A Place So Foreign, Cory Doctorow‘s new collection of short stories, is always charming, and sometimes profound. In these stories as in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I blogged previously), Doctorow achieves a breezy and low-affect style that nonetheless turns out to be sneakily incisive, making points or suggesting emotional implications which almost sneak by you before you notice them. Some of the stories are simply entertainments, but several of them have real power. My favorites were: “Return to Pleasure Island,” which combines Doctorow’s Disney/theme park obsession with a strange updating of Pinocchio in a way that was both creepily disturbing and rather moving; “To Market, To Market:,” a satricial piece in which 11-year-olds, have marketing strategies and use branding and product endorsements to secure their status in the school playground; and “0wnz0red,” which takes the privatization of “intellectual property” to its logical conclusion. I also had a warm spot for “The Super Man and the Bugout,” which imagines a somewhat hapless Jewish Superman with left-wing sympathies.
Cory Doctorow short stories
A Place So Foreign, Cory Doctorow‘s new collection of short stories, is always charming, and sometimes profound. In these stories as in his novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I blogged previously), Doctorow achieves a breezy and low-affect style that nonetheless turns out to be sneakily incisive, making points or suggesting emotional implications which almost sneak by you before you notice them. Some of the stories are simply entertainments, but several of them have real power. My favorites were: “Return to Pleasure Island,” which combines Doctorow’s Disney/theme park obsession with a strange updating of Pinocchio in a way that was both creepily disturbing and rather moving; “To Market, To Market:,” a satricial piece in which 11-year-olds, have marketing strategies and use branding and product endorsements to secure their status in the school playground; and “0wnz0red,” which takes the privatization of “intellectual property” to its logical conclusion. I also had a warm spot for “The Super Man and the Bugout,” which imagines a somewhat hapless Jewish Superman with left-wing sympathies.