In "Craphound," visiting aliens prove to be preternaturally cunning "pickers," scavengers among Earth's discards, rummaging inexplicably though yard sales and junk stores for our cultural detritus. When a human named Jerry pairs up with the eponymous Craphound, he finds that interspecies friendship and loyalty extend only so far—when confronted with the find of the century. The title story concerns young James Nicholson, schoolboy in the year 1898. When James' dad is secretly appointed ambassador to the year 1975 by a time-travel consortium, James finds himself having to adapt to a weird era that is not by any stretch of the imagination the same 1975 the reader knows. But this adaptation is minimal compared to the shock of being dumped back into 1898, when James' dad loses his post.
"All Day Sucker" is a short-short in the form of the classic "biter bitten" riff. Once his job is stolen by an expert system downloaded into the brain of a rival employee, "the smartest man in the world" finds a unique way to get his revenge. What if the overblown world of corporate sponsorship extended to grade-school kids? This satiric premise fuels "To Market, to Market: The Re-Branding of Billy Bailey." With the role of "heel" losing market share, the title character must reposition himself as a "dissenter." But how much alternative rock can one person listen to? "Return to Pleasure Island" is told from the perspective of a golemlike creature employed by a Disney-style corporation to seduce children into a bestial slavery. But the clay creature named George finds his affection for his two brothers winning out over company loyalty. And of course, George would like to be a father as well—if he can only bring himself to sacrifice a few fingers.
The next three stories share a common background: Aliens called "bugouts" have come to Earth to test us and perhaps admit us to a galactic community. "In the Shadow of the Mothaship" concerns poor Maxes Schumacher, whose New-Agey parents have become favorites of the bugouts. Left alone, Maxes begins some serious acting out in revenge for parental neglect and general anomie. Always assuming, that is, that using one's house for a kite qualifies as bad behavior. Another kid named Chet in "Home Again, Home Again" suffers similar angst, mainly due to the outsider status of his family, and especially when trying to relate to a guidance counselor called The Amazing Robotron. But when Chet finds the secret sea belonging to a weird neighbor, life starts to look up. Finally, in "The Super Man and the Bugout," our protagonist—in all but name a dead ringer for Clark Kent—finds that being a caped crusader in a world where aliens enforce the peace is not an easy job.
The last story, "0wnz0red," delivers the tale of two Silicon Valley computer nerds, Liam and Murray, who find their lives uprooted by some major biotech. The main trouble is, the platform this revolutionary wetware needs is their bodies!
A distinctive and multifarious voice
Like fellow newcomer Ted Chiang, Cory Doctorow has burst full-blown upon the SF landscape, attracting major attention on the basis of just a handful of stories told in an immediately recognizable voice. Doctorow's first novel—a milestone Chiang has not yet achieved—further confirmed his promise.
What's particularly attractive about Doctorow's writing is the easy way it assimilates several generations of historical science fiction, filtering it through a distinctly postmodern worldview to achieve work that is at once nostalgic and forward-looking, retro and fresh. In the title story, for instance, there's an utterly old-fashioned Simakian affect to the adventures of James Nicholson, and yet Doctorow's warped take on the vagaries of time travel are as jolting as must have been those of Heinlein when he published "All You Zombies." And the surreal characters and environment of "Return to Pleasure Island" strike me as a kind of homage to R.A. Lafferty, supplemented by the Disney component that is pure Doctorow. This blending of old and new is the kind of leapfrogging off the shoulders of giants that helps our field advance.
Yet Doctorow is not afraid to venture into totally new territory. The concluding story, "0wnz0red," is a tour de force of cyberpunk-ribofunk glory. Using the metaphor of proprietary software design to explain how Darwinian evolution left us with inferior physiologies, Doctorow succeeds in uniting the digital and the biological realms, all the while delivering a breakneck secret-agent tale. If this is an example of "nerdc0re," as he labels it in his story introduction, then by all means let's have more!
Another vein prominent in Doctorow's writing is the satirical and humorous. Arising out of the same attitude that launched such giants as William Tenn and Robert Sheckley, Doctorow's fiction is super-savvy about current trends ripe for satire. Yet he manages to interject some real poetry and compassion into his black-hearted jabs, never placing himself above his subjects. And his affection for pop culture lends his stories an electrical current lacking in much SF: For instance, his handling of the "mothaship" motif is more George Clinton than Steven Spielberg.
Finally, Doctorow must be admired for the concision and density of his work. He manages to compact into a short story more ideas and actions than most writers lavish on a novel. In this regard, he shows alliances with Charles Stross, another star of their generation. Imagining some future collaboration among Chiang, Doctorow and Stross in the manner of a de Camp & Pratt or Niven & Pournelle outing boggles the mind!
For some reason, when reading "Return to Pleasure Island," I kept flashing on Hayao Miyazaki's great supernatural adventure of bondage, Spirited Away, even though the story predates the film. Just another example of Doctorow's prescient, zeitgeist-tapping powers! — Paul
