Asimov’s

This is one of three stories I’ve sold about the time I spent volunteering on sustainable development projects in Costa Rica with an organisation called Youth Challenge International.

The village I lived in, Caño Rito de San Jorge de Upala, was about 40km from the nearest road, generator, water-pump, and telephone. Our lone technology was a shortwave radio with a solar-charger that only worked for about an hour a day.

Strangely enough, I loved it. Me, Mr. Technocrat, having the time of my life digging latrines and mixing concrete with shovels, making gravel by smashing volcanic boulders with hammers.

Ever since, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of returning with a solar-powered laptop/sat uplink rig, living in the middle of the jungle, technologically plugged in without living technologically.
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Science-Fiction Age

This story appears in my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and is licensed for downloading under a Creative Commons license. Download it here

When I sold this, it was the longest story I’ve ever sold, at 18,000 words. By a very happy coincidence, I sold it to the highest-paying market in the business.

I owe much about this story to the Great Brain books of John D. Fitzgerald. This autobiographical children’s series captured my imagination when I was a boy, and I find myself returning to them again and again.
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Amazing Stories 599

This story appears in my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and is licensed for downloading under a Creative Commons license. Download it here

Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

I wrote this strange, stylised Scientology/Alien-Invasion/Oedipus story at a Gypsicon, the writers’ workshop that gave rise to Craphound and Visit the Sins.

Now, you’re not supposed to play favorites, but, just between you and me, this is one of my all-time favorite stories. I loved writing it, and I’m delighted to see it heading for print.
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Tesseracts 8, Tesseract Press

This story appears in my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and is licensed for downloading under a Creative Commons license. Download it here

Podcast: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

This story is a sequel, of sorts, to Shadow of the Mothaship, which Kim Mohan published in Amazing Stories.

I got the idea for this while snorkeling in the Bay of Pigs, on the south coast of Cuba. I’d just gotten out of the water and picked up E.L. Doctorow’s brilliant Book of Daniel, when the entire story smacked me between the eyes. Once I returned, I sweated blood for a month, cranking out the 10,000 words — I had this tremendous vision of the effect I was trying to capture, but implementing it was trickier than it appeared. I finished it on a Sunday afternoon, read it through twice, and decided it was the best thing I’d ever written. I’ve just re-read it, prepatory to emailing the manuscript to Tesseract Books, and I still think it’s brilliant.
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On Spec

Like Craphound, Visit the Sins and Shadow of the Mothaship, I wrote this story at Gipsycon, the post-Clarion summer workshop I attend every year. There’s another Clarion connection: the title for this story was conceived of while at the Clarion 30th anniversary reunion, as I sat in the Owen Hall courtyard with a gang of other Clarion grads and talked about the memories the place brought back, discussing the possibility that we were being bombarded with “recollectons,” the fundamental units of memory.
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Asimov’s
Year’s Best Science Fiction 5, HarperPrism 2000, David G. Hartwell, Ed.

This story, which I sold today, October 26, 1998, completes my Asimov’s hat-trick: three stories to Asimov’s in just over a year.

I wrote this while at Gipsicon ’98, a writers’ retreat founded by my Clarion classmate, Janis O’Connor. We meet in a different city every summer, in a rented University dorm or schoolhouse, and write and critique our heads off. I heartily recommend this experience: I write my best stuff during that week (I wrote Craphound at Gipsicon ’97).

This story was written in a blind panic, terror inspired by a heinous writer’s block that had me chewing my toes at the prospect of not finishing a story while at the workshop. So I did what I always do when I feel blocked: I went and saw a bunch of bad movies, which bored me to the point where I could write again — about boredom.

A note for my folks: although this has parallels to my family — my grandfather just went into a home — this is by no means an indictment of my family, who are wonderful people.

You can read the whole story online at Strange Horizons.
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Asimov’s

Gardner Dozois was the first editor I ever sent anything to, in 1987, at the tender age of 16, a story called “Birdblood.” Over the following decade, Gardner saw virtually everything I wrote — and rejected it all.

In August, 1997, I went out to my mailbox and extracted a SASE with “Grace, Asimov’s” scrawled on the back in my hand. “Damn,” I thought, “another reject. Wonder if Van Gelder will buy it?”

Standing in the driveway, I opened the envelope. I read the letter. The first three paragraphs told me why he didn’t think he should buy it — not really sf, in a nutshell. The last one said that he was buying it anyway.

I freaked. There’s no other word for it. I whooped and did a barefoot dance in the driveway of the factory that I live in, then ran down the hall, screaming like an idiot. I burst in on my neighbours, who were entertaining a new client, and screamed and screamed and screamed. Eventually, I managed to let them know what had transpired, and they congratulated me roundly and offered me a beer. Then I called everyone I knew and screamed.

That was a great day.

A month later, Gardner bought another one, “At Lightspeed, Slowing, another story set in Costa Rica, where I spent a lot of time in 1993 as a volunteer on a Youth Challenge International project.

When the October/November double-ish of Asimov’s arrived in my mailbox, I whooped all over again, rubbbed my contrib copies all over my body, and then signed one, “To Cory, You Big Stud, You Rock!”
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Odyssey

The characters in this one originated in “The Adventures of Ma N Pa Frigidaire“, and I’m thrilled to see them finally making their way into print. Normally, I don’t write more than one story in a given world or about a given character, but Dometown and its residents are stuck in my brain, and I think you’ll be seeing more of them.
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Tesseracts 7, Tesseract Books

This is the culmination of what I call my “Jesus period,” in which a nice Jewish boy like me wrote story after story about Jesus. Most of ’em frankly stank. This one didn’t. It’s not just the experimental style (which I first encountered when we workshopped Jeff Vandermeer’s “At the Crossroads, Burying the Dog,” at Clarion 92), it’s the feeling. I think that this is the creepiest story I’ve ever written — the closest I’ve ever come to horror.
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Science-Fiction Age
Year’s Best Science Fiction XVI, Griffin, 1999
Northern Suns, Tor, 1999

Podcast, Escape Pod, January 2006

Podcast, Literal Systems, July 2008

Podcast, Roy Trumbull, September 2008

Finalist, Aurora Award for Best Short Form Work in English, 1999.
Finalist, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Short Story of 1999.

This story appears in my short story collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More and is licensed for downloading under a Creative Commons license. Download it here

German translation (Christian Spließ)

Everything in this story (except the part about the alien) really happened. I love thrifting, I love yard-saling, I love junk. I moved into a huge warehouse space in Toronto nearly three years ago, and I’ve been steadily filling it ever since. There’s the wall of Sputnik clocks, the tiki bar, the 15′ high library, the deck, the chinoise figurines, the Disneyland board games, and so on ad nauseum.

This was my first professionally published story (though it was my second sale — Gardner Dozois bought “Fall From Grace” a month earlier, but took eight months longer to publish it, and the response has been overwhelming. David Hartwell and Glenn Grant have bought a revised version for reprint in Northern Suns, the sequel to Northern Stars, a hardcover antho of the best of Canadian sf.

A short-story crossed the transom recently that did a gret job of capturing the ever-shifting dynamics of of thrifting — the hunt (fruitless and otherwise), competition, karma issues, value relative to the marketplace or sentiment, the past lives/memories of used goods. The tale in in a science fiction mag, but it read like my actual life! Track it down an dig it. “Craphound” by Cory Doctorow, published in the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age.

Al Hoff, Thrift Score Magazine #12

One of the short stories published in this issue proves my point. Hidden recently amongst the many hundreds of short stories that pour in each month was “Craphound,” Cory Doctorow’s tale of a decidedly different alien contact. “Craphound” is Doctorow’s first professionally published short story. In answer to the folks who think that editing is simple — “just read the submissions from the big names,” they sometimes say — it’s finding the stories from folks at the beginning of their careers that is the most important and most rewarding. With those evil book publishers stealing short story writers and forcing them into highpaying careers as novelists, the science fiction magazines will always depend on those just starting out.

Scott Edelman, Editorial, Science Fiction Age, March 1998

The two best stories in the March SF Age, in my opinion, were Cory Doctorow’s “Craphound” and Robert Silverberg’s “The Colonel in Autumn.” 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); one of the more accomplished performances so far this year.’

Gardner Dozois, on GEnie

Aliens have once again decided to visit Earth in this lighthearted romp. Rather than having conquest on their minds, they merely wish to visit, and explore. Jerry is a junk dealer, a collector, a pack rat of crap and antiques and memorabilia, depending on your point of view. He knows what to look for and how to resell it for a profit. He befriends one of the visiting aliens, who he has named “Craphound,” and they become great pals as they visit flea markets, auctions, and garage sales, always in search of the oddment or bauble only the keen eye of the true collector can spot. Through good times and bad, we learn the inner workings of the collecting business, including the unwritten moral code of the collector toward his brethren. The real lesson is learned, however, from the amiable and wiser-than-he-seems Craphound just as the aliens decide to take their leave of Earth, that the true worth of something is not judged by its dollar value. “Craphound” is a pleasant, likable, satisfying story. It is a nice professional debut for Cory Doctorow and kudos to editor Scott Edelman for rescuing it from his slush pile.

Dave Truesdale, SF Site

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