Books : Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

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Author name: Cory Doctorow

: Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN num: 9780765312808
ISBN number: 0765312808
Label: Tor Books
Manufacturer: Tor Books
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 320
Printing Date: May 30, 2006
Publishing house: Tor Books
Release Date: May 30, 2006
Sale Popularity Level: 317085
Studio: Tor Books



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Product Description:
Alan is a middle-aged entrepeneur in contemporary Toronto, who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighborhood. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts subsequent 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 endeavor 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.




Customer Reviews
User popularity level: out of 5 stars

Rated by buyers 4 out of 5 stars - Well that was different!
This is the second novel I have read by Cory Doctorow, although I am working on my third. I guess that is a high enough complement to an author itself, the fact that I am read one of his novels and came back for more. This book is different, decided surreal. It is a mark of the author's skill that he can draw a reader into a world as strange as the one he describes.

Cory Doctorow has a gift for inventing characters. The characters in this book leap off the page (which is quite a feat considering some of the characters are decidedly outside the human realm). His setting is well done too. The novel mostly takes place in Toronto, Canada, and is a mixture of the regualar world and a unique fantasy world of Doctorow's own imagination.

Whether there is some deeper meaning to some of the weirder parts of the book, i do not know. What I do know is that I enjoyed this book. The only complaint I have (and this quite possibly has been done intentionally by the author to make this book seem even more weird) is that the plot isn't very tightly woven together. Or rather, there almost seems to be two plots involving some of the same characters. Perhaps one was meant to be a subplot that simply grew larger than the author intended, or perhaps the author is simply giving us an extra treat by including it. I can certainly see some people liking this sort of thing in a novel, like I said, it is quite possibly intentional.

As a side note, this and I believe the rest of Cory Doctorow's work is available in electronic format free of charge from his website, so you can start reading this novel to see if you like it before purchasing it.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - Vivid, concise prose makes for an entertaining read
The story starts out reasonably normal. The main character, Alan, buys a house, moves into the neighbourhood, renovates the house, meets his neighbours and plans to write a novel. It's only when Alan starts to recount his past that we realize that he's had a rather strange upbringing. Initially I thought Alan was speaking metaphorically when he referred to his father as the mountain and one of his brother's as an island. However when his mother is revealed to be a washing machine, and three of his brothers a trio of nesting dolls, each born 30 days apart in three violent spin cycles, there's no doubt this is not your average family.

Unlike his brothers, Alan is outwardly normal and the story traces his attempts to fit into society and lead a normal life. Along the way he meets Kurt, a punk who's main passion is dumpster diving for discarded tech that he can recycle and sell on eBay in order to finance the free wireless mesh network that he's rolling out in his neighbourhood. Alan quickly joins his cause and the two become fast friends.

I loved the idea of the free mesh network, so it was an amazing coincidence when Bruce Schneier wrote in Wired magazine last week that he ran an open wireless router and urged people to `Steal this Wi-Fi`.

I particularly enjoyed Cory's writing style. He seems to be able to paint the most vivid of scenes using just a few, well chosen words. I felt like I was right there with the characters, able to taste, touch, hear and see everything they experienced.

The one thing I didn't like was the way Cory keep changing the names of Alan and his family throughout the entire book. Perhaps it was meant to show that they were all trying to fight for a real identity in normal society but I just found it annoying. The only consolation was each brother always had a name starting with the same letter and this letter was determined by their birth order (i.e. Alan was the oldest, George the youngest).

All in all Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is an imaginative, entertaining read that I thoroughly enjoyed.

Highly Recommended!




Rated by buyers 2 out of 5 stars - Someone writes a good story, someone writes a bad story.
There are two stories here: one is the kind of modern-technology-is-cool story that Doctorow is good at, and is a pretty good -- if also low-key and ranty -- story. The other story is an abstract fantasy story that's just a mess, keeps losing track of itself, and ends in nothing BUT loose ends. Cory takes these two stories and randomly shuffles them together, and then does the literary equivalent of the Photoshop smudge tool to kind of sort of make them overlap in a way that doesn't work. It's ugly, but it's still fairly engaging for the very first half of the book. In the second half of the book, however, he begins to mix up the chronology of chapters with no rhyme or reason, he starts experimenting with clumsy jumps from third person into very first person, and then in the last quarter of the book the main character starts writing a short story, and paragraphs from the short story are interspersed throughout the main story, with no break denoting the shift, to the point that many readers have posted to Doctorow's feedback page for the novel, asking if those paragraphs are typos. And then at the end he resolves absolutely zero of the numerous mysteries he's invented over the course of the abstract fantasy part of the book.

I loved "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", and I will read "Eastern Standard Tribe" soon, but this one was a big disappointment, and gave me the impression that Doctorow should stick to the sci-fi, and maybe dip a little bit into fantasy, but the abstract fantasy of this book was WAY too ambitious for him.

Oh, also, the whole "erotic armpit sniffing" thing really squicked me.


Rated by buyers 3 out of 5 stars - Iconoclasts Unite!
The protagonist of this book has no idea what he is, his parents are a mountain and a washing machine, his brothers include a psychic, an undead malcontent and symbiotic stacking dolls. He keeps trying to live a normal life, but his family won't let him. Despite his bizarreness, he can at least walk down the street without too much trouble. This is different from a woman he befriends whose bizarreness is so noticeable that she needs to saw off parts of her body on a regular basis.

Ultimately this book deals with issues that any iconoclast or counter-culture denizen will recognize. While the characters issues are weirder-than-life, they all span the gap of the social outcast - wanting to live in the mainstream world, resenting the mainstream world, observing the mainstream world ... but never quite being a part of it.

Cory is an easy read. The book flows nicely. Characters are interesting, plot twists are well executed. Even though I've only given this 3 stars, I likely be reading more Cory Doctorow in the future.


Rated by buyers 5 out of 5 stars - A big step from your usual fantasy
I'm a huge fantasy fan. I love G.R.R. Martin, am getting into Jordan, and am halfway through Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. That said, I find it difficult to 'branch-out' sometimes into other genres, and even into 'lighter fantasy'.

I picked this book up at the book store, flipped through it, found it mildly intriguing, and showed it to my girlfriend before putting it down and moving on. (This is fairly standard fare for me since it can take a full 6 months for me to commit to buying a book, but I also don't read too many things I don't like.) About 3 weeks later, its my birthday and what did my girlfriend get me? This book. (I had initially thought it would fit her taste more than mine, but I gave it a go.)

It starts off fairly normal, a guy fixing up an old row home in Toronto, but quickly gets interesting with details of his past and the people he surrounds himself with. I found some of the back story a bit strange, but mostly just added to my intrigue, so I eagerly plugged on, (Curiously asking myself, 'Okay, where is the author going with this?'). The characters really come to life and become really memorable, mostly likable and realistic people (for the most part) that fill this book with a bit of magic. Their motivations are understandable given their personalities, and the way the story is woven I found myself utterly engrossed in a book, which is almost completely 'out of my element.'

The book is intelligent and lightly specked with the author's own philosophies, but unlike many writer's Doctorow is able to do this without being heavy-handed in his approach.

If you are looking for a quick, memorably enjoyable read with likable, quirky characters who like the rest of us just want to be normal, despite (and in some cases, in spite of) those traits about themselves that make them unique and beautiful. Give this book a try, I did, despite my initial indifference and am very thankful for one of the better birthday gifts in recent memory.

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