Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

“Well, it's the only art form where the consumer has to be a performer. It's like expecting everybody to sight-read music for the French horn and most people can't read that well and I mean, hell, you go into an art gallery and just look, or go to a movie or a play and just look. We are the only art form where the audience has to be a performer and it's expecting a hell of a lot of them.” --Kurt Vonnegut

Yes kids, it’s time again for me to lecture on what you should be reading/listening to/watching. But trust me, it’s worth it. You’ll be getting in on the second floor of an author you’ll come to know well in the next decade.

What Vonnegut means is that, more than any other form of art, writing requires the audience to be an active participant in the creation of the art. The author can only set up the story, provide the dialogue, setting, stage direction and the plot. You, the reader, must provide the final images. You are the director, art director, set dresser, actor, composer, cinematographer and craft services. In order to enjoy a book, you must mount a huge production within your mind and provide the drama with the proper gravitas, the humor with the proper execution and the heart with the proper warmth.

It’s not small task. A great reader has the mind of a proper Buddhist meditation master. Your mind is clear, your body is relaxed and you aim for enlightenment (of a sort) by moving through towards that final page when you finally know the ultimate truth of the self-contained world you hold within your hands.

Take notice next time you are in a hotel lobby, on the beach, on a train or on a plane. You can see the reading gurus in their books; literally within their books. The best has the ability to interact with the outside world without ever leaving their inner world of literature.

I bring all this up because with Cory Doctorow’s latest book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, the author has presented his performers with his most difficult work to date. It’s also his most heart-felt, seemingly personal (don’t want to fall into that good old logical fallacy) and funniest. However, the world you will inhabit is a difficult one.

The world looks, sounds, feels, even smells like the one you inhabit now. The technology is a step ahead of us (and man, sometimes you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of the most basic application of a current technology . . . someone may get rich off Cory’s ideas . . . sounds like Clarke Syndrome). Nevertheless, there’s also a deeper, more surreal layer in which nothing is quite right with Alan, our reluctant hero, his neighbor nor his family who comes to his doorstep one day to throw his idyllic attempt at a “normal” life into a tailspin. A dead man, a mountain, an island, a washing machine and Russian nesting dolls . . . it all makes my family seem the picture of sanity.

All of these details are interesting and, of course, important. But it’s Doctorow’s heart this time out that grabbed me. He can dazzle me with his wit, his imagination and his superb writing. However, there is surprising warmth below the surface of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

Great Science Fiction is not about science. Science is merely a trapping, a vehicle to tell a human story about human interests, human limitations, human loneliness, human grandeur, and human folly. At its heart, Sci Fi is an allegorical medium that tells you more about the inner working of the human soul than it reveals about technology.

From the outset, it is clear that, pushing aside the surreal, mysterious nature of how the story unfolds, that Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town is a story of personal importances. It is a story about love and respect of those things, or people, that others have forgotten. Whether it is a children’s book with a deteriorating spine that oozes with the promise of a past life, or the beauty that hides beneath layers of neglect on an old hardwood floor, a wingback chair . . . or a girl with regenerative wings, everything has worth to someone.

There is no trash nor no waste here.