Copyright (C) 2000 by Corey Doctorow A Place So Foreign Cory Doctorow From "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," a short story collection published in September, 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows Press (ISBN 1568582862). See http://craphound.com/place for more. Originally Published in Science Fiction Age, January 2000 -- Blurbs and quotes: * Cory Doctorow straps on his miner's helmet and takes you deep into the caverns and underground rivers of Pop Culture, here filtered through SF-coloured glasses. Enjoy. - Neil Gaiman Author of American Gods and Sandman * Few writers boggle my sense of reality as much as Cory Doctorow. His vision is so far out there, you'll need your GPS to find your way back. - David Marusek Winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Award, Nebula Award nominee * Cory Doctorow is one of our best new writers: smart, daring, savvy, entertaining, ambitious, plugged-in, and as good a guide to the wired world of the twenty-first century that stretches out before us as you're going to find. - Gardner Dozois Editor, Asimov's SF * He sparkles! He fizzes! He does backflips and breaks the furniture! Science fiction needs Cory Doctorow! - Bruce Sterling Author of The Hacker Crackdown and Distraction * Cory Doctorow strafes the senses with a geekspeedfreak explosion of gomi kings with heart, weirdass shapeshifters from Pleasure Island and jumping automotive jazz joints. If this is Canadian science fiction, give me more. - Nalo Hopkinson Author of Midnight Robber and Brown Girl in the Ring * Cory Doctorow is the future of science fiction. An nth-generation hybrid of the best of Greg Bear, Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling and Groucho Marx, Doctorow composes stories that are as BPM-stuffed as techno music, as idea-rich as the latest issue of NEW SCIENTIST, and as funny as humanity's efforts to improve itself. Utopian, insightful, somehow simultaneously ironic and heartfelt, these nine tales will upgrade your basal metabolism, overwrite your cortex with new and efficient subroutines and generally improve your life to the point where you'll wonder how you ever got along with them. Really, you should need a prescription to ingest this book. Out of all the glittering crap life and our society hands us, craphound supreme Doctorow has managed to fashion some industrial-grade art." - Paul Di Filippo Author of The Steampunk Trilogy * As scary as the future, and twice as funny. In this eclectic and electric collection Doctorow strikes sparks off today to illuminate tomorrow, which is what SF is supposed to do. And nobody does it better. - Terry Bisson Author of Bears Discover Fire -- A note about this story