A Place So Foreign and 8 More
by Cory Doctorow
(Four Walls Eight Windows, $13.95, 243 pages, trade paperback; published
in October 2003.)
In 2000, Canadian expat Cory Doctorow earned the John W. Campbell Award
for  Best
New Writer on the strength of his early short fiction. A Place So
Foreign and 8 More is the post-cyberpunk iconoclast's much anticipated
first collection, and it starts with a bang.
"Craphound" is the author's signature piece. It's his most widely anthologized
story, and deservedly so. The eponymous character is an extraterrestrial
living in Ontario who collects old junk and discarded memorabilia. The
story is filled with fascinating social details, and its characters
are delightfully eccentric and vividly alive. "Craphound" is a sharply
and confidently focused tale -- with a compelling narrative voice --
that sensuously immerses the reader in its world.
Next up is "A Place So Foreign", a beautifully realised time-travel
novella set, mostly, in the town of New Jerusalem, Utah, circa 1898-1902.
It deftly combines layers of sciencefictional invention with a rewardingly
complex emotional palette.
Alas, the next four stories don't measure up to the standards of the
first two. They feel too self-satisfied, too enamoured of their own
ideas (clever though they may be), and the characters don't rise above
being vehicles to move the plots forward.
The situation improves with the book's final three stories.
Although it meanders a bit too much, "Home Again, Home Again" features
interestingly complex characters and postulates an intriguing social
situation. "0wnz0red" -- a computer-geek take on Norman Spinrad's Journals
of the Plague Years -- involves a laboratory-created benign virus.
It's not as powerful and evocative as the Spinrad novella, but it's
an entertaining read.
One of my favourite pieces in Doctorow's book is "The Super Man and
the Bugout", a political satire that reclaims the Jewish and socialist
roots of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman, a character who has
become so associated with WASPy US capitalism.
Originally published in
The Montreal Gazette, Saturday, 13 December 2003.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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