Craphound
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
- Year's Best Science Fiction XVI
"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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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode
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