Radicalized — Available March 19th
With A Rebel Yell . . . She Cried “More, More, More”
I know what you’re thinking, “…oh great, another post about another Cory Doctorow book. This is starting to get repetitive.” Well, that’s tough, because the man’s a genius.
It wasn’t that long ago that I posted about Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, and I just finished reading Little Brother, which was a great read, filled with teenage digital revolutionaries versus an evil surveillance state. I’ll be sure to review it here before too long, because I know a lot of you are big fans, just like me. There’s even a sequel.
Today, though, let’s focus on Tor Books’ recent announcement of Radicalized, Doctorow’s upcoming release of a volume of four dystopian novellas that, according to the publisher, are book “connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future.” There’s not much detail given, but they did summarize the novellas for us:
- Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.
- In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectify the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless… only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.
- Radicalized is a story of a dark web-powered violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife’s terminal cancer.
- The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow’s Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.
Four Stories of Our Dystopian Present — Available March 19th
I’ve come to expect Doctorow to be so very fresh. He’s able to put perspective on our present age by interspersing real life with real tech, and even when it’s on the nose, you can still appreciate the rhetoric. Due for hardcover release on March 19, this is exactly what I want to be reading in a couple of months. If I can’t convince Tor Books to send a review copy, then I may just keep the Cory train rolling and dig into Walkaway. It’s on my list, coming highly recommended by @trash-panda, whose taste I trust.
If that’s not a good enough recommendation, then I’ll leave you with a few reviews from the greats:
“The darker the hour, the better the moment for a rigorously-imagined utopian fiction. Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle. A wonderful novel: everything we’ve come to expect from Cory Doctorow and more.” ―William Gibson
“The Bhagavad Gita of hacker/maker/burner/open-source/git/gnu/wiki/99%/adjunct-faculty/Anonymous/shareware/thingiverse/cypher-punk/LGTBQIA*/squatter/upcycling culture…zipped it down into a pretty damned tight techno-thriller with a lot of sex in it.” ―Neal Stephenson
