Cory Doctorow (www.craphound.com) is a science fiction writer, blogger, and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (www.boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, the New York Times, and many other papers, magazines, and websites. Presently living in London, in 2006 he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy. A collection of short stories, A Place So Foreign and Eight More (2004), won the Sunburst Award. His latest short story collection is Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present (2007). His latest novel, Little Brother, published for teenage readers, is one of the significant SF novels of 2008. His next novel for adults, Makers, publishes in 2009.
“The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away” was published online by Tor.com, a community-building enterprise of Tom Doherty Associates that is at present the highest paying fiction market in SF. This is perhaps its first appearance in print. It is an excellent story about a future in which monk-like techies retreat into secular cults where they can work without dealing with everyday life in dystopia. But their seclusion is illusory, and the world intrudes.