Paul Di Filippo Reviews The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

The Lost Cause, Cory Doctorow (Tor 978-1250865939, $29.99, 368pp, hc) November 2022.

Sometimes I think that Cory Doctorow is the last real optimist and idealist left in science fiction – once a genre characterized by hopeful and future-welcoming readers and authors. True, there are other writers with a generally upbeat worldview, such as Neal Stephenson, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Andy Weir. But none of them manifests the special kind of ’60s Greening of America vibe that Doctorow steadfastly exhibits, the lonesome voice of a joyful yet troubled visionary rapping in the wilderness of civilizational collapse. He’s like the last surviving test tube baby from some CRISPR recombination of the genomes of Abbie Hoffman, Robert Heinlein, and Stewart Brand. Or maybe the love child of Le Guin and Mack Reynolds. If you recall the adage from the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers – ‘‘Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope’’ – you could repurpose it for Doctorow’s fiction: ‘‘Sustainable tech and a sense of community will get you through times of no stability better than stability will get you through times of no sustainable tech and no sense of community.’’ Although technically a member of Generation X (born 1971), Doctorow exhibits a mix of the qualities most associated with the Boomers and Gen Z. He’s Cosmic Consciousness overlaid with a ‘‘We Got Screwed’’ weltanschauung.

Certainly his new book, The Lost Cause, delivers this somewhat paradoxical portrait in spades. Its hero is relentlessly resilient and upbeat – as are his friends and the other allied figures who are striving for change and improvement in the face of a global crisis. But they exist in a scenario where everything is very plausibly and scarily going to hell in a Coach handbag, as they face implacable diehard foes and dire environmental circumstances that would drive lesser people to just lie down and die. Doctorow’s sunny disposition does not make him a Pollyanna, nor cause him to adopt blinders that shield him from reality, nor make him underestimate the duration, nature and toughness of any struggle. In fact, he can depict catastrophes more tangibly than most writers of dystopias. It’s just that his heroes always dredge up from the depths of their suffering the same maxim that John Carter of Mars deployed when things looked their worst: ‘‘I still live.’’

The year is sometime in the 2030s. The recent election of 2034 brought a Republican conservative, President Bennett, into office, after 16 years of liberals at the helm. During this preceding, nonrevanchist period, American laws and customs were revolutionized in a Green New Deal in order to cope with rising seas and temperatures, as well as all the other familiar eco-troubles. Nonetheless, waves of internal refugees still crisscross the country, and ‘‘Maga Clubs’’ of aging and paranoid super-patriots threaten to pull out the underpinnings of this shaky compromise to a harsh reality. (The title of the novel refers to these fossilized holdouts, who embrace a mythic past much in the manner of the Confederate ‘‘Lost Cause’’ faction of the early 20th century.)

Our viewpoint on this world is Brooks Palazzo, a 19-year-old recent high-school graduate. (The YA nature of our protagonist echoes so many other classic SF novels and stories, imbuing teenage Brooks with all the weight, real and symbolical, of the unborn future.) Brooks lives in Burbank, California. Orphaned at a tender age – his American parents, resident in Canada at the time, died of a new plague – Brooks has spent the past decade under the care of his irascible grandfather, who happens to be a prime exponent of the MAGA Club doctrines. Brooks himself, natch, is diametrically opposed to everything the old man stands for.

When Brooks gets shed of Grandpa, he finds himself owner of a modest yet valuable homestead, and at a loss for how to live his life. When a wave of climate refugees surges into Burbank, activating both the best and worst impulses of the various citizens, the lad finds himself with a new purpose and goal in life: to make things better for as many of his fellow native citizens and for the newcomers as he can.

He is reinforced and abetted in this mission by a slightly older woman named Phuong Petrakis. Phuong has spent the last few years in London as a Blue Helmet, one of a corps of emergency responders dealing with myriad crises. Now back in her natal Burbank, she wants to employ her many inventive coping and constructive skills on the local scene. She and Brooks become lovers, and from here on it’s Two Against Tomorrow. Except that there’s also a nicely delineated cast of supporting characters who pitch in as well.

The novel is structured as a cascading series of calamities – culminating in simultaneous massive forest fires, an armed insurrection, and industrial pollution! – each one challenging Brooks to dig deeper into his soul, as in classic bildungsroman fashion, getting enlightened through positive actions (and also sins of omission, such as not destroying the cache of guns that his grandfather bequeathed him). He learns from the varied viewpoints of his friends, and even from his enemies. Doctorow’s alliances are never not obvious – he’s Team Brooks all the way – but he does play fair when limning the opponents.

I grew up around those people, Gramps and his friends. They didn’t want to see the world burn. They thought we wanted to destroy the world. They didn’t always act in good faith, but they thought the same of us. Gramps and his Maga buddies didn’t deny climate change (not anymore, though I could believe they had, once upon a time). Some of them thought we were exaggerating it, but there were plenty of them who believed in it as much as I did. Mostly, we agreed on the facts. What we disagreed on was what to do about them.

Because Brooks is our first-person narrator, he’s onstage 100 percent of the time, and the success of this book has to depend on how relatable Doctorow can make him. Ninety percent of the time, I think, the reader will inhabit Brooks’s just-out-of-adolescence POV with much enjoyment. Sometimes, though, the lad gets a bit too emo. He’s occasionally a high-school Hamlet without the gravitas. But in the end, readers will, I believe, endorse and admire his authentic path.

Like Kim Stanley Robinson, Doctorow is not afraid of, nor denying of, the utility of infodumps, often delivered in dialogue, and the reader has to be appreciative of Wellsian exchanges such as this:

Did you see the lake? The lake’s super cool, it’s part of the runoff system. All the road grades run toward it; if there’s a flood it’ll absorb all the water and then most of that will end up back in the water table…. Did you see the solar capacity? Total energy independence, and we’ve got this concrete factory over here, it’ll just sinter prefab any time there’s more power in the grid than we can use. Then any time someone goes on the job guarantee, one of the gigs’ll be building one of these buildings, using that prefab. It’s carbon-neutral mass-scale construction –

When you factor in Brooks’s touching personal journey, all the acutely analyzed sociopolitical doings, the innovative stefnal stuff, and a fair amount of humor and satire (a fleet of libertarian entrepreneurs called ‘‘the Flotilla’’ could have come straight out of Marc Andreessen’s ‘‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’’), the result is a novel with at least a dozen attractive hooks by which the reader can be happily snagged. Having many themes and attitudes in common with two recent hopepunk books – The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins and Analee Newitz’s The Terraformers – The Lost Cause shows that while near-future SF mght be the one of the harder subgenres to compose, the results are more impactful and meaningful than many a big-canvas space opera. As one of Doctorow’s spiritual ancestors, E.F. Schumacher, always reminded us, ‘‘Small is beautiful.’’

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