http://craphound.com/place/ ( )

Fresh sci-fi looks at time travel, teenage alienation, extraterrestrials, and superheroes. Good reads. ( )

A Place So Foreign is Cory Doctorow’s first collection of short stories. The entire collection is available on his website, www.craphound.com, and Doctorow is one of the editors on BoingBoing.net. In addition to everything else he does in pursuit of fair use and intellectual property rights, Doctorow is also a pretty damn good writer.

A Place So Foreign brings together several stories in a classic-contemporary sci-fi shorts kind of collection. The stories feel utterly contemporary in their blending of tech and reality, drawing as much from fantasy and fairy tales as from Bradbury and Asimov. Doctorow’s prose is clean and clear, presenting plot-driven stories generally designed to illustrate some deeper issue of socio-techno-cultural importance.

Doctorow’s work is enjoyable in the same way as so many sci-fi fans once enjoyed Bradbury or Arthur C. Clarke: His stories are dire warnings wrapped in highly edible containers. Read, enjoy, be blown away. ( )

A reasonable collection, is about it. Definitely enjoyable, though. It is interesting to see that Bruce Sterling, a noted futurist, has written an introduction. Obviously Doctorow is part of a 'new movement' of writers that has useful things to say about science, technology and humanity at our current point in time. Certainly worth the time for those interested.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/16721

http://superprose.blogspot.com/2006/1... ( )