After the Siege

The final story in Cory Doctorow's Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present is the perfect ending to the book. It revisits themes from some of my favorite stories in the collection, and takes the reader on a journey uniquely that of protagonist, Valentina.

In his introduction to the story, Doctorow explains how this story grew out of the strange marriage of his interest in copyright and patent law and the horrific WWII stories his grandmother (no coincidence, her name is Valentina) told him as they walked the streets of St. Petersburg. The story that results uses the idea from the first short in the collection, "Printcrime," of a futuristic printer that can make household items- clothes, furniture, food, medicine. Inevitably, pirated copies of household goods abound, and the government cracks down on stolen intellectual property turned boxer shorts and beer. In "After the Siege," Doctorow goes a step further, and sets us in world clearly the parallel to Eastern Europe between WWI and WWII. In this post-war world, printers serve the everyday needs of the people, from food and tasty sweets to hearing aids for deaf children, but they also construct buildings- hospitals, schools, even a movie theater. Life is good, until the foreign power who created the technology gets mad that the Eastern European nation didn't pay them for the new life they're printing. After all these folks are pirating their new standard of living- they're thieves. The rich foreign power (let's stop kidding around and call it a futuristic U.S.) bombs the heck out of the Eastern Europeans who pirated their technology, and releases a malware (think software virus) that leaves the population without functioning printers- and, in effect, without hospitals, medicine, clothing, or even food. The evil futuristic U.S. is more than willing to beat, starve, and bomb the poorer nation into respecting copyright.

So, what does the starving, limping nation do? It fights back!

Doctorow does a pretty good job of weaving these high-level concepts with the low-level view of protagonist, Valentina. Like her literary cousin, Anda ("Anda's Game"), Valentina loves sweets. She likes going to the movies, talking with her friends. Then her life is gutted by the bombing of her city and the war. She follows a pretty grim path during the siege, fighting off zombies (the enemy releases a new strain of the zombiism virus), digging trenches, losing teeth and fingers, working corpse duty for an extra half ration of pebble-weighted bread. There's a dark shadow of survival horror in here, based on what Doctorow's grandmother lived through, but also reminiscent of the gut-level shock in "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth."

"After the Siege" starts with flying cars and candy forests, a cinema whose seats fly out like the senate seats in Star Wars, Episode II. Later there will be vampires- would it surprise you if I said there was also a wizard? Like the rest of the fantastical elements in this tale, the wizard has its roots in Doctorow's practical vision of the future.

But don't think that practicality keeps the sense of magic from sparkling through even the darkest alleys of "After the Seige."

I'd asses this story much the way I'd asses the collection as a whole: a morass of excellent ideas, an unabashed fascination with copyright law, and a good dose of excitement. "After the Siege," like most of Doctorow's stories, goes a few pages longer than I would like. I guess someone with such a strong vision of the future can't leave his readers without a glimpse at what's in store for his characters' tomorrows. Despite this and a few small stylistic lapses, the collection had something to say and sent the reader on some fun and thrilling adventures while saying it. That's good science fiction!