A good collection of short stories and novellas loosely based off of spoofed titles of classic sci-fi novels, inspired by current events, and/or generally set in the present or near future with highly plausible (or already-existing) technology. There's the same preachy anti-copyright/information-wants-to-be-free message throughout, and some general anti-business Internet utopianism, but overall it was pretty good. I particularly liked the idea behind "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth", although I'd read it before this collection. If you're new to Doctorow, this collection is better than starting with a novel. ( )

Cory Doctorow'dan her biri birbirinden güzel öykülerin olduğu bir derleme bu kitap. Bazı öykülerde ileride yazdıklarına dair ipuçlarını ya da o fikirlerin gelişme noktalarını görebiliyorsunuz. Bu anlamda da Doctorow'un gelişimini görebilmenizi sağlıyor.

Kişisel olarak favori öykülerim After the Siege, Anda's Game ve When Sysadmins Rule the World. Hepsi oldukça iyi öyküler olsa da bu üçü kendisini öne çıkarmayı ve kafamda bazı şeyleri dürtmeyi becerebilenler oldu.

Özetle okunmasında fayda olan bir öykü(ler) kitabı. ( )

Short stories that you probably wanted to be longer. I'm a big fan of C D ( )

In the story “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth,” there is a horrifying worldwide coordinated terrorist attack. It involves nuclear weapons, lethal bioweapons, computer attacks that essentially take down the Net, and much more. The viewpoint character, in Canada, sees the CN Tower fall. He is one of a group of computer experts in a secure facility who avoid the airborne pathogen that has killed a significant fraction of the world’s population. These survivors aren’t experts in biowar, etc., but they do what they can, given their area of expertise, and begin to rebuild a functioning Internet amid the steaming ruins of civilization. Then...
When they start trying to cobble together a rudimentary government, one debate involves a female sysadmin. We get this rumination from the viewpoint character:
Not many woman sysadmins, and that was a genuine tragedy.
The main character’s wife and baby son have just been murdered by bioweapon. New York City and Mecca are radioactive moonscapes. Human civilization has been destroyed. And... “Not many woman sysadmins, and that was a genuine tragedy.”
The passage continues:
Women like Queen Kong were too good to exclude from the field. He’d have to hack a solution to get women balanced out in his new government. Require each region to elect one woman and one man?
Look, I try to avoid political comments in my reviews. (In fact, generally such comments are part of the problem.) But you have to call out extreme insanity. An author who writes something like that is not mentally normal. You literally cannot satirize leftism any more; it deranges people’s minds so thoroughly that a worldwide bio-nuclear strike sets off editorials asserting the need for more affirmative action. A normal person, in the wake of WMD-caused megadeath, would blurt out something like, “Oh God, this is terrible! Billions of people have been killed!” People like Doctorow would blurt, “Oh God, this is terrible! Women are underrepresented in network-admin positions!”
There is also the fact that the story screeches to a halt so the author can insert his little Op-Ed piece on politics. One is haunted by the painful suspicion that Doctorow thinks he’s being subtle here. One also gets the sense that he is actually fantasizing about such a cataclysm because, hey, at least it would clear the way for proportional representation.
Anyway, at this point, of course, I stopped reading and started just randomly flipping through the remaining pages. A few days later, the protagonist and a friend are wandering outside the secured facility, trying to find some food. To get the absurdity of what comes next, a little scene-setting:

They didn’t see a single soul on the fifteen-minute walk. There wasn’t a single sound... It was like walking on the surface of the moon...They walked past a little hatchback and in the front seat was the dried body of a woman holding the dried body of a baby, and his mouth filled with sour bile, even though the smell was faint through the rolled-up windows.
A page later they encounter a woman wandering in the ruins of civilization. The following exchange ensues:
Felix held his hands up. “Seriously, are you a doctor? A pharmacist?”
“I used to be a RN, ten years ago. I’m mostly a Web designer.”
“You’re shitting me,” Felix said.
“Haven’t you ever met a girl who knew about computers?”
“Actually, a friend of mine who runs Google’s data center is a girl. A woman, I mean.”
“You’re shitting me,” she said. “A woman ran Google’s data center?”
Amid the smoking craters where there used to be cities and the corpses lining the streets, people say, “Wow, a female ran Google’s data center? That really strikes me as a surprising and dramatic fact worth taking note of!” WTF? (What’s surprising about that, anyway?)
As I write this, in April 2015, there is a tempest in a teacup in the Sci-Fi/Fantasy world about “right wingers” “taking over” the Hugo Awards. The “right wingers” are actually just people who want to replace fiction that is (1) horribly stupid and (2) politically in-your-face, like the above, with actual story-telling. The amount of pearl-clutching this has occasioned from the in-your-face crowd is hilarious; God forbid that people read a story that doesn’t bombard them with tendentious agitprop!

I flipped through the intros to the rest of the stories. In the last intro, Doctorow compares the siege of Leningrad in WWII to, well, read: When Doctorow visited the city with his grandmother, who had been in the siege, “She pointed out the corners where she’d seen frozen, starved corpses, their asses sliced away by black-market butchers; the windows from which she’d heaved the bodies of her starved neighbors when she grew too weak to carry them... My grandmother’s stories found an easy marriage with the contemporary narrative of developing nations being strong-armed into taking on rich-country copyright and patent laws.” Well, of course! Who, on hearing of the cannabalism in the siege of Leningrad, doesn’t instantly think of international copyright law?

Summary: If you want story, not a political lecture of elephantine unsubtlety, avoid this deplorable collection of idiocy. ( )

I'm a fiend for short fiction, and Doctorow's [b:Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present|115969|Overclocked Stories of the Future Present|Cory Doctorow|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171719071s/115969.jpg|111691] is a thought-provoking collection of stories, often focused on intellectual property issues (it's more fun than it sounds).

I, Row-Boat and After the Siege were two favorites, though all the stories have something to recommend them.

My only complaint is that Doctorow is sometimes so eager to prove a point that he occasionally short-changes the story itself, or crosses that fine line between smart and preachy.

That said, this is a wonderful collection, and well worth your time. ( )