff so fast that making it to last didn’t make any sense—we started building things to fall apart. That was the golden age of junk. After the great deflowering of junk, when manufacturing in China and the Far East took off, it was replaced by a torrent of junk. We’re rightfully nostalgic for that period when things were cheap but not hasty, when that specialness of being given a physical thing still remained. We were overwhelmed in 2005 or 2006
.
Physical objects have become kind of a burden, but back then they were still novelties.

The second thing that makes the story something you can really chew on is the mystery at the end. What is it that Craphound realizes? That the narrator realizes? What does it mean that this stuff is a story and a poem? It’s a story that asks a lot of questions while evoking a lot of emotions.

If you were writing this today, what would you do differently? What are the story’s weaknesses, and how would you change them?

If I were writing this today, I would have to tell the story of junk after this period. This was published before the World Trade Organization agreements and China’s entry onto the manufacturing scene. It misses the big story of junk which was lurking just around the corner, more so than the nostalgia. I also think that one of the things that made that story so timely is that it hit at the dawn of eBay, a moment in North American cultural identity when suddenly the contents of every attic were available easily online. What was a lifelong quest became instantaneous gratification. In the past, you might spend ten years poking your head into second-hand bookstores searching for that one particular edition of a book you loved in first grade. Now it’s ten seconds.

What inspired this story? How did it take shape? Where was it initially published?

This was originally published in
Science Fiction Age,
now sadly departed. Scott Edelman was the editor, and he had already hired me to write columns for him—a proto-blog about what was cool on the web—six times a year. That was back when they thought you could actually tell people about the web in print media. Scott had three amazing things going for him. First, he was sweet and nice to write for, and really responsive. Second, he was
fast.
Most editors in those days turned manuscripts around in the three hundred to five hundred a day range. If you’d written a manuscript that warranted a second or third read, it could take forever to hear back—the curse of being nearly good enough. Scott was good about turning it around more or less overnight, maybe in four or five days . . . and that from Canada! Last, Scott also paid
really
well—ten cents per word when most markets were paying four.

As for the inspiration, at the time I was living in this wonderful warehouse with two thousand square feet and a loft—an illegal rental, filled with a very bohemian community of artists and technological people. One of the things about all that space is that I was able to slowly fill it with all this junk I found at yard sales and things. I’d worked for several years at a great science fiction store called Bakka, and learned from the guy who lived in the apartment upstairs and worked as a picker. On slow days he would come down and spread out his finds for the day on the counter to show us.

Where were you in your life when you published this piece, and what kind of impact did it have?

I had always wanted to be a writer, and started selling to semi-pro markets when I was seventeen. Then I went to Clarion and hit a drought—I had about five years when I couldn’t write anything. I’d gone from having some promising sales as a teenager to nothing, and was about to give up, when suddenly Scott and Gardner Dozois each bought a story within two weeks. Although it didn’t change the world, “Craphound” was very well regarded, and it really set me back on my feet and got me writing again, recovered my confidence. A couple of years later I won the John W. Campbell Award. John Scalzi (another Campbell winner, who follows these things more than I do) says I’m the last one to win based on short stories rather than novels.

How has your writing changed over the years, both stylistically and in terms of your writing process?

My process is a lot less dependent on inspiration now. Inspiration is a shitty way to write. If you spend your life waiting for it while wanting to write for a living, you’ll be a miserable bastard. Writing is something I do every day, a thousand words whether I feel like it or not. That’s a much more sane approach. I think writers who rely on inspiration aren’t very happy—the thing that makes their identity isn’t in their control. I can’t imagine a worse situation.

Style-wise, my plotting has really improved. That’s something a lot of people said about my last book,
Little Brother.
My approach to plotting is: things always get worse. That gives you a reason to turn the page. The protagonist is reasonable and intelligent and trying to solve the problems, and it just keeps falling apart. It’s a slow-motion car wreck.

What advice do you have for aspiring authors?

I’ve written this column more than once! Write a set amount every day. Finish what you write. Eschew ceremony, and don’t get into habits—such as only writing when the children are asleep, or with a certain type of music playing— because you probably don’t have control over them all the time. Don’t let those external circumstances control you. Turn off your IM, or any real-time communications. Leave a little bit hanging at the end of every day: leave off in the middle of a sentence so that you’ve got a little bit to start you the next day, even if it’s just the first five words.

Any anecdotes regarding the story or your experiences as a fledgling writer?

The thing that I remember most about being a new writer was the extent to which every tiny little victory was hoarded so carefully. If I got a positive review in a tiny zine, that was cause for celebration. That was something that went away after a little while. There comes a point where they stop being special in the same way. The first time your baby speaks, it’s exciting. The millionth time, it might be annoying. (For the record, my daughter hasn’t spoken yet.)

The advice I have for a lot of writers is: You may discover that success in writing isn’t nearly as nice as you hope it would be. SF writers aren’t widely regarded as important people. You might labor for 10 years as I did to make your first pro sale, and then after a few weeks, nobody cares anymore. I used to go to the bookstore and buy three copies of each magazine I was published in, hoping somebody would ask why, so I could say, “I have a story in it.” But on the flip side, every now and again you discover a fan when you don’t expect them. Once, when I was raising capital for a technology startup, it seemed like every venture capitalist I encountered was more impressed by my SF sales than my business plan...