I thought, once I got to the end of the book, I would understand what it was about. I was horribly mistaken. Cory Doctorow's latest, which is available for free download, is titled Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and it's... definitely interesting.
This twisted crack baby of a story reads like the love child of Bruce Sterling and Charles DeLint, concived in an alley behind a crack house minutes before the cops raid the place. A tale about setting up a free WiFi network gets ecapsulated with a mind-warping narrative of a man who's mother was a washing machine, and who's father was a mountain. Literally. Nesting dolls, a precognative, an island and a corpse were his brothers.
While I most certainly can't claim to understand it, I can say this: I started reading this morning, and stopped reading just now. Aside from playing with a new bit of software I tracked that appealed to my programmergeekiness and love of recursion, I've done little else today. It's bizarre, breaks all sorts of narrative conventions, and would probably make traditional literature cry. But, all that said, it's good. I don't understand it, and I quite possibly never will, but it has its own internal logic, interesting, if alien characters and was downright addictive. I will most definitely reread it again in hardcopy, thus proving Doctorow's feelings on giving away free electronic copies right- they just make you want the "real thing". Go, give it a look.
This twisted crack baby of a story reads like the love child of Bruce Sterling and Charles DeLint, concived in an alley behind a crack house minutes before the cops raid the place. A tale about setting up a free WiFi network gets ecapsulated with a mind-warping narrative of a man who's mother was a washing machine, and who's father was a mountain. Literally. Nesting dolls, a precognative, an island and a corpse were his brothers.
While I most certainly can't claim to understand it, I can say this: I started reading this morning, and stopped reading just now. Aside from playing with a new bit of software I tracked that appealed to my programmergeekiness and love of recursion, I've done little else today. It's bizarre, breaks all sorts of narrative conventions, and would probably make traditional literature cry. But, all that said, it's good. I don't understand it, and I quite possibly never will, but it has its own internal logic, interesting, if alien characters and was downright addictive. I will most definitely reread it again in hardcopy, thus proving Doctorow's feelings on giving away free electronic copies right- they just make you want the "real thing". Go, give it a look.
