Overclocked

I was recently loaned a copy of Cory Doctorow's book Overclocked by a friend who I trade good SF with. I've resisted reading any Doctorow to date, but this friend has very similar taste to my own, so I decided to give it a whirl.

See, you have to understand. Cory Doctorow drives me nuts. There isn't really a rational explanation for this; he's just always bugged me. I've read Boing Boing for ages, and nine times out of ten, if the tone of a post annoys me, it was Cory's. His copyfighting successful-writer web-celebrity expat status irks me beyond all endurance, because goddammit I wish my business card read that way! To top it off he's so smug about it all (as any sane human being would be). It just makes me bonkers.

So it is with great reluctance that I am forced to say this book was really fantastic. I was a little turned off by some of the abuses of the English language, but no more so than in any book where an accent is written out in the spelling, and even while having a negative reaction to that I was in awe of the stories. I think the most impressive part is how fresh it all seems. Considering his unapologetic borrowing of titles and concepts from previous authors, his work manages to be incredibly non-derivative, which is a quality sadly lacking in most SF these days.

So I recommend reading the book. You can read it for free on his website, along with his other books, but it was good enough to be worth buying to show your support, which I'm probably going to be doing soon.

... Dammit.