Shadow of the Mothaship

Shadow of the Mothaship, by
Cory Doctorow

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Shadow of the Mothaship, 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: Shadow of the Mothaship
Author: Cory Doctorow
Release Date: November 20, 2005 [EBook #17029]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHADOW
OF THE MOTHASHIP ***

Shadow of the Mothaship
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 Amazing Stories, Winter 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 short stories. Losing