Cory Doctorow’s new novel, “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town”:http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=72-0765312786-0, is out. Now Cory is a mate, so I’m not sure that I’m entirely unbiased in warmly recommending it. But I can honestly say that while I enjoyed his first two novels, I think that this one is on an entirely different level. It’s matter-of-fact surrealism; the main character’s father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, and his brothers are nesting Russian dolls, an island, a prophet and a very unpleasant reanimated corpse. It’s a love poem to Toronto (which is part of why I enjoyed it so much – the house in which much of the novel takes place is about 15 minutes walk from where I used to live). And it’s a warm, funny romance between two flawed, interesting people. Gene Wolfe says it’s a “glorious book, but there are hundreds of those. It is more. It is a glorious book unlike any book you’ve ever read.” And you can read it for yourself before buying; the text is Creative Commoned and available for download at “http://craphound.com/someone/download.php”:http://craphound.com/someone/download.php.

!http://www.henryfarrell.net/cory.jpg!

At first sight, the dispute over Bob Geldof’s attempts to prevent resale of tickets to Live Aid 8, discussed by Henry, looks like a classic dispute between hardheaded economists and soft social scientists. In reality it’s nothing of the kind. The critics have not only ignored the issues raised by sociology and other disciplines, they have got their economics wrong.
[click to continue…]