My favorite Doctorow story so far, the gonzo "Jury Service," isn't here -- maybe because it's a collaboration with Charlie Stross? -- but it's just a click away.

"Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.

Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets..."

My third favorite Doctorow isn't here either -- who's picking these, anyway? -- "I Love Paree," another collaboration, this time with Michael Skeet. Here's a teaser, with more compliments from perceptive critics Rich Horton and Nick Gevers. Ah, it was recently reprinted in another 4w8w anthology, Witpunk "Full-metal baguette." All right!

OK, back to what is in the book. "Craphound", the lead-off story, was Doctorow's first published story, about an alien who likes thrift shops. Good weird stuff, and online, too.

"A Place So Foreign", an 18,000 word novella (also online) about time travel from 1898 to 1975, is a fresh take on an old theme, and well-worth reading, though not quite to my taste.

"All Day Sucker" is a neat, clever short-short original. "To Market, To Market: The Rebranding of Billy Bailey", personal brand-management at Pepsi Elementary, is crackerjack, my second-favorite in the collection (and overall). Neither is online.

"Return to Pleasure Island" is sort of a Disney satire and didn't do much for me. And "Shadow of the Mothaship", a weird Scientology/alien invasion tale, went completely by me, though it's a favorite of the author. Go figure. Both are online, so you can judge for yourself (and calibrate your taste against mine). "Home Again, Home Again", an alien nuthouse tale, and "The Super Man and the Bugout", adventures of a Jewish-Canadian superhero, are good stories that share the "Mothaship" background. Both are online.

So that's it. A good collection, from a hot new writer -- but they left out two of his four strongest stories!