Who Goes There?

It seems like a lot of SF writers now living prefer to keep to themselves, with a few notable exceptions—Cory Doctorow being one of those exceptions. Over the past couple decades he has become arguably more notable as a personality and commentator on the state of copyright in our post-internet age than as an SF writer. On top of his fiction he’s been a prolific non-fiction writer and editor, including being a former co-editor of Boing Boing and having articles published in the likes of Wired and Asimov’s Science Fiction. He did something that was pretty audacious with his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, in that he used a Creative Commons license to make it digitally available online, for free(!), simultaneously with its commercial print publication. This was back in 2004, mind you. He’s a bit of a character. While Doctorow hasn’t yet won a Hugo or Nebula, he’s tied for the most number of Prometheus Award wins; given his democratic socialist politics this is a bit ironic. Still, it’s true that few people have fought more staunchly against the horrors of DRM and top-down surveilance, and in that sense “freedom” is a big word in his vocabulary. Despite “Craphound” being a very early story for Doctorow, he clearly has soft enough a spot for it to have named his own website after it.

He’s from Toronto, but let’s not hold that against him.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the March 1998 issue of Science Fiction Age. It was then reprinted in Northern Suns (ed. Glenn Grant and David G. Hartwell), The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection (ed. Gardner Dozois), Before They Were Giants: First Works from Science Fiction Greats (ed. James L. Sutter), The Big Book of Science Fiction (ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer), and the Doctorow collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. Because Doctorow makes his work available online for free, with some copyright trickery (that I can’t be bothered to explain), you can read “Craphound” totally legit on Project Gutenberg.

Enhancing Image

“Craphound” takes place in what seems to be a then-present Canada, which means that despite presumably taking place in the ’90s it culturally feels more like the ’80s. To make matters worse, Jerry, our narrator, is a sucker for ’50s nostalgia, from pop culture to useless knick knacks—the remains of a bygone era. As is expected I suppose for a story written by a young person (Doctorow would’ve only been 25 or 26 at the time), about a similarly young character, there’s a pining for a past the author/protagonist did not actually live to experience. It’s also worth mentioning that if “Craphound” is set in the present then it’s a present with a big difference—namely that mankind and intelligent alien life have long since made contact. Indeed Jerry’s best bud is one of the aliens, named Craphound; that’s the name Jerry gave Craphound, not his actual name. Of course, Jerry and Craphound are both craphounds, in that they’re dumpster divers, finding old crap as yard sales and whatnot and then reselling them elsewhere at a higher price. People (especially old people, if we’re being honest) sometimes give away old stuff of theirs without knowing the thing’s market value, which is where craphounds come in. I mean, it’s a living; at least they’re not landlords. It helps also that thee two are redeemed by their genuine friendship.

Conflict enters the picture when the two buddies find a yard sale run by a couple of “blue-haired old ladies,” with the top find being a trunk full of Wild West apparel and toys, tossed-aside belongings for a guy who was once a kid, or rather liked to play as “Billy the Kid,” but who would be a grown-ass man now. (Remember how Westerns were inexplicably really popular in the ’50s? What was up with that? Remember Bonanza? Have Gun—Will Travel…?) Jerry likes what he sees, but Craphound is nothing less than enraptured, and the two have a kind of bidding war over the trunk, with Craphound winning out, albeit by paying a ridiculous amount. This strains the two’s friendship, not least because it violates an unwritten rule among craphounds, in that when fellow craphounds are at a yard sale or whatever at the same time they ought to refrain from getting into a bidding war. There’s a time and a place for bidding, and that’s an auction house, not some granny’s front yard. Doesn’t help either that Jerry does his business as a way of making a living while Craphound is doing it for fun, already being unspeakably rich, having “built his stake on Earth by selling a complicated biochemical process for non-chlorophyll photosynthesis to a Saudi banker.” Others of Craphound’s race have similarly become members of the top 1% on Earth by selling their technology, or at least some of it, for prices the richest of humanity would be pay a pretty penny for. The friendship between Jerry and Craphound is thus troubled by a difference in species, cultural priorities, but also class. An older and wiser Doctorow might’ve interrogated Craphound’s vulture-like attitude with human culture more unsparingly, or indeed framed Jerry’s own capacity for selfishness more harshly, but ultimately this is a story that, while playing tug-of-war between optimism and pessimism in humanity’s relationship with capital, ultimately goes for optimism.

That’s not to say “Craphound” doesn’t evaluate its own late-capitalist landscape, which at times can border on apocalyptic, the very much Canadian Jerry obsessing over American pop culture of the past, Craphound himself being like a wealthy tourist. Jerry becomes fixated on someone else’s past, that of the man he only knows as “Billy the Kid,” the former owner of the trunk, whose contents have memories attached to them which are not Jerry’s own. He does, by sheer chance at a sale, meet a strapping 30-year-old upstart named Scott, who co-runs a firm and who matches the description Billy’s mother had given. Despite already being rather wealthy Scott is himself a fellow craphound, and over the course of about a week, the two strike up a friendship, their meeting place called the Secret Boutique, a second-hand market, Scott being a kind of a replacement for Craphound. Perhaps the strangest moment between these two, representing Jerry’s capacity for occasional selflessness (and I suspect remorse over his bitter treatment of Craphound the last time they were together), is when Jerry buys a Native American headdress for five dollars, intending to sell it somewhere else at a much higher price, only to sell it back to Scott/Billy for the same amount. This act of kindness must be at least partly fueled by the fact that Jerry’s convinced Scott/Billy is his man, so to speak. “As I said it, I was overcome with the knowledge that this was ‘Billy the Kid,’ the original owner of the cowboy trunk. I don’t know why I felt that way, but I did, with utter certainty.” Again there’s a cynical undertone to all this, these lily-white Canadians hawking over junk and often caricatured representations of indigenous peoples; that we never get to meet an indigenous character may or may not add to the subtle bleakness.

There Be Spoilers Here

Bad news: Scott/Billy turns out to not be Billy after all. This changes surprisingly little, although it does coincide with Jerry realizing that maybe his own childhood memories are more important than leeching off of other people’s memories. The good news is that Craphound is back, and the two buddies reconcile while at an auction sale, which is perhaps fitting. In this story friendships are formed and reformed, which provide the external conflict, but this is also about Jerry’s internal conflict, his sense of nostalgia and hungering for a past which is not necessarily his. I’m referring to “nostalgia” in the proper sense of the word, which is a kind of homesickness, as opposed to a kind of euphoria as people often think of it. Jerry spends most of the story homesick, except the home in question is not concrete but abstract. He comes to a realization that’s put pretty beautifully, maybe too beautifully given how colloquial his speech is otherwise; but still it’s one of those little passages I can imagine Doctorow smiled at while he was writing it. Hell, writing is such a solitary business, you may as well take pride in it. So here it is:

I understood that an alien wearing a cowboy hat and sixguns and giving them away was a poem and a story, and a thirtyish bachelor trying to spend half a month’s rent on four glasses so that he could remember his Grandma’s kitchen was a story and a poem, and that the disused fairground outside Calgary was a story and a poem, too.

That last one is referring to the fact that some of these aliens, or “extees,” are so rich that they buy up property on Earth, presumably in the hopes of turning a profit on it—being craphounds on a considerably larger scale than what Jerry does. In a different story (I suspect James Tiptree, Jr. would have a fun time with this premise) I can imagine such a turn of events becoming something quite shadowy, but Doctorow (or at least Jerry) wants to think the aliens know what they’re doing. The result is an ending that one would call cautiously optimistic.

A Step Farther Out

“Craphound” wasn’t Doctorow’s first published story, but it was the first to pick up traction with reprints, and it’s not hard to understand why. Aside from being a uniquely Canadian story (we even get a Tim Horton reference) at a time when genre SF was overwhelmingly American and British, it comes off as almost post-cyberpunk, despite the lack of futuristic technology in the humans’ lives. It feels like post-cyberpunk in the sense that the great technological shift has not only married late capitalism already but has seemingly passed over the average person’s head. The aliens have left their table scraps, in the form of basically patenting little pieces of their own tech, and yet humanity at large seems no better off for this. On a macro scale this sounds bleak, but Doctorow posits that at least on a micro scale, on an individual basis, there’s room for hope. There has to be room for hope. Which is something we all think about, probably.

See you next time.