Cory Doctorow - A place so foreign and eight more stories

The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Place so Foreign, by Cory Doctorow

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Title: A Place so Foreign

Author: Cory Doctorow

Release Date: September 19, 2005 [eBook #16721]

Language: English

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PLACE SO FOREIGN***

Copyright (C) 2000 by Corey Doctorow

A Place So Foreign

Cory Doctorow

From "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," a short story collection published inSeptember, 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows Press (ISBN 1568582862). Seehttp://craphound.com/place for more.

Originally Published in Science Fiction Age, January 2000

Blurbs and quotes:

* Cory Doctorow straps on his miner's helmet and takes you deep into the caverns and underground rivers of Pop Culture, here filtered through SF-coloured glasses. Enjoy.

- Neil Gaiman
Author of American Gods and Sandman

* Few writers boggle my sense of reality as much as Cory Doctorow. His vision
is so far out there, you'll need your GPS to find your way back.

- David Marusek
Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Award, Nebula Award nominee

* Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy,
entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of
the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find.

- Gardner Dozois
Editor, Asimov's SF

* He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science
fiction needs Cory Doctorow!

- Bruce Sterling
Author of The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction

* Cory Doctorow strafes the senses with a geekspeedfreak explosion of gomi kings
with heart, weirdass shapeshifters from Pleasure Island and jumping automotive
jazz joints. If this is Canadian science fiction, give me more.

- Nalo Hopkinson
Author of Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring

* Cory Doctorow is the future of science fiction. An nth-generation hybrid of the best of Greg Bear, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and Groucho Marx, Doctorow composes stories that are as BPM-stuffed as techno music, as idea-rich as the latest issue of NEW SCIENTIST, and as funny as humanity's efforts to improve itself. Utopian, insightful, somehow simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, these nine tales will upgrade your basal metabolism, overwrite your cortex with new and efficient subroutines and generally improve your life to the point where you'll wonder how you ever got along with them. Really, you should need a prescription to ingest this book. Out of all the glittering crap life and our society hands us, craphound supreme Doctorow has managed to fashion some industrial-grade art."

- Paul Di Filippo
Author of The Steampunk Trilogy

* As scary as the future, and twice as funny. In this eclectic and electric
collection Doctorow strikes sparks off today to illuminate tomorrow, which is
what SF is supposed to do. And nobody does it better.

- Terry Bisson
Author of Bears Discover Fire

A note about this story

This story is from my collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," publishedby Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I'vereleased this story, along with five others, under the terms of a CreativeCommons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyrightnormally reserves for me, the creator.

I recently did the same thing with the entire text of my novel, "Down and Out inthe Magic Kingdom" (http://craphound.com/down), and it was an unmitigatedsuccess. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the book good news andthousands of people bought the book also good news. It turns out that, asnear as anyone can tell, distributing free electronic versions of books is agreat way to sell more of the paper editions, while simultaneously getting thebook into the hands of readers who would otherwise not be exposed to my work.

I still don't know how it is artists will earn a living in the age of theInternet, but I remain convinced that the way to find out is to do basicscience: that is, to do stuff and observe the outcome. That's what I'm doinghere. The thing to remember is that the very *worst* thing you can do to me asan artist is to not read my work to let it languish in obscurity anddisappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, andthis is doubly true for the short stories. Losing a couple bucks to people whowould have bought the book save for the availability of the free electronic textis no big deal, at least when compared to the horror that is being irrelevantand unread. And luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for freegets me more paying customers than it loses me.

You can find the canonical version of this file athttp://craphound.com/place/download.php

If you'd like to convert this file to some other format and distribute it, youhave my permission, provided that:

* You don't charge money for the distribution

* You keep the entire text intact, including this notice, the license below, andthe metadata at the end of the file

* You don't use a file-format that has "DRM" or "copy-protection" or any otherform of use-restriction turned on

If you'd like, you can advertise the existence of your edition by posting a linkto it at http://craphound.com/place/000013.php

Here's a summary of the license:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0

Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute,
display, and perform the work. In return, licensees must give the
original author credit.

No Derivative Works. The licensor permits others to copy,distribute, display and perform only unaltered copies of the work not derivative works based on it.

Noncommercial. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute,display, and perform the work. In return, licensees may not usethe work for commercial purposes unless they get thelicensor's permission.

And here's the license itself:

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0-legalcode

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a. "Collective Work" means a work, such as a periodical issue,anthology or encyclopedia, in which the Work in its entirety inunmodified form, along with a number of other contributions,constituting separate and independent works in themselves, areassembled into a collective whole. A work that constitutes aCollective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work (asdefined below) for the purposes of this License.

b. "Derivative Work" means a work based upon the Work or upon theWork and other pre-existing works, such as a translation, musicalarrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion pictureversion, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment,condensation, or any other form in which the Work may be recast,transformed, or adapted, except that a work that constitutes aCollective Work will not be considered a Derivative Work for thepurpose of this License.