Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
Last night I finished reading Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow. I had gone into Pulp Fiction last week to grab Little Brother but they had sold out so I thought I’d get an idea of Doctorow’s style in this book. (Actually if I had been so inclined, I could have just downloaded the book from his website for free as he seems to release all his books this way)
With this book I was expecting a fairly straightforward urban tech novel maybe similar to what William Gibson has been writing lately which is just a totally wrong assumption. Doctorow’s style in this novel is possibly more of an experimental partial post-modern deconstruction or something. Or maybe it’s allegorical, I don’t know. The book has a fairly straightforward plot if your exclude the main character. It’s about a share house and a neighbourhood wireless mesh starting up. Then this weird main character is dropped into it who seems to have stepped out of a badly remembered dream. As the story progresses, even more weirdness is revealed. But somehow the story is really compelling and I had to keep reading just to see if any of it was going to be explained. I was pretty happy with the ending and might have enjoyed the book more had I known beforehand that it was going to be pretty weird.
[tags]science fiction, cory doctorow, books[/tags]
Hi Matthew, I’m enjoying your blog.
I greatly enjoy Cory Doctorow’s short stories – I especially enjoy him reading them. He has podcasted most of his better short stories, and they are available free off his blog/podcast site as well. http://craphound.com/
There is something really nice about hearing Cory read his stories, beyond just hearing how the author would pronounce certain words and names and inflect certain phrases. I’ve seen one commenter describe it as bed-time stories for grown ups, though I tended to listen to his stories on the tram.
I highly recommend his short stories, especially ‘Print Crime’ and ‘I, Robot’. And ‘I, Row-boat’ was a scream too. If you get how weird his stories can be, you’ll appreciate his work more and more. And it helps to appreciate where he is coming from politically, especially with things such as digital rights etc.
Thanks for the recommendation Mark, I listen to podcasts in the car on the way to work so I should work some of these into the schedule. I listen to Escape Pod for short science fiction podcasts which are usually pretty good.