Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005) is Doctorow's most formally experimental novel and his most direct fictional treatment of mesh networking and community wireless infrastructure. Published by tor-books with simultaneous free release under creative-commons-licensing, it weaves magical realism and technological advocacy in a way that is unusual in Doctorow's body of work.
The Strange Family and Magical Realism
The protagonist, Alan (whose name changes throughout — he is referred to as Adam, Aloysius, and other A-names), is the son of a mountain and a washing machine. His brothers include a dead-and-revived boy, a set of Russian nesting-doll siblings, and a winged girl whose wings he must cut off periodically. This is not metaphor in the conventional sense — Doctorow plays the magical elements straight, refusing to rationalize them. The family dynamics, however, map onto recognizable human experiences of difference, shame, sibling cruelty, and the negotiation of inherited strangeness.
Wireless Mesh as Political Argument
Running through the fantastical family plot is Alan's real-world project: building a free, community-owned wireless mesh network across his Toronto neighborhood. This strand of the novel is essentially a manifesto for open wireless infrastructure embedded in fiction. Alan proselytizes for mesh networking, explains its technical architecture, and confronts the social and institutional obstacles to building community-owned communication infrastructure.
The mesh network argument engages directly with the end-to-end-principle — the design philosophy that intelligence should live at the edges of a network rather than in centralized chokepoints. Community mesh networking is the physical embodiment of end-to-end: it creates decentralized, resilient communication infrastructure that no single entity controls and that cannot be easily monopolized or surveilled.
Doctorow was engaged with practical wireless community networking activism at the time of writing — Toronto had active wireless community groups — and the novel serves partly as propaganda for the technical and political case for decentralized networking infrastructure.
The Most Challenging Doctorow Novel
Among Doctorow's novels, Someone Comes to Town is the most difficult to categorize and the most demanding of readers. It has fewer of the thriller-plot propulsive elements that characterize his YA work, and the magical elements sit uneasily with readers who come for the political technology arguments. Doctorow has acknowledged it as his personal favorite among his novels precisely because of its formal ambition.
The novel's failure to reach as wide an audience as little-brother or makers is instructive: Doctorow's most successful political fiction tends to work in genres (YA thriller, science fiction adventure) that carry readers through the argument. Someone Comes to Town demands more and reaches fewer — but it represents his most sustained attempt to use the tools of literary fiction, including magical realism, for political technology argument.
Legacy
The mesh networking strand has aged well. By the time of little-brother's publication and the surveillance debates following the Snowden revelations (see edward-snowden), community wireless and mesh networking had become increasingly urgent as alternatives to surveilled commercial infrastructure. The novel's arguments for decentralized, community-owned communication infrastructure look prescient from that vantage point, even if the novel itself remains underread in Doctorow's catalog.