It’s only natural that Alan, the broadminded hero of Doctorow’s fresh, unconventional SF novel, is willing to help everybody he meets. After all, he’s the product of a mixed marriage (his father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine), so he knows how much being an outcast can hurt. Alan tries desperately to behave like a human being–or at least like his idealized version of one. He joins a cyber-anarchist’s plot to spread a free wireless Internet through Toronto at the same time he agrees to protect his youngest brothers (members of a set of Russian nesting dolls) from their dead brother who’s now resurrected and bent on revenge.

After reading the Publisher’s Weekly plot summary of Cory Doctorow’s “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” above, you’re probably wondering the same thing I did: WTF? 😕 It took me a little bit to get comfortable with the characters and the backstory, and even then I was still scratching my head (figuratively), not sure of what exactly was going on. As with the other Doctorow stories I’ve completed recently, I read this one on my Treo in iSilo format (you can download it for free here in a wide variety of formats).

The main characters are named alphabetically, but this is never clearly explained. So you start out reading about Alan (the protagonist), but then in one sentence it suddenly refers to him as “Art” and then goes back to “Alan.” This confused me because the previous Doctorow story I read was “Eastern Standard Tribe” and the main character in that book is Art. I figured, at first, this was just a publishing error. But then he (Alan) introduces himself to his neighbors as “Adam.” Eventually it became clear that Alan was being called by any name starting with A. His brothers are then (in order), Billy (who can see the future), Charlie (who is an island, yes, an actual island), Davey (an evil undead sort of thing and the main antagonist), and then Ed, Frank, George who are the nesting dolls (George inside Frank inside Ed). Now, remember that all of their names change constantly throughout the text, only the first letter stays the same. Then throw in that their mother is a washing machine and their father is a mountain and they were raised by stone golems and you start to see how messed up this story is. But messed up in a good way.

Alan has left the mountain (his father) and moved to Toronto where he is trying to blend in with normal people, like  his next door neighbors (alphabetically named Krishna, Link, Mimi, and Natalie but their names don’t change and Doctorow inexplicably skipped the letters H, I, and J). Alan’s brother Davey, who they killed some six years before, is back and hunting down the brothers one by one.

There’s another plotline running through “Someone” that involves Alan and Kurt (a dumpster-diving, anarchist techno-punk) trying to blanket their area of the city with free WiFi (open access to information via technology is a typical plot element in many of Doctorow’s stories). This whole technology thread (describing wireless access points, routers, network traffic, etc.) stands in stark contrast the fantasy elements of Alan, his family, and neighbor Mimi, who Alan discovers has her own secret: she has wings.

The narrative jumps back and forth between the present (Alan living in Toronto helping Kurt with his ParasiteNet project) and the past (Alan and the brothers growing up on the mountain and eventually killing Davey). Eventually, both story lines come together in the climatic, if not somewhat confusing, conclusion.

It’s a good read … check it out.