Cory Doctorow 47 min read

A Canadian superhero, raised by a Jewish mother in Toronto, faces an existential crisis when benevolent aliens 'bug out' Earth's governments and make heroism, and everything else, obsolete.

Cory Doctorow's 2001 story is a very funny, warm-hearted first-contact and social-SF tale. Inventive, humane, sharply observed. Read it for prime early Doctorow, a hilarious and touching portrait of a decent super-man at loose ends in a world that no longer needs saving, praised as a genuinely believable non-human human being.

In its time

Published in 2001, during the 2000s, open-culture and post-scarcity visions.

Reading it

47 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).