Free Craphound 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