A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2004) is Doctorow's debut short story collection, published by Four Walls Eight Windows. It gathers nine stories representing his early short fiction output and was a significant early-career statement, winning the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic. The collection includes "0wnz0red," which received a Nebula Award nomination.
Early Career Significance
The collection appeared just one year after Doctorow's debut novel down-and-out-in-the-magic-kingdom (2003) and represents the other half of his early output: the short fiction that had been appearing in magazines and anthologies through the early 2000s. Together, the novel and this collection established Doctorow as a distinctive new voice in science fiction — one with strong political commitments, a particular interest in technology and intellectual property, and a gift for making abstract digital-rights arguments concrete through character and narrative.
The Sunburst Award, a Canadian prize for speculative fiction, recognized Doctorow's standing within Canadian literary SF specifically and helped establish his reputation in his home country even as he was building an international following through his blog at boing-boing.
"0wnz0red"
The Nebula-nominated "0wnz0red" is the collection's most significant piece. The story follows a man who has sold his own biological processes to a corporation — his metabolism, his mood regulation, his body chemistry are all subject to corporate licensing and DRM-style controls. It is a surgical extrapolation of digital-rights-management-critique from software into the body: the same logic that allows software companies to restrict what you can do with code you have bought is extended to the biological substrate of human experience.
The story is remarkable for anticipating debates — about biological patents, pharmaceutical DRM, and the relationship between corporate ownership and bodily autonomy — that would become far more politically salient in the 2020s. In 2004, it read as near-future speculation; in retrospect, it looks like early mapping of a terrain that corporate power has increasingly occupied.
Connection to Doctorow's Emerging Arguments
The stories in A Place So Foreign are working out, in fictional form, the same arguments Doctorow was developing in his nonfiction and blogging. The intellectual property critique visible in content-essays is present throughout: stories examining what it means to own information, how creative-commons-licensing and open sharing change the relationship between creators and audiences, and what forms of resistance are available to individuals facing institutional and technological power.
The collection is the earliest concentrated statement of the concerns that would run through Doctorow's entire career, making it essential background for understanding where his later, more developed arguments came from.