Doctorow is one of sci-fi’s most exciting young writers, and one of the few with a genuine sense of humor. This is, even by his own bizarre standards, his oddest work yet — an absurd, cartoonish fantasy about a man whose father is a mountain, whose mother is a washing machine, and whose brother is a set of Russian nesting dolls. It all takes place in Toronto, where our hero finds love — and discovers a passion for installing wireless Internet connections.
The latest novel by this Nebula-award nominee is every bit as strange as it sounds, but considerably more powerful than you might guess. The tone swings wildly from farce to technological exposition to horror. There are even two touching love stories, one of which Alan experiences as a child, and one as an adult. The surprises arrive at the rate of one every couple of pages.
When I lived in San Francisco, I was just down the street from the amazing Borderlands Books, who would take orders for my books with inscriptions. I’d stop in a couple times a week and sign the special orders and they’d ship ’em out. Since moving to London, though, this deal has been a little harder to pull off — a 9,000 mile commute to the shop makes this not very practical.
However, I’ve got the next-best thing: a bookstore in Canada and a store in the UK that are taking special orders for my books with signature and inscription requests, who will ship them out once they’re signed. I’m doing the Toronto signing on July 11 and I’ll be meeting up with the UK seller in late July. Place your orders before then if you want signed copies!
Canadian Store
I’m doing a book-launch at Toronto’s BakkaPhoenix on July 11, and the good folks there have graciously agreed to take orders for signed and inscribed copies of any or all of my books. Simply contact them before the 11th of July with your order and I’ll sign it when I swing by the store — they’ll ship out the signed articles shortly thereafter.
Here are the shipping rates:
All shipping rates in $CDN and do not include the cost of the books:
Canada: 1 book $8, 2 books $10, 3 books $12
USA: 1 book $10, 2 books $13, 3 books $15
UK/Europe: 1 book $16, 2 books $21, 3 books $25
Australia: 1 book $22, 2 books $28, 3 books $30.
For larger orders, or destinations not listed, please email them directly.
Here’s all the contact info:
BakkaPhoenix Books
697 Queen St West
Toronto ON
Canada M6J 1E5
inquiries@bakkaphoenixbooks.com
+1.416.963.9993
UK Store
For Europeans — or those who are too late to order with Bakka — your best bet is Iain Emsley’s Aust Gate, in Oxford. Ian’s offering free second-class shipping in the UK, and very reasonable rates to the rest of the world:
UK – First class: £2.00
Europe – Printed Matter Air: £3.00
Rest of the World – Printed Matter Air: £4.00
The Aust Gate
13 Yew Close
Greater Leys,
Oxford OX4 7UX
United Kingdom
+44(0)1865 787948
orders@austgate.co.uk
This book dazzles by walking a dangerous high tightrope pulled taut between the widely separated poles of the story. The fairy-tale childhood, with its startling yet archetypically resonant improbabilities, has to consort with the hacker realities of the Kurt-based story, which in itself is not overtly unlikely, but still slightly gonzo. But, like the best mashup tunes, Doctorow’s narrative wedges the most consensually disparate elements together into a brilliant whole.
What probably carries the whole project is Doctorow’s deft, deep depiction of his characters. I have to say that he’s never done a better job of limning real people. However weird they are, they are certainly not cardboard or one-dimensional. They all contain the essential pressure points, drives, caprices and emotions that power the folks we encounter every day. Damaged yet striving to survive and do good, Alan and his cohorts demand that we empathize with their human foibles. This essential believability pulls us in, easing our acceptance of any grotesqueries.
The Sci Fi Channel has a stupendous print and web-presence, with net resources like the Sci Fi Wire and Sci Fiction.
That’s why it was such an honor to have my novel chosen to launch the SciFi Channel’s new book club, Sci Fi Essentials. SciFi specifically asked for my book to lead the program with, and we delayed it from March to July to line up with the program’s launch. Sci Fi will be promoting the book across its media properties, including the Web site and the magazine.
Thanks, Sci Fi — and welcome new readers!
Dorothea Salo, of textartisan.com, did the conversion of my first novel to html, converting an ASCII text file into something well-formed, with great typography and easy-to-hack semantics in the stylesheet.
Dorothea graced me with her skills again, producing the stupendous HTML verion of the book, producing something that is, again, standards-compliant, pretty to look at, and easy to mod.
Thank you, Dorothea.
To read Doctorow is to love Doctorow…every story he writes is practically guaranteed to be witty, irreverent, challenging, and completely outrageous. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is no different: It’s classic Cory.
I’m going to do an in-game signing and talk this July in Second Life, the massively mutiplayer online world (I did this before, for Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and it was really fun!).
To commemorate the event, Second Life’s Wagner James Au is coordinating an in-game contest to design a virtual book based on the text of the novel, a digital 3D object wiht turn-able pages, etc. I really hope that what they end up building is more than a simple 3D version of a meatspace book, though: electronic text is so much more protean than printed words, so it would be a shame to constrain it to behaving the way that dumb matter does.
…[F]or the next couple months, in preparation for Cory’s appearance, Residents will be creating book prototypes, and submitting them to me for an in-world expo, so the community can choose which one provides the best in-world reading experience. Within 48 hours of the announcement, one Resident had already submitted a screenshot of his own prototype (bottom screenshot), which sharp-eyed readers will recognize as the opening page to Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the novel he discussed with Residents at the first Book Club. The one to win the most votes at the Expo will get the honor of publishing Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town in Second Life. (Though of course, my personal hope is that this also helps launch a mini-explosion of virtual book technology in-world.)
Have you found a typo, continuity problem or factual error in my book? Good! Here’s a wiki (a community-editable webpage) where we’re keeping track of errata. I’ll fix any errors I can in the electronic editions (though just in the canonical PDF, text and html versions, I have no way of editing the user-submitted versions). When the next edition of the treeware version of the book comes out, I’ll see to it that all the errata are collected there, too!
Cory Doctorow’s third novel blends ordinary technology, nerdista tech, myth,
horror, sheer astonishing silliness, and the Aspergerish quest of the
outsider into a demented non-stop juggling act that struck me as the
1950-ish Absurdism of Eugene Ionesco and Boris Vian melted into the
heart-touching whimsy of Jonathan Carroll and Jonathan Lethem, then steeped
in the crazed fractured realities of the Goon Show. Perhaps US readers are
unfamiliar with the Goons, a BBC radio series from the 1950s (Spike
Milligan, Peter Sellers) that crunched its way through genres and grotesque
voices the way Monty Python tried to do a decade later.
