Science Fiction Double Feature

Believe it or not, this entry was actually stared months ago.  (Notice the entry number up at the top?  Yeah, I've just royally screwed up the entry numbering.)  I'd received a book from Dave a while back, and after having finally read it I felt like posting something about my love/hate relationship with science/speculative fiction.  Unfortunately, that entry got very off-track and unwieldy (as this one is likely threatening to do), and I never finished it.

The other day, on the urging of Becca, I read Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.  So, what you get from this entry instead is my review/opinion of it.  I've tried to keep it as spoiler-free as possible (although I will refer to things mentioned on the back cover or the first few chapters), but you have been warned.

So, first things first:  I'm not a huge Doctorow fan.  Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom drove me nuts for a number of reasons, the two largest ones being that a) I felt the story seemed subservient to the social ideas he was basing it around, and b) the constant repetition of certain words (I believe "Bitchun" was the main culprit) made me want to scream.

That said, I was more than pleasantly surprised by Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, which shows a definite improvement over Down and Out.  The story is really quite good, and for the most part takes precedence over the social/technological ideas.  (Though not always; there's a sub-plot involving free-wireless for a large section of Toronto that occasionally gets bogged down with tedious explanations of Doctorow's beliefs on communication, copyright, and telecommunications.  And before I get accused of the fallacy of claiming a character's opinion as the author's:  I read Boing Boing, I already knew what Doctorow's opinions on these things were before I picked up the book.)

On the other hand, there are a few things that bothered me.  First off was what I saw as constant name-dropping.  Items used or consumed by the characters tened to be described with the brand-name or place of origin.  While that's fine for something like Birkenstocks, where the name has almost become like Kleenex or Band-Aid — a description of a type of item, not necessarily the specific brand — at other times it just became jarring and off-putting.  No one eats a slice of pizza or drinks a beer.  Instead, they eat "slices of pizza from Pizzabilities" and drink "a glass of Upper Canada Lager" — things that mean nothing to the average reader, and (in my opinion) is like when you suddenly notice obvious product placement in a movie or television show, in that it distracts from the main action.

The second complaint is the occasional rant.  While I've read enough Boing Boing to know that Doctorow can't go more than a short period of time without ranting about something, and he was at least thoughtful enough to have most of the rants come from an appropriate character (an aging punk/anarchist dumpster-diver), there were other times where you came across a rant and then stopped and went "Wait, what did this have to do with the story?".

Case in point: the main character, Alan, meets one of his neighbours and talks to her about her job at a video store.  She mentions that the database contains all the rental information, and the main character goes off on a page-long rant about privacy.  So, what does this have to do with the story?  Not a damn thing.  No plot relevance, either past or future, is related to this rant.  It's just Doctorow ranting on companies that store more information about you than they need.

So, in summary: ignoring the constant brandname-dropping, the social rants, and the technological explanations of how wireless networks work (which could have probably been shortened a bit), the book is good — quite good, in fact.  The story's engaging and interesting, although I felt a bit let down by the end.  (Not as much as a by Neal Stephenson book, but that's another rant.)

As a final note, I suppose I should be thankful for small things: he (miraculously) only uses the word "mash-up" once in the entire book.