Copyright (C) 1998 by Cory Doctorow
Craphound
Cory Doctorow
From "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," a short story collection published inSeptember, 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows Press (ISBN 1568582862). Seehttp://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
"Like most aliens-mingling-with-human-society stories, Doctorow's story servesmostly to hold a mirror up to human nature, but the odd corner of human natureit examines is fascinating, and the story is smoothly and expertly written, withsome good detail and local color and some shrewd insights into human nature andhuman culture, and an almost Bradburian vein of rich nostalgia running throughit (although the nostalgia is quirky enough that perhaps it might more usefullybe 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 supr