Last weekend’s San Diego Union-Tribune carried a wonderful review of my next novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town,, which comes out on July 1 from Tor Books.

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.

While I’m on the subect, check out the starred Publishers Weekly review (scroll down on the page) — holy smokes!

Starred Review. It’s only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow’s fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he’s the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately to behave like a human being—or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist’s plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead brother who’s now resurrected and bent on revenge. Life gets even more chaotic after he becomes the lover and protector of the girl next door, whom he tries to restrain from periodically cutting off her wings. Doctorow (Eastern Standard Tribe) treats these and other bizarre images and themes with deadpan wit. In this inventive parable about tolerance and acceptance, he demonstrates how memorably the outrageous and the everyday can coexist.

This book was originally scheduled for May 1, but my publisher pushed it back to July so that it could be used to launch a brand-new Tor/Sci-Fi Channel co-promotion deal, whereby one book a month will be chosen by the Sci-Fi Channel as a “Sci-Fi Essential” to be promoted through their media. They specifically asked for my next book to launch this, and who was I to say no?

GreatWriting.co.uk has published part two of a recent interview with me (part one was published last month). The Great Writing folks were fun to talk to and they’ve done a great job with the interview write-up.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but for me novel writing is very incremental, like building a pyramid one brick at a time. Every morning I get up and I spend half an hour writing 250 words on the novel and a year later I have a book. Whereas short stories, by and large I tend to write them in bursts and oftentimes at writing retreats where I’ll go away for a while and really nail up a short story.

They’re also really different kinds of creative processes. Novel writing I think gets me closer to the bone because my subconscious churns for 24 hours on what’s going to go on the next page. Whereas with short stories I think you run out of subconscious and you start to move into deliberate craft. If you try and barf one out onto a page in the course of one or two days or a week it really is more about a premeditated ‘here is what the narrative art looks like, here are ten things that could go next, and here’s the best one and I’ll write that now’.

With novel writing I tend to know generally speaking where I want a theme to go, I know where I want a section of a book to go and I know overall where I want the book to go, but in terms of it’s emotional effect, not the actual action on the page. There are some tricks of the trade for making that happen, especially if you’re going to work impressionistically and one little bit at a time. The three things that great writing teachers have taught me:

I’m giving a talk in Oslo, Norway next Monday night — hope to see you there!

The Norwegian Polytechnic Society invites you to a discussion with Cory Doctorow, themed “The Economics of Openness”

Time: May 9th from 7pm to 8:30pm, with informal discussions following.

Place: The conference hall, Norwegian School of Management’s Center for Management Education (at the old Marine College, Ekeberg – map reference), Karlsborgveien 4, Oslo. (Parking is available, or you can take the Ljabru tram line (about 10 minutes) from the center of Oslo.)

Open standards and access to information are not just about about teenagers downloading MP3 files. Historically, openness – in the widest sense of the word – has been an important contributor to economic success: Open societies experience faster economic growth and political stability than closed ones. Despite this, we see a trend today where public and private actors work to limit access to information, using both technical and legislative means.

(Norwegian Link)

Rick Kleffel — who wears many hats, including NPR personality and freelance writer — has posted a long, flattering review of my next novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town to his website, The Agony Column.

There are no rules in fiction. You can write about whatever you want. That said, there are many rules with regards to writing. And while you can write about whatever you want in whatever way you so desire, the rules that apply to writing are there for a reason. They make it easier for the writer to communicate with the reader. 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.

Best known for cyberpunk and science fiction, in ‘Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town’, Cory Doctorow offers readers something familiar and something fantastic. Alan is a middle-aged man who moves into a new house in a funky, artsy neighborhood in Toronto. Next door, he has a house full of twenty-something art-punks. When Mimi, the Rubens-esque girl he takes fancy to reveals to him that she has wings, he handles the revelation with aplomb. After all, his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. One of his brothers is an island, and another is a living set of three Russian nesting dolls. Two of them have just showed up on his doorstep, afraid that Davey, an unstable brother Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, has returned from the dead to continue terrorizing his family.

Doctorow handles the fantasy here so matter-of-factly, his writing verges on being hard-boiled. Neither he nor his characters dwell on the weirdness that comprises their lives. In fact, for all his fantastic (though not supernatural-seeming) woes, once Alan meets Kurt, the neighborhood technopunk, he joins Kurt in a scheme to set up wireless Internet coverage for most of downtown Toronto. Entrepreneurs, the telephone company, street kids and stranger things still scheme and stalk one another on the not-so-gritty streets of a bohemian college town.

Next Sunday, May 1, I’ll be participating in a group book-signing in Chicago, following on from the Nebula Awards banquet the night before. Other signers include Kevin J. Anderson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Eric Flint, Janis Ian, Geoffrey Landis, Todd McCaffrey, Jack McDevitt, Rebecca Moesta Anderson, Mike Resnick, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Steven H Silver, Laurel Winter and W.R. Yates. Hope to see you there!

When: Sunday, May 1, 11AM-1PM

Where: Borders, 150 North State Street, Chicago, IL (312.606.0750)

Last week at the Computers, Freedom and Privacy conference, Chris Pirillo caught up with me and recorded this hour-long podcast that covers how I ended up at EFF, what I do there, why I write, and so forth.

I did an interview last month with James Schellenberg from Strange Horizons, on the kind of music I listen to while writing, as part of a piece on SF writers’ listening habits. I hand-rate all my music and use iTunes’s last-played feature to put together a rolling playlist of high-ranked music I haven’t heard in 30 days or more, so I get to hear all my fave music (at least) once a month.

Other respondents included Orson Scott Card, Suzy McKee Charnas, Nalo Hopkinson, James Patrick Kelly, Rudy Rucker, Peter Watts, and many others.