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.
After finishing Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I was surprised
to find that botherment and uncertainty had vanished into satisfaction.
Somehow this loose-jointed, wandering, ramshackle compendium of casual
weirdness (perfectly expressed in the title) produces the kind of intimacy –
even authenticity – more often associated with a personal journal, a blog,
even autobiography. Yes, the mountain’s son will have to confront sheer
Evil, but he also struggles with the complexities of friendship,
outsiderhood, progressive ideals, and the awkward hinterland between sex and
love.
Beneath all the tech, cultural references, and imaginative indulgence, Wired correspondent Doctorow’s geek fantasy portrays a misfit’s struggle to connect with the people around him. An ex-shopkeeper courts a reluctant-angel babe next door and helps deploy a grassroots Wi-Fi network, all while he struggles with his impossible family (his mom is a washing machine, and his little brother, Davey, is a murderous corpse).
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There are at least a half-dozen passages sharp and stylish and apropos enough that it’ll be all you can do to keep from forcing them on friends, acquaintances, even strangers. The tone of the book has the strange off-kilter sensuality of, say, Jonathan Carroll, but more engaging, less foreboding, not as scary. It’s Doctorow’s third published novel. I enjoyed the first two; I love this one.
Now of course rules, where they apply are meant to be broken, and you may do so with impunity, if you know them well enough. Cory Doctorow clearly knows the rules. Cory Doctorow must in fact be a freaking dictionary of the rules, because in ‘Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town’ he breaks them with such breathtaking skill that the enchanted readers of this fine novel will never be the wiser. Doctorow strings together wonderfully witty words into pithy sentences that have no right making as much sense as they do. He brings a powerful but lighthearted magic to a world we very much hope resembles the real world. ‘Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town’ evades every expectation you might reasonably attempt to apply to it with one exception: expect to enjoy this novel immensely.
Middle-aged entrepreneur Alan, for whom mother is a washing machine and father is a mountain, has moved into one of Toronto’s more interesting neighborhoods. The brother Alan and his other brothers killed years ago has returned to hound the family, and those other brothers, who are nesting dolls, show up on Alan’s doorstep starving because the innermost brother has vanished. A next-door neighbor has wings that her boyfriend cuts back regularly so she can pass for normal. In the midst of such ordinary oddness, getting involved in a scheme to provide free wireless Internet to the neighborhood and eventually the city seems reasonable, even when it’s masterminded by a crusty punk whose gear comes from Dumpster diving. Eventually, Alan concludes that he must go back to the mountain, a home he hasn’t visited in years. The combination of Alan facing up to his family and their strangeness, the damage his dead brother will do to everything Alan cares about, and Doctorow’s inescapable technological enthusiasm eventuates in a lovely, satisfying tale.
