A Place So Foreign and Eight More

/ / Novels

This is not technically a novel, but rather a collection of my short fiction. This book won the 2004 Starbust Award for Best Canadian Science Fiction Book, and sports a kick-ass introduction by cyperpunk legend Bruce Sterling. Many of the stories in this have won or been nominated for prestigious awards, including the Nebula and Sturgeon awards.

Six of the nine stories are available as a free download in a multitude of formats, as well as a physical object at bookstores everywhere.

Audio edition courtesy of Podiobooks.

Review:

SFSite

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is a short novel, only just clocking up two hundred pages. This is an entirely welcome thing at a time when twice that length seems to have become a bare minimum. It’s quick and snappy, pared of all flab. It is not, though it has often been called it, a fun book. This perception is probably due to Doctorow’s sprightly, bantering style. The story itself however is concerned with betrayal and mental breakdown. In this, Paul Di Filippo is right on the money when he identifies Doctorow as being aligned with the axis of serious jocularity (he could also have been describing himself.)

Martin Lewis,
SFSite

NIMBY and the D-Hoppers

/ / Stories

Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine

The Infinite Matrix, July 2008

Podcast:
Part One,
Part Two,
Part Three

Year’s Best Science Fiction 9 (edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer)

Solaris Magazine (French Translation by Elisabeth Vonarburg), 2004

Sci Fi World (Chinese translation), September 2004

ESLI Magazine (Russian translation), 2005

Bli-Panika (Hebrew translation), 2005

Italian Translation, 2006, by Giovanni Ella

This one literally came to me in a dream: I woke up one morning, shortly after moving to San Francisco, with this whole story in my head. I wrote it over the next two weeks, and, what, three years later?, Asimov’s finally published it!

This story has also been translated into French by Elisabeth Vonarburg, for the Quebecois magazine Solaris in 2004. You can download it from here under a Creative Commons license.

In 2005, the Russian SF magazine ESLI reprinted this magazine in Russian translation. Download it here under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s a 1.7MB Tarball of this story in Chinese, with illustrations, taken from the September 2004 ish of Sci Fi World magazine. It’s offered under a liberal Creative Commons license — enjoy!
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NASA on Down and Out

/ / Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom, News

NASA’s astrobiology magazine has a good, in-depth review of the book in the current ish.

In his modernization of wearing your karma on your sleeve, society is governed by reputation and actions. This is not so much an ideal world, as a practical one which keeps considerable adventure and moves in anything but boring ways. ‘The whole point ..was to be more reputable than the next ad-hoc, to succeed on merit, not trickery, despite assassinations and the like.’

Therein lies Doctorow’s thesis: an internet-saavy version of personal capital, particularly one’s success rating with friends and neighbors. Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom coins this all-encompassing and frequently updated reputation rating, one’s Whuffie.

While friends’ opinions may matter most in getting good Whuffie, a weighted score also makes room for those both likely– and unlikely– to be compatible. This version resembles a counterpoint system, and is called left-handed Whuffie: respect garnered from people who share very few of your own opinions. This is not a world of sycophants who seek mutual admiration. The future apparently holds true to both majority power, and also minority empowerment.

Review:

Austin Chronicle

Cory Doctorow meshes all of these outlandish ideas into a novel of power and skill. His story is told on many levels, with a surprising complexity and the perfect touch of humor. Like all good science fiction, Doctorow tackles the issues of today, tomorrow. Morality, cloning, socialism, poverty, right to die, freedom of choice, pratfalls of hubris, and the cult of celebrity are all explored in what may be the best debut science-fiction novel since Neuromancer.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is not for everyone. If you prefer your literature linear or your ideas staid, then give this one a pass. Using the tropes of the genre to blaze a new path, it showcases the talents and skills that popular literature needs to survive and thrive in the 21st century.

Rick Whitten-Klaw,
Austin Chronicle