Radicalized – four novellas
Cory Doctorow (2020)
Cory Doctorow is angry and it shows.
He has been working for years at the interface of civil rights and computer technology, particularly with open source software, while writing very good (and entertaining) science fiction in his spare time – or perhaps vice versa (visit his own site or wikipedia for more about him).
But the USA has been going from bad to worse in many respects and in these near-future stories Doctorow lets fly at some of the problems.
They are good, but they are not a whole lot of fun, since the victories celebrated in three of them come at such great personal and social cost. We can rejoice with the refugees in the first story as they triumph over systematic repression and exploitation, for instance, but first we have to share their suffering.
I have tagged this book ‘dystopia‘, because its visions are indeed dystopian; but here contemporary America is the dystopia, and that is a worry.
Re Doctorow’s Doomsday preppers: the kernel of this story is a few years old but here we get the whole thing in enough detail to overcome our natural incredulity – https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-10-20/tech-billionaires-are-planning-for-the-apocalypse/101546216