His brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune-teller, and an island. He only had two or three family portraits, but he treasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them for landscapes. There was one where his family stood on his father's slopes, Mom out in the open for a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords snaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator's three-prong outlet. He hung it over the mantel, using two hooks and a level to make sure that it came out perfectly even.

I called Doctorow a science fiction writer, and I did so deliberately, because there's a difference between how a science fiction writer approaches an absurd premise and how a graduate of the School of Kafka (off Mumble's Road) approaches an absurd premise. Science fiction writers tend to like their fantasies logical -- L.E. Modesitt's Magic of Recluce is a fine example of this, of a writer taking the skills he polished writing semi-hard SF and applying them to a world of magic. Doctorow goes even farther, applying the lessons of science fiction not to all things medieval and Tolkienesque, but to the slipperier streams of oddball contemporary fantasy, the landscapes of Kelly Link and Jonathan Lethem and R.A. Lafferty. Doctorow leaves unexplained a few of the larger mysteries in his tale so that a core of inexplicability can lurk like an engendering id, while everything else becomes rationalized in the greatest of geekboy traditions -- the ghosts of Gernsback and Campbell hover over many of the pages, just as others evoke echoes of Ellison and the brattier cards in the New Wave pack. Looked at with a sensitive, and perhaps slightly crazy, eye, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is no less than an apotheosis of the history of science fiction -- as fantasy.

Of course, there's the internet, too. This is a Doctorow book, and on certain days, when the WiFi is calibrated just right, Cory Doctorow is the apotheosis of what we talk about when we talk about The Web. I'm sure plenty of unique visitors to this book will find the long discussions of how to create a free, decentralized metropolitan wireless network just the thing to boing their boings (remember that ghost of Gernsback?), but those of us who were picked last for both kickball and the math team might have appreciated it if at least a few of those pages were relegated to a footnote, or an appendix, or a web site of their own.

A few techies probably think the same thing about the sex scenes, or the loving descriptions of bookshelves, or -- well, any number of items, really. This is a devoutly democratic book, both in its politics and its practices, leaving a little bit of something for everybody, good and bad. That's where the charm comes in. A more authoritarian novel might be more authoritatively great, but the key to the charm here lies in the eclectic populism and aw-shucks anarchy of letting each scene last just a little bit too long, so that it can include a little something for everybody. The structure of the book looks at the end a lot like the wireless network Doctorow's characters so lovingly envision: scavenged, clever, fragmented, cooperative, messy, redundant, and so ridiculous that you'd never believe it unless you experienced it for yourself.