Up until recently, I’d been avoiding Cory Doctorow’s books. Seriously! I would have these internal dialogues every time I saw one of his books at the store:

Good Me: “Hey, Cory Doctorow has a new book out. He’s supposed to be awesome.”

Evil Me: “Don’t believe the hype, you wannabe hipster. That dude is totally milking his involvement in the Boingboing.net blog phenomenon. He can’t be as ‘all that’ as they say. Nobody’s that ‘all that.’”

GM: “If you say so. I just heard he’s a good writer, is all.”

EM: “Why don’t you buy an SUV and start watching FEAR FACTOR with all the other drones?”

Well, I finally cracked open one of his books, and the Evil Me says he’s sorry.

Published in hardcover about a year ago and recently blessed with a trade paperback publication, SOMEONE COMES TO TOWN, SOMEONE LEAVES TOWN – part of Tor’s Sci-Fi Essential line – is what I would call a tour de force if I hadn’t promised the Good Me that I’d stop talking like that. Simultaneously combining fantastic fiction with total nerdcore network noodling a la Neal Stephenson’s CRYPTONOMICON, SOMEONE is so original, so groundbreaking and so heartbreaking that just giving away a little of the plot is really hard to do. In a nutshell, SOMEONE is a love story between both a man and a woman and a man and his incredibly weird, ridiculous, dysfunctional family.

Despite the fact that the protagonist’s mother is a washing machine and his father’s a mountain, this is no throwaway comedy. It’s a supercharged beam of imagination and humanity shining with such intensity that just to reading it acts as a stimulant for your own dormant creative center. Run, don’t walk, and if I haven’t convinced you yet, the text is available for free (along with his other novels) at Doctorow’s website at craphound.com. –Ryun Patterson

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OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THE SCI-FI ESSENTIAL SERIES:
• CHILDREN OF CHAOS by Dave Duncan
• THE CLAN CORPORATE by Charles Stross
• OLD MAN’S WAR by John Scalzi