The Lost Cause

I have always struggled with Doctorow's writing and this wasn't an exception (see that it took me over a year to make it through).

The story is so "on the nose". It doesn't lead you along, helping you understand through example and metaphor. It just drags you along a whirlwind tour of hopeful progressive political thought experiments. Most of my favorite fiction teaches similar concepts (we can choose to just care about/for people, we can choose to abandon the old narrative and live a better future), but does so with nuance and impact.

When I started to enjoy the book is accepting that it's a hopeful tour of progressive ideas, more like a summary of a bunch of young people's online "what-if" rants. It's legitimately useful in that sense because it places those ideas in to a narrative and helps the reader find application for them.

One problem I had is that there is a famed politician who cut through all the red tape and enabled the whole US to make progress again. Yeah, she did that by re-democratizing government, buuuut its still a depiction of a political personality cult and that feels icky in an otherwise "power to the people" story.

The other main issue I have is the hopefulness that technology will save us. Don't get me wrong, the story actually focuses on technologies used in meaningful reasonable ways (heat pumps and sea walls) instead of fantastical schemes (geoengineering such as reflective atmospheric gases to reduce sunlight reaching earth). The story also balances the technology with a human element. Still, it wrests technology out of the hands of capitalism in a way that I struggle to find satisfying or aspirational.

I don't have much of a conclusion, but if you go in to this book looking to enjoy a romp through modern progressive ideology, without getting stuck on the details or the rather 2D characters, you'll find it to be an interesting projection of where we could go from here.

While some sold it as "solarpunk," I'm not sure it fits this genre. Brooks, the "hero" character, is emotionally complex, but eternally falls on optimism. And his comrades generally seem to share an upbeat nature. Near future southern California is hot, plagued by fires, and dealing with the fallout of MAGA racists and their "plut", cryptocurrency allies, a broader swath of "decent people", and the leftist activists that are trying to create change in the face of climate catastrophe that leaves many internally displaced persons. A few characters add some political complexity, but there's an overall "us vs them" equation that lays the foundation for the book. It reads like a few others of Doctorow's books (Walkaway in mind), where there's a constant back and forth between positive, hopeful movement, and reactionary destruction. It shares with other solarpunk (1) a lot of talk about solar and carbon neutral or negative technologies, and (2) a general optimism in the face of difficult climate situations. Unlike much other solarpunk, this isn't a further off future, where significant transformation has changed political, social and cultural grounds. It is instead a near future, where the political debates remain (realistically, I think) in relatively similar terrain. Unlike "The Ministry for the Future", Doctorow doesn't get lost in scalar storytelling ranging from micro to macro transformation. Instead, the focus is on the change that could be made at a small level, in one place, by a group of committed activists. I think the book is meant to leave you hopeful, and I can see how it could do. However, unlike The Ministry for the Future, Becky Chambers' novels, or other Solarpunk, this book feels like it lands solidly in more realistic science fiction. It was a rich romp with some fun ideas (I love the notion that AI combined with open source does something useful and makes it possible for lay people to collectively redesign neighborhoods and communities) and, I think, a decent read on near future politics. And, as I often do, I find myself appreciating Doctorow's political bent, including his thorough investigations into "plut" culture and the cryptocurrency political hellscape.

I like Cory Doctorow's blog and share his politics. I backed The Lost Cause on Kickstarter. There are some cool things about the book, but overall I wouldn't recommend it.

It's shocking to read "MAGA" in fiction. Most sci-fi authors of today grew up on sci-fi written before 1980, and that is what we think sci-fi is. When those works were originally written, they probably referred to politics of the day. (Every book from that period seems to be a meditation on nuclear war.) But their settings and themes became the settings and themes of sci-fi. No history after 1980 can be included in a sci-fi, because it was never included in the books we grew up with.

It's fantastic that The Lost Cause breaks through this and more authors should do it.

It's clearly very political and that's great too. Sci-fi is supposed to say something.

The main ideological argument of the book is that leftists are hot brown chicks who cook exotic vegan dishes, while the conservatives are fat old white dudes. We can assume they cook bland dry burgers.

Oh, and the conservatives have a beloved sci-fi book that is a wish-fulfillment fantasy that makes them sound like the good guys. So silly to have a book like that, right? Haha!

In the conservatives' book they end up heroically gunning down leftists. While in The Lost Cause the leftists only almost end up heroically gunning down the conservatives. The two sides are not the same!

Both of these phenomena (appeal to hot chicks and claiming to act differently while acting the same) are so blatant. Maybe it's intentional? But to what end?

I have read a total two explicitly political sci-fi stories, The Lost Cause and William Morris's [b:News from Nowhere|189746|News from Nowhere|William Morris|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1172550120l/189746.SY75.jpg|13352231]. It's weird that hot chicks are also a core argument of Morris's.

The book has a few weird quirks. An unsettling amount of alcohol is consumed without any issue. Just non-stop drinking and pot. Is that normal? Am I just old? A significant fraction of the book is dedicated to food too. The dishes sound great and I would love to try them all. But I'm not sure all the detail about them helps the book. I think the argument is "We should let in more immigrants because they bring great food." Which I don't think is a great argument. (Should we reject immigrants that lack a tasty cuisine?) But it can also read as "Look at how many fancy dishes I know!"

Some of the leftist cultural markers are so over the top it's funny. Sex in masks! "Someone gave me a vegan empanada." "I was so ready to tear down my fucking house." As a 40+ Hungarian living in Hungary I can't directly connect with these tribal markers. I accept that tribalism is necessary for building a community. But I would have preferred a book that doesn't simply show that leftists are better and leave it at that. What if the conservatives were hotter? If they had better food? If they were nicer?