Cory Doctorow - Home Again,Home Again

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Home Again, Home Again

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 Tesseracts 8 (Tesseract Press, 1999)

"'Home Again, Home Again,' is at once intimate and spectacular."

- Farren Miller

Locus Magazine

Issue 512, Vol 51, No 3

Sept 2003

--

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

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* 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

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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/000016.php

--

Here's a summary of the license:

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###

Home Again, Home Again

======================

The kids in my local bat-house breathe heavy metals, and their gelatinous bodies

quiver nauseously during our counseling sessions, and for all that, they reacted

just like I had when I told them I was going away for a while -- with hurt and

betrayal, and they aroused palpable guilt in me.

It goes in circles. When I was sixteen, and The Amazing Robotron told me he

needed to go away for a while, but he'd be back, I did everything I could to

make him guilty. Now it's me, on a world far from home, and a pack of snot-nosed

jellyfish kids have so twisted my psyche that they're all I can think of when I

debark the shuttle at Aristide Interplanetary, just outside my dirty ole

Toronto.

The customs officer isn't even human, so it feels like just another R&R, another

halting conversation carried on in ugly trade-speak, another bewilderment of

queues and luggage carousels. Outside: another spaceport, surrounded by the

variegated hostels for the variegated tourists, and bipeds are in bare majority.

I can think of it like that.

I can think of it as another spaceport.

I can think of it like another trip.

The thing he can't think of it is, is a homecoming. That's too hard for this

weak vessel.

He's very weak.

#

Look at him. He's eleven, and it's the tencennial of the Ascension of his

homeworld -- dirty blue ball, so unworthy, yet -- inducted into the Galactic

fraternity and the infinite compassion of the bugouts.

The foam, which had been confined to just the newer, Process-enclaves before the

Ascension, has spread, as has the cult of the Process For Lasting Happiness.

Process is, after all, why the dirty blue ball was judged and found barely

adequate for membership. Toronto, which had seen half its inhabitants emigrate

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on open-ended tours of the wondrous worlds of the bugout domain, is full again.

Bursting. The whole damn planet is accreting a layer of off-world tourists.

It's a time of plenty. Plenty of cheap food and plenty of cheap foam structures,

built as needed, then dissolved and washed away when the need disappears. Plenty

of healthcare and education. Plenty of toys and distractions and beautiful,

haunting bugout art. Plenty, in fact, of everything, except space.

He lived in a building that is so tall, its top floors are perpetually damp with

clouds. There's a nice name for this building, inscribed on a much-abused foam

sculpture in the central courtyard. No one uses the nice name. They call it by

the name that the tabloids use, that the inhabitants use, that everyone but the

off-world counselors use. They call it the bat-house.

Bats in the belfry. Batty. Batshit.

I hated it when they moved us into the bat-house. My parents gamely tried to

explain why we were going, but they never understood, no more than any human

could. The bugouts had a test, a scifi helmet you wore, and it told you whether

you were normal, or batty. Some of our neighbors were clearly batshit: the woman

who screamed all the time, about the bugs and the little niggers crawling over

her flesh; the couple who ate dogturds off the foam sidewalk with lip-smacking

relish; the guy who thought he was Nicola Tesla.

I don't want to talk about him right now.

His parents' flaw -- whatever it was -- was too subtle to detect without the

scifi helmet. They never knew for sure what it was. Many of the bats were in the

same belfry: part of the bugouts' arrogant compassion held that a couple never

knew which one of them was defective, so his family never knew if it was his

nervous, shy mother, or his loud, opinionated father who had doomed them to the

quarantine.

His father told him, in an impromptu ceremony before he slid his keycard into

the lock on their new apt in the belfry: "Chet, whatever they say, there's

nothing wrong with us. They have no right to put us here." He knelt to look the

skinny ten-year-old right in the eye. "Don't worry, kiddo. It's not for long --

we'll get this thing sorted out yet." Then, in a rare moment of tenderness, one

that stood out in Chet's memory as the last of such, his father gathered him in

his arms, lifted him off his feet in a fierce hug. After a moment, his mother

joined the hug, and Chet's face was buried in the spot where both of their

shoulders met, smelling their smells. They still smelled like his parents then,

like his old house on the Beaches, and for a moment, he knew his father was

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Cory Doctorow - Home Again,Home Again

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