re:mote voices

Title: Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town
Author: Cory Doctrow
Publisher: Tor Books

Alan has bought himself a house with the insurance money from when his latest shop burnt down. His intention is to do the house up, and then use it as somewhere to write. But as he gets closer to completion he is faced with the question of what to write? Trying to find inspiration he meets his neighbours and a local punk called Kurt. His relationships with both shaping what follows.

Alan is different from other people. His father was a mountain, his mother a washing machine. One of his brothers is an island, another is a violent zombie filled with spite. It seems that one of his neighbours might be like him, in some way, she has wings. While on a more mundane front Kurt is trying to set up as much of Toronto with free WiFi as he can, and this seems like a great project for Alan to become involved in.

Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is a non-linear novel, constructed without the use of chapters, it flows back and forth. From Alan's present - the WiFi project and the return of his zombie brother - back to Alan's past - the problems of living as the son of a mountain, and how he came to murder his brother. But even with that being the main course of the book, the narrative is prone to go off on tangents. Just as you think it is going to go off in one direction, something that happens seems to remind Doctorow to fill in some gaps. This can make things a little hard to follow at times, but isn't a big deal really, you just need to stick with it.

Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is the third novel by Canadian novelist Cory Doctorow. Like Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe before this, Cory has made his novel available in electronic format as a free download from his site. As far as I am aware there aren't actual physical copies of his novels published in the UK, though I did see an import of Magic Kingdom in hardback once. As such I have read his previous novels in electronic format, and that was fine - if I came across convenient paperbacks at some point I'd perhaps be tempted.

With Someone Comes To Town, Cory made a visit to Glasgow for Worldcon, with a number of signed copies of this novel following him over. I decided to buy a copy, even though in the end it was still the electronic copy that I read, and I am glad that I did. For me, Someone Comes To Town is Cory's best novel to date. It has the same dense tech culture that was present in his previous novels, but this one is a definite departure in a couple of ways.

The first departure is that Someone Comes To Town has a very contemporary feel, as opposed to the kind of near future he has worked with before. The second is that there is a more fantasy or perhaps magical realism influence on this novel - nudging it more in the direction of Haruki Murakami or Russell Hoban than Bruce Sterling or Charles Stross.

Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is a well written and fun novel, combining contemporary science fiction with magic realism to provide a thoroughly enjoyable novel.