A quick note. I do a fair amount of short book reviews, but in the interest of trying to impose some rationality to this little setup, I am going to try and limit them to one day a week. Hence the new section. If you don’t want the book reviews, feel free to remove yourself from the section.
A bit of bias confession upfront: Corey Doctorow annoys me, somewhat. It is not even that I disagree with him all the time, or even most of the time. It is largely that he gets a lot of the big issues wrong. His fixation on ending copyright as a universal solution to all that ails the internet and his work for the EFF rub me the wrong way. The EFF in particular has been a blight on the growth of the internet. It’s idiotic opposition to having democratic control of the internet economy and its insistence that only government could possibly be a problem have helped lead to the current hellscape that is the internet.
I once heard Doctorow say on Adam Conover’s podcast (an excellent podcast, by the way) that “we” never thought that anti-trust laws would be so weakened that corporations could be a danger. Whose “we”, white boy? A lot of us were noticing that danger even in the late nineties and early two thousands. A lot of people had their heads cracked in Seatle and Italy protesting just that kind of power grab. It was there if you wanted to pay attention. Doctorow and his fellow travelers simply did not wish to see. It was easier to pretend that cyberspace, unlike every other human creation, would be perfect if the government just got out of the way. No one would have to make any hard decisions or involve themselves in any messy politics or trade-offs then. A utopia of societal laziness.
Okay, that felt good. And if you disagree, well, you have my biases upfront. Take the review with as much salt as you deem necessary.
But having said all of that, Doctorow is a very good writer. He sees systematic issues clearly and layers them into his stories. The Martin Hench novels, Red Team Blues and The Bezzle are both well written, taught thrillers with real societal problems at their center. The Bezzle in particular is an unflinching look at how government privatization leads to massive abuse.
Both books star a forensic accountant, Martin Hench, in his sixties as he is drawn into various dangerous situations related to some aspect of the internet or cybersecurity. Hench is an engaging character, smart without knowing everything, decent without being a plaster saint, funny without being a Whedon-esque quip machine. He is, in my opinion, probably the most interesting character Doctorow has yet created. Since the books are from his point of view, the fact that he is compelling is important.
The plots all hang together nicely, and the issues Doctorow want to highlight are not afterthoughts — they are integral to the action. I don’t think I am spoiling anything when I say that things generally turn out okay in the end, but not okay for some sympathetic characters. these are very noir-ish in nature, even if they don’t fill in all the tropes.
Sometimes the action happens a little too much off screen (though I am glad Doctorow has rested making the sixty-something Hench an action hero), and there is at least one romance that feels kind of Mary Sue, wish fulfilling more than driven from the characters. Those are minor issues, however. The larger issue goes back to my initial bias declaration: Doctorow cannot see the forest for the trees.
The systematic problems that Doctorow deals with are presented as largely essentially impossible to overcome. Now, part of this is certainly realism. There is little an individual can do to overcome, say, the power of the prison-industrial complex. And some of the solutions are implicit — end prison privatization, for example. But Doctorow does pause to rail against copyright as the cause of one set of issues when it really is not. The issues he discusses (I won’t spoil them because I think for some readers the revelations would be shocking, but people familiar with prison reform likely have an idea of what I am alluding to) are not because of copyright laws, but because people in prison are not seen as human beings.
Doctorow does, then, when he wants, pause to spell out potential solutions to the problems he brings up. The fact, then, that he doesn’t make explicit the privatization issues, or the fact the ending police unions would go a long way to help, or that limiting political donations would lessen corruption, are likely choices. Whether they are artistic choices or simply the result of his limited worldview is hard to say, but they are choices. And bad ones, in my opinion. If you have a couple pages to rant incorrectly about copyright laws being the source of a specific evil, you could probably spend a bit of time on real solutions.
Despite the books’ limitations, I do recommend them. They are well-written noir updated for the twenty-first century with well-drawn characters and tight, compelling plots. Just don’t think that the paucity of Doctorow’s political imagination is the limit of what’s possible to deal with the problems these books highlight.