Super Man and the Bug Out Read online

  Copyright (C) 2001 Cory Doctorow

  The Super Man and the Bugout

  Cory Doctorow

  From "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," a short story collection published inSeptember, 2003 by Four Walls Eight Windows Press (ISBN 1568582862). Seehttps://craphound.com/place for more.

  Originally published in On Spec, Fall 2001

  "It is certainly worth noting that the story in this issue which flagrantlyviolates the length limit, Cory Doctorow's 'The Super Man and the Bugout,' atclose to 10,000 words, is also by far the best story... The story is both veryfunny, and a portrayal of a quite believable non-human human being."

  - Rich Horton, Tangent Online https://www.tangentonline.com/reviews/magazine.php3?review=463

  --

  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," publishedby Four Walls Eight Windows Press in September, 2003, ISBN 1568582862. I'vereleased this story, along with five others, under the terms of a CreativeCommons license that gives you, the reader, a bunch of rights that copyrightnormally reserves for me, the creator.

  I recently did the same thing with the entire text of my novel, "Down and Out inthe Magic Kingdom" (https://craphound.com/down), and it was an unmitigatedsuccess. Hundreds of thousands of people downloaded the book -- good news -- andthousands of people bought the book -- also good news. It turns out that, asnear as anyone can tell, distributing free electronic versions of books is agreat way to sell more of the paper editions, while simultaneously getting thebook into the hands of readers who would otherwise not be exposed to my work.

  I still don't know how it is artists will earn a living in the age of theInternet, but I remain convinced that the way to find out is to do basicscience: that is, to do stuff and observe the outcome. That's what I'm doinghere. The thing to remember is that the very *worst* thing you can do to me asan artist is to not read my work -- to let it languish in obscurity anddisappear from posterity. Most of the fiction I grew up on is out-of-print, andthis is doubly true for the short stories. Losing a couple bucks to people whowould have bought the book save for the availability of the free electronic textis no big deal, at least when compared to the horror that is being irrelevantand unread. And luckily for me, it appears that giving away the text for freegets me more paying customers than it loses me.

  You can find the canonical version of this file athttps://craphound.com/place/download.php

  If you'd like to convert this file to some other format and distribute it, youhave my permission, provided that:

  * You don't charge money for the distribution

  * You keep the entire text intact, including this notice, the license below, andthe metadata at the end of the file

  * You don't use a file-format that has "DRM" or "copy-protection" or any otherform of use-restriction turned on

  If you'd like, you can advertise the existence of your edition by posting a linkto it at https://craphound.com/place/000017.php

  --

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  THE WORK (AS DEFINED BELOW) IS PROVIDED UNDER THE TERMS OF THIS CREATIVE COMMONSPUBLIC LICENSE ("CCPL" OR "LICENSE"). THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OROTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THISLICENSE IS PROHIBITED.

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