My publisher, Four Walls Eight Windows, deserves some credit here. John Oakes (the founder and head honcho) really believes in this book and always has a kind word for it. What’s more, he’s put me in good company: 4W8W publishes Octavia Butler, Kathe Koja, Paul DiFillipo, Rudy Rucker, Abbie Hoffman, Pat Cadigan, and a whole raft of talented, wonderful writers. Literary boutique presses like 4W8W are of the things that give me hope for publishing.
All About:
A Place So Foreign and Eight More
Here are the stories in this book:
- The Kingdom of Magic Junk, by Bruce Sterling
- Craphound
- A Place So Foreign
- All Day Sucker [Not online]
- To Market, To Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey [Not online]
- Return to Pleasure Island
- Shadow of the Mothaship
- Home Again, Home Again
- The Super Man and the Bugout
- 0wnz0red [Hosted on Salon.com]
0wnz0red is one of the best-known stories in this book, but it’s not available on this site. That’s because the story was originally published on Salon, and it’s still available there. Enjoy!
By the way, this story has made the preliminary 2003 Nebula ballot. That means that it will be presented to the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America as a candidate for the final award ballot. Cross your fingers!
One of the things that pleases me most about this book is the killer intro Bruce Sterling wrote for me. You can read it here.
There has been a chunk of science fiction influenced by Silicon Valley, but “0wnz0red” captures the disturbed inner world of the technically sociopathic. For years now I’ve been searching for a work of science fiction that could only have been written in the 21st century. “0wnz0red” has broken through. This story is fully realized, and it is sarcastic, abrasive, and mind-boggling in a truly novel way. Like Beat writing in its early period, “0wnz0red” has the dual virtues of being both really offensive and genuinely hard for normal people to understand. This work is therefore truly advanced. It deserves an epithet all its own: “Doctorovian.” We should all hope and trust that our culture has the guts and moxie to follow this guy. He’s got a lot to tell us.
Originally published in On Spec, Fall 2001
“It is certainly worth noting that the story in this issue which flagrantly violates the length limit, Cory Doctorow’s ‘The Super Man and the Bugout,’ at close to 10,000 words, is also by far the best story… The story is both very funny, and a portrayal of a quite believable non-human human being.”
– Rich Horton,
Tangent Online
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Originally Published in Tesseracts 8 (Tesseract Press, 1999)
“‘Home Again, Home Again,’ is at once intimate and spectacular.”
– Farren Miller
Locus Magazine
Issue 512, Vol 51, No 3
Sept 2003
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Originally Published in Amazing Stories, Winter 2000
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Originally Published in Realms of Fantasy August 1999
“By design or default, something about this story (and I can’t describe exactly what because I don’t know) disturbed me a great deal, though it’s a well-written and unique take on an old tale. Others may find it more palatable. If Doctorow’s intent was to unsettle, he succeeded…”
– J. G. Stinson,
Tangent Online
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Originally Published in Science Fiction Age, January 2000
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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 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).”
– Gardner Dozois
Editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
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