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Cory Doctorow

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Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town Gebundene Ausgabe – 1. Juli 2005

Englisch Ausgabe von Cory Doctorow (Autor)

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With Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe, Cory Doctorow established himself as one of the leading voices of next-generation SF: inventive, optimistic, and comfortable with the sheer strangeness of tomorrow. Now Doctorow returns with a novel of wrenching oddity, heartfelt technological vision, and human pity set on the streets of Toronto today.

Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur in contemporary Toronto, who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in the bohemian neighborhood of Kensington. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings--wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

Alan understands. He himself has a secret or two. His father is a mountain; his mother is a washing machine; and among his brothers are a set of Russian nesting dolls.

Now two of the three nesting dolls, Edward and Frederick, are on his doorstep--well on their way to starvation, because their innermost member, George, has vanished. It appears that yet another brother, Davey, who Alan and his other siblings killed years ago, may have returned...bent on revenge.

Under such circumstances it seems only reasonable for Alan to involve himself with a visionary scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless Internet connectivity, a conspiracy spearheaded by a brilliant technopunk who builds miracles of hardware from parts scavenged from the city's dumpsters. But Alan's past won't leave him alone--and Davey is only one of the powers gunning for him and all his friends.

Wildly imaginative, constantly whipsawing us between the preposterous, the amazing, and the deeply felt, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is unlike any novel you have ever read.

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Seitenzahl der Print-Ausgabe

315 Seiten
Sprache

Englisch
Herausgeber

Tor Books
Erscheinungstermin

1. Juli 2005
Abmessungen

14.8 x 2.8 x 21.3 cm
ISBN-10

0765312786
ISBN-13

978-0765312785
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Produktbeschreibungen

Pressestimmen

Praise for Cory Doctorow

"I know many science fiction writers engaged in the cyber-world, but Cory Doctorow is a native...We should all hope and trust that our culture has the guts and moxie to follow this guy. He's got a lot to tell us."
--Bruce Sterling

"Cory Doctorow is just far enough ahead of the game to give you the authentic chill of the future...Funny as hell and sharp as steel."
--Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan, on Eastern Standard Tribe

"Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar-a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)."
--William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, on Eastern Standard Tribe

"Doctorow throws off cool ideas the way champagne generates bubbles...[he] definitely has the goods to be a major player in postcyberpunk science fiction. His ideas are fresh and his attitude highly engaging."
--San Francisco Chronicle on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

"Artful and confident...Like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Doctorow has discovered that the present world is science fiction, if you look at it from the right angle."
--Vancouver Sun on Eastern Standard Tribe

"Doctorow peppers his novel with technology so palpable you want to order it up on the web. You'll probably get the chance. But technology is not the point here. What is unexpected, shocking even, is how smart Doctorow is when it comes to the human heart, and how well he's able to articulate it....He seems smart because he makes the reader feel smart. When Doctorow talks, when Art argues, we just get it. There's nothing between the language and the meaning. The prose is funny, simple and straightforward. This is a no-BS book."
--NPR on Eastern Standard Tribe

Buchrückseite

Praise for Cory Doctorow

"I know many science fiction writers engaged in the cyber-world, but Cory Doctorow is a native...We should all hope and trust that our culture has the guts and moxie to follow this guy. He's got a lot to tell us."
--Bruce Sterling

"Cory Doctorow is just far enough ahead of the game to give you the authentic chill of the future...Funny as hell and sharp as steel."
--Warren Ellis, author of Transmetropolitan, on Eastern Standard Tribe

"Utterly contemporary and deeply peculiar-a hard combination to beat (or, these days, to find)."
--William Gibson, author of Neuromancer, on Eastern Standard Tribe

"Doctorow throws off cool ideas the way champagne generates bubbles...[he] definitely has the goods to be a major player in postcyberpunk science fiction. His ideas are fresh and his attitude highly engaging."
--San Francisco Chronicle on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

"Artful and confident...Like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, Doctorow has discovered that the present world is science fiction, if you look at it from the right angle."
--Vancouver Sun on Eastern Standard Tribe

"Doctorow peppers his novel with technology so palpable you want to order it up on the web. You'll probably get the chance. But technology is not the point here. What is unexpected, shocking even, is how smart Doctorow is when it comes to the human heart, and how well he's able to articulate it....He seems smart because he makes the reader feel smart. When Doctorow talks, when Art argues, we just get it. There's nothing between the language and the meaning. The prose is funny, simple and straightforward. This is a no-BS book."
--NPR on Eastern Standard Tribe

Über den Autor und weitere Mitwirkende

Canadian-born Cory Doctorow is the UK coordinator for Creative Commons and the European Affairs Coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, with nearly a million visitors a month; he also maintains a personal site. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. His other books include two previous novels, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe, and a story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

Canadian-born Cory Doctorow is the UK coordinator for Creative Commons and the European Affairs Coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, with nearly a million visitors a month; he also maintains a personal site. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards. His other books include two previous novels,Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe, and a story collection,A Place So Foreign and Eight More.

Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

Alan sanded the house on Wales Avenue. It took six months, and the whole time it was the smell of the sawdust, ancient and sweet, and the reek of chemical stripper and the damp smell of rusting steel wool.

Alan took possession of the house on January 1, and paid for it in full by means of an e-gold transfer. He had to do a fair bit of hand-holding with the realtor to get her set up and running on e-gold, but he loved to do that sort of thing, loved to sit at the elbow of a novitiate and guide her through the clicks and taps and forms. He loved to break off for impromptu lectures on the underlying principles of the transaction, and so he treated the poor realtor lady to a dozen addresses on the nature of international currency markets, the value of precious metal as a kind of financial lingua franca to which any currency could be converted, the poetry of vault shelves in a hundred banks around the world piled with the heaviest of metals, glinting dully in the fluorescent tube lighting, tended by gnomish bankers who spoke a hundred languages but communicated with one another by means of this universal tongue of weights and measures and purity.

The clerks who’d tended Alan’s many stores—the used clothing store in the Beaches, the used book store in the Annex, the collectible tin-toy store in Yorkville, the antique shop on Queen Street—had both benefited from and had their patience tried by Alan’s discursive nature. Alan had pretended never to notice the surreptitious rolling of eyes and twirling fingers aimed temple-wise among his employees when he got himself warmed up to a good oration, but in truth very little ever escaped his attention. His customers loved his little talks, loved the way he could wax rhapsodic about the tortured prose in a Victorian potboiler, the nearly erotic curve of a beat-up old table leg, the voluminous cuffs of an embroidered silk smoking jacket. The clerks who listened to Alan’s lectures went on to open their own stores all about town, and by and large, they did very well.

He’d put the word out when he bought the house on Wales Avenue to all his protégés: Wooden bookcases! His cell phone rang every day, bringing news of another wooden bookcase found at this flea market, that thrift store, this rummage sale or estate auction.

He had a man he used part-time, Tony, who ran a small man-with-van service, and when the phone rang, he’d send Tony over to his protégé’s shop with his big panel van to pick up the case and deliver it to the cellar of the house on Wales Avenue, which was ramified by cold storages, root cellars, disused coal chutes and storm cellars. By the time Alan had finished with his sanding, every nook and cranny of the cellar was packed with wooden bookcases of every size and description and repair.

Alan worked through the long Toronto winter at his sanding. The house had been gutted by the previous owners, who’d had big plans for the building but had been tempted away by a job in Boston. They’d had to sell fast, and no amount of realtor magic—flowers on the dining-room table, soup simmering on the stove—could charm away the essential dagginess of the gutted house, the exposed timbers with sagging wires and conduit, the runnels gouged in the floor by careless draggers of furniture. Alan got it for a song, and was delighted by his fortune.

He was drunk on the wood, of course, and would have paid much more had the realtor noticed this, but Alan had spent his whole life drunk on trivial things from others’ lives that no one else noticed and he’d developed the alcoholic’s knack of disguising his intoxication. Alan went to work as soon as the realtor staggered off, reeling with a New Year’s Day hangover. He pulled his pickup truck onto the frozen lawn, unlocked the Kryptonite bike lock he used to secure the camper bed, and dragged out his big belt sander and his many boxes of sandpaper of all grains and sizes, his heat strippers and his jugs of caustic chemical peeler. He still had his jumbled, messy place across town in a nondescript two-bedroom on the Danforth, would keep on paying the rent there until his big sanding project was done and the house on Wales Avenue was fit for habitation.

Alan’s sanding project: First, finish gutting the house. Get rid of the substandard wiring, the ancient, lead-leaching plumbing, the cracked tile and water-warped crumbling plaster. He filled a half-dozen dumpsters, working with Tony and Tony’s homie Nat, who was happy to help out in exchange for cash on the barrelhead, provided that he wasn’t required to report for work on two consecutive days, since he’d need one day to recover from the heroic drinking he’d do immediately after Alan laid the cash across his palm.

Once the house was gutted to brick and timber and delirious wood, the plumbers and the electricians came in and laid down their straight shining ducts and pipes and conduit.

Alan tarped the floors and brought in the heavy sandblaster and stripped the age and soot and gunge off of the brickwork throughout, until it glowed red as a golem’s ass.

Alan’s father, the mountain, had many golems that called him home. They lived round the other side of his father and left Alan and his brothers alone, because even a golem has the sense not to piss off a mountain, especially one it lives in.

Then Alan tackled the timbers, reaching over his head with palm sanders and sandpaper of ever finer grains until the timbers were as smooth as Adirondack chairs, his chest and arms and shoulders athrob with the agony of two weeks’ work. Then it was the floorwork, but not the floors themselves, which he was saving for last on the grounds that they were low-hanging fruit.

This materialized a new lecture in his mind, one about the proper role of low-hanging fruit, a favorite topic of MBAs who’d patronize his stores and his person, giving him unsolicited advice on the care and feeding of his shops based on the kind of useless book-learning and jargon-slinging that Fortune 100 companies apparently paid big bucks for. When an MBA said "low-hanging fruit," he meant "easy pickings," something that could and should be snatched with minimal effort. But real low-hanging fruit ripens last, and should be therefore picked as late as possible. Further, picking the low-hanging fruit first meant that you’d have to carry your bushel basket higher and higher as the day wore on, which was plainly stupid. Low-hanging fruit was meant to be picked last. It was one of the ways that he understood people, and one of the kinds of people that he’d come to understand. That was the game, after all—understanding people.

So the floors would come last, after the molding, after the stairs, after the railings and the paneling. The railings, in particular, were horrible bastards to get clean, covered in ten or thirty coats of enamel of varying colors and toxicity. Alan spent days working with a wire brush and pointed twists of steel wool and oozing, stinging paint stripper, until the grain was as spotless and unmarked as the day it came off the lathe.

Then he did the floors, using the big rotary sander first. It had been years since...

Produktinformation

Herausgeber ‏ : ‎ Tor Books (1. Juli 2005)
Sprache ‏ : ‎ Englisch
Gebundene Ausgabe ‏ : ‎ 315 Seiten
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0765312786
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0765312785
Abmessungen ‏ : ‎ 14.8 x 2.8 x 21.3 cm

Amazon Bestseller-Rang: Nr. 3.518.095 in Bücher (Siehe Top 100 in Bücher)
- Nr. 108.091 in Science-Fiction-Romane
- Nr. 176.131 in Fantasy-Romane
- Nr. 909.164 in Unterhaltungsliteratur

Kundenrezensionen:
4,0 66 Sternebewertungen

Informationen zum Autor

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Cory Doctorow

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Cory Doctorow, 1971 in Toronto geboren, ist Schriftsteller, Journalist und Internet-Ikone. Mit dem Blog boingboing.net und seinem Kampf für ein faires Copyright hat er weltweite Bekanntheit erlangt. Seine »Little Brother«-Romane wurden internationale Bestseller. Cory Doctorow ist verheiratet, hat eine Tochter und lebt in Los Angeles.

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66 weltweite Bewertungen

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MD Customer

Any book by Cory

Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 16. November 2020

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Any book by Cory is worth reading. Note that they are all on the internet for free if you want to download them, but having a physical copy goes to the beach well, sand in the pages is no problem, and hopefully some residual payment goes back to the author or by the author's choice.

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EGil

Startlingly original and thought provoking

Rezension aus dem Vereinigten Königreich vom 3. März 2011

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When I first read the plot description for this book, I was immediately interested, but wondered if such an idea would actually be a main theme in the story, or just a sideline to make for an interesting tagline. I was pleasantly surprised, in that the whole 'my father is a mountain, my mother a washing machine, etc' theme is in fact a central tenet of the storyline. Wacky? Definitely. But for those who would immediately consign the idea to the bin for the sheer ludicrousness of it, I ask you this - is it any more impossible than elves, or wizards, or people with wings? For me, this book challenged my preconceptions of Fantasy/SF, in that I didn't realise how 'normalised' or narrow the genre really has become. Doctorow has thrown this bizarre premise into the mix, and I think it works well.

One of the most original things I have read in a long time, and it gets 5 stars for that alone. The writing is fairly consistent, and to a good standard, although I do agree that some of the main characters lack detail. It's a quick read, and I enjoyed it more for its originality than for any sense of epic, thrill or adventure. I would (and do) recommend this to any SF/Fantasy reader who feels bored or jaded by a supposedly avante-garde genre that has failed to innovate for a very long time.

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GDMF

Fantastic story, very well written

Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 21. September 2010

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Parts of this book are so well written that I had to force myself to put the book down and do something else.
The story moves around and each segment sucks you in further.
My only mild criticism is that the symbolism around one the characters and her relationships is so obvious I was literally embarassed at times while reading the book.
The book iteslf is a great size to hold and read.

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Lars

Just you wait... Read along

Rezension aus den Vereinigten Staaten vom 5. Februar 2015

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It starts out real good, a man is renovating his new home and the author is adding a boatload of details on how it is done. That's in itself is joyful as I am a sucker for renovation. Then he states something that you probably just think is a funny expression of his.
A chapter later he says the same thing and adds another very curious observation. I just read along a bit nonplussed. Then another and I was totally hooked and.. Spooked in a fascinating way. It's all fabulous reading from that point.
This was my first book by the author, I had read a novella before so I liked the way with words he had.
After this... What a story, and what a strange man he must be. :-)

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Rob D

Wacky and different

Rezension aus dem Vereinigten Königreich vom 1. Februar 2014

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You really can not pass this up for 99p second hand. But be ready for the weirdest book you have every read! Yet it is really easy to read and enjoy. Yes there are characters like the Mountain and the Washing machine, but it is great fun ride/read. I want more of this style of book.

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Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town Gebundene Ausgabe – 1. Juli 2005

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Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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Cory Doctorow

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