True Names

by Cory Doctorow, Benjamin Rosenbaum

The tale of duelling galactic colony-organisms that are competing to recruit all the matter in the universe for raw computation.

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, Hard Science Fiction, Novella

100 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2008

About the author

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of the YA graphic novel In Real Life, the nonfiction business book Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free, and young adult novels like Homeland, Pirate Cinema, and Little Brother and novels for adults like Rapture Of The Nerds and Makers. He is a Fellow for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founded the UK Open Rights Group. Born in Toronto, Canada, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've never read anything like this. Very interesting and strange.

[Kyra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I first read this back in 2014, a year when I actually read a decent number of good things that I'm interested in revisiting (well, and Wintergirls, which I guess I need to reread about once a year anyway). I enjoyed enough of what I read that year that I'm not sure I quite remembered how much I liked this - but also, I haven't particularly liked other things I've read by the two authors working individually, so it's a bit weird to admit just how much I like it for that reason, too.

I really, really like this novella, though. I mean, not just that it's very engaging (which it is), but also it's quite important to me. I feel like I learned something important from it, or that it makes a very good shorthand for a particular way of thinking about things. I strongly recommend it!

[Katherine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a little confusing of a read at first, but once I understood the rules of this particular universe, it was an enjoyable read. This is definitely world as simulation, post-human stuff. A bit of the kind of thing you also see in a little more accessible fashion in The Quantum Thief.

You have competing simulations here, order, chaos, and something in between. It's hard to figure out what is real and what isn't, it's all in layers of recursion, but there's definitely a story here that's pretty entertaining.

[Chuk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one was great, tons of far-future supertech all rushing past with not much explanation of how any of it works with cute 'societies' that I feel might have been a bit unrealistic but give the human reader something to root for.

[J · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh, short stories shouldn't be this much effort to read.

I liked the world and the concept of words within words - what is real after all? The ending helped the story for me but only in the sense it confirmed what I had guessed it correctly.

The names are part of the stories but it makes reading difficult as various characters have the same names. The pronoun usage doesn't help either. You get used it after a bit but now and then it is difficult to follow.

But the middle again just seemed to wander around a lot as it felt like the story was trying to find itself. It eventually comes together but it felt at times like things were hodgepodged together. perhaps this was a result of the two authors' effort not jelling well.

I also felt the story was more like a novella than a short story (which is how it was labeled at Feedbooks.

But I wouldn't recommend this story and certainly not for a quick or light read.

[James DiGiovanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing novella that suffers just a bit from an obvious ending. Rosenbaum's imagination in describing not just a world but a universe so divergent from ours, but with a universality of emotional conflict and content, is at its peak here. Definitely worth checking out his other stories as well, I didn't see the influence of Cory Doctorow, though he's listed as co-author, but maybe he was able to set aside didactic YA fiction and explore something a little richer than the obvious and simple political parables he usually traffics in.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really wonderful novella: named in homage to and sort-of building off of Vernon Vinge's original cyberspace-defining story "True Names", this one has just as much imagination and though-provoking ideas as the Vinge story. But it is set far, far in the future and is much more of an expansion on those ideas, taking them many generations out. Despite making you think it's also got plenty of action and kept me reading easily.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Co-authored by Benjamin Rosenbaum, this was, in a way, a nice change of pace from the other novels of Cory Doctorow that I've read, in that it takes the setting out into outer space, one of my favorite settings for science fiction. I'd recommend this novella to anyone who has previously read and enjoyed any of Cory's work.

[Jaysen Naidoo · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful ideas