A Place so Foreign

Place so Foreign, A

The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Place so Foreign, by Cory Doctorow
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project
Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
** This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutenberg eBook, Details Below ** ** Please
follow the copyright guidelines in this file. **

Title: A Place so Foreign
Author: Cory Doctorow

Release Date: September 19, 2005 [eBook #16721]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***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 in
September, 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows Press (ISBN 1568582862). See
http://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," published by
Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I've released
this story, along with five others, under the terms of a Creative Commons license that
gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyright normally reserves for me, the
creator.

I recently did the same thing with the entire text of my novel, "Down and Out in the
Magic Kingdom" (http://craphound.com/down), and it was an unmitigated success.
Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the book -- good news -- and thousands of
people bought the book -- also good news. It turns out that, as near as anyone can tell,
distributing free electronic versions of books is a great way to sell more of the paper
editions, while simultaneously getting the book 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 the Internet, but I remain
convinced that the way to find out is to do basic science: that is, to do stuff and observe
the outcome. That's what I'm doing here. The thing to remember is that the very *worst*
thing you can do to me as an artist is to not read my work -- to let it languish in obscurity
and disappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, and this is
doubly true for the