Cory Doctorow: Stories

An antiques collector in a peculiar post-contact world where exccentric aliens do strange deeds.

Jules is a young man barely a century old. He's lived long enough to see the cure for death and the end of scarcity, to learn ten languages and compose three symphonies...and to realize his boyhood dream of taking up residence in Disney World.Now in the keeping of a network of "ad-hocs" who keep the classic attractions running as they always have,Now, they are under attack. A new group has taken over the Hall of the Presidents, and is replacing it with...

Art Berry lives in a world just slightly askew from the rest of us. In our increasingly wireless world of instant and constant communication, he gives his loyalty not to a state or a company or family and friends he sees regularly, but to the Eastern Standard Tribe-a largely faceless collection of people whose home time zone is the Eastern Standard Zone, who are locked in cutthroat competition with other tribes aligned with other time zones...

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. The thing he can't think of it is, is a homecoming.

In the title tale, narrator James 14 returns home with Mama to 1898 village when his father Les, time-traveller Ambassador to aliens, vanishes from 1975 jet-pack city. When the "mothaship" takes the anointed few into the brave new world, those left behind are angry. "0wnz0red" asks - what happens when hackers hack the human body?

A man goes to prison for illegal printing.

This is the story of the ogres who run the concession stands on Pleasure Island, where Pinnocchio's friend Lampwick turned into a donkey.

Childhood rebellion? Rebellion against conforming? Rebellion against expectations? Rebellion against the state? All of the above.

Alan is a middle-aged entrepreneur in contemporary Toronto, who has devoted himself to fixing up a house in a bohemian neighborhood. This naturally brings him in contact with the house full of students and layabouts next door, including a young woman who, in a moment of stress, reveals to him that she has wings--wings, moreover, which grow back after each attempt to cut them off.

This story is both very funny, and a portrayal of a quite believable non-human human being.