The Project Gutenberg EBook of Craphound, by Cory Doctorow

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

** This is a COPYRIGHTED Project Gutenberg eBook, Details Below ** ** Please follow the copyright guidelines in this file. **

Title: Craphound

Author: Cory Doctorow

Release Date: November 20, 2005 [EBook #17026]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRAPHOUND ***

Copyright (C) 1998 by Cory Doctorow

Craphound

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, March 1998

Reprinted in:

 * Northern Suns
   (Tor, 1999, David Hartwell and Glenn Grant, editors)

 * Year's Best Science Fiction XVI
   (Morrow, 1999, Gardner Dozois, editor)

 * Hayakawa Science Fiction Magazine (Japan)
   September 2001

"Like most aliens-mingling-with-human-society stories, Doctorow's story serves mostly to hold a mirror up to human nature, but the odd corner of human nature it examines is fascinating, and the story is smoothly and expertly written, with some good detail and local color and some shrewd insights into human nature and human culture, and an almost Bradburian vein of rich nostalgia running through it (although the nostalgia is quirky enough that perhaps it might more usefully be compared to R.A. Lafferty or Terry Bisson than to Bradbury)."

 - Gardner Dozois
   Editor, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine

—

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

This story is from my collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," published by Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I've released this story, along with five others, under the terms of a Creative Commons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyright normally reserves for me, the creator.

I recently did the same thing with the entire text of my novel, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" (http://craphound.com/down), and it was an unmitigated success. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the book — good news — and thousands of people bought the book — also good news. It turns out that, as near as anyone can tell, distributing free electronic versions of books is a great way to sell more of the paper editions, while simultaneously getting the book into the hands of readers who would otherwise not be exposed to my work.

I still don't know how it is artists will earn a living in the age of the Internet, but I remain convinced that the way to find out is to do basic science: that is, to do stuff and observe the outcome. That's what I'm doing here. The thing to remember is that the very *worst* thing you can do to me as an artist is to not read my work — to let it languish in obscurity and disappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, and this is doubly true for the short stories. Losing a couple bucks to people who would have bought the book save for the availability of the free electronic text is no big deal, at least when compared to the horror that is being irrelevant and unread. And luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for free gets me more paying customers than it loses me.

You can find the canonical version of this file at http://craphound.com/place/download.php

If you'd like to convert this file to some other format and distribute it, you have my permission, provided that:

* You don't charge money for the distribution

* You keep the entire text intact, including this notice, the license below, and the metadata at the end of the file

* You don't use a file-format that has "DRM" or "copy-protection" or any other form of use-restriction turned on

If you'd like, you can advertise the existence of your edition by posting a link to it at http://craphound.com/place/000012.php

—

Here's a summary of the license:

 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd-nc/1.0

 Attribution. The licensor permits others to copy, distribute,
 display, and