Beka Cooper, a young officer who speaks to the dead, investigates serious financial crimes.
I liked a lot of it. Cooper is a smart, hard working, and Beka Cooper, a young officer who speaks to the dead, investigates serious financial crimes.
I liked a lot of it. Cooper is a smart, hard working, and competent cop in a high fantasy setting. She lives in a magical, corrupt and corrupting world but she does her best. She leaves places better than she found them.
It's set centuries before the firs book the universe but written much later. Perhaps because of it, the world is less gender essentialist and more LGBTQ friendly.
It's really long but the pages turn fast. Would have made a great bus book. ...more
Martin Hench, an aging forensic accountant, tackles cryptocurrency shenanigans, cooks a lot of meat and has a lot of sex.
I really love Cory Doctorow. Martin Hench, an aging forensic accountant, tackles cryptocurrency shenanigans, cooks a lot of meat and has a lot of sex.
I really love Cory Doctorow. Love the big ideas he builds his books around. I'm really glad he's tackling crypto-bros and block-chain charlatans who are using these tools to leverage value out of our shared home without adding any. At best. Some of them do tremendous harm.
This book didn't delight me. Maybe that was deliberate. Martin Hench -- whose name evokes "handmaiden of war" to me -- has been penetrating financial schemes for decades. He's on the red team, that tries to attack systems, rather than the blue team, which defends them. He drives around the country in a luxury bus solving mysteries for rich people. Some of the thrill is gone and he's contemplating retirement. Then he gets pulled into One Last Job.
There's lots of old friends and lots of dead bodies. California seems on the edge of The Bell Riots and the government is happy to keep to the status quo because it has determined its the best of all possible worlds. When Marty, who has been perfectly happy to go along with this, learns something that could get him killed, he has to decide whether to stick to the red team where he's always thrived or go blue. He decides to provoke -well, I suppose that's a spoiler.
I liked the big ideas, but I got pulled out of the book every time he stopped to cook a meat-heavy meal. I also didn't really understand the rhapsodic ending. It involves economics lectures. Not lectures we get to see, just lectures we hear were Feynmanesque. Also he does pay his taxes (at last?) which cheers me.
I really wanted him to turn his energies towards more than just reducing the number of baddies, having sex, and leaving enormous tips to helping create a sustainable economic system. He seemed so close to something grand.
A hopeful novel about the coming climate catastrophe.
The story is told from the perspective of Brooks Palazzo, a 19 year old living in Burbank a geneA hopeful novel about the coming climate catastrophe.
The story is told from the perspective of Brooks Palazzo, a 19 year old living in Burbank a generation or two from now. Since then and now, the seas rose, coastal cities largely fell, forests burned and glaciers melted.
But the plutocrats and accelerationists took to the seas and the New Green Deal finally passed. Things did get better.
Brooks's parents were heroes who accepted Canada's call for help to safe Calgary from the rising waters of its flood plain. He was orphaned when a plague hit. His grandfather, who feared the future his son was helping to build, took him in. There was love but no fondness.
Grandpa was a Maga. The Magas hated the Green New Deal; the right of everyone to a job; and the right of internal climate refugees to migrate to new cities. He believed we were in a lifeboat and couldn't take anymore people in.
Grandpa dies and Brooks inherits his house just as a refugee caravan comes to town. Brooks is one of the people who gets to help shape Burbank's response. Generous welcome or barred doors? Meanwhile, the Flotilla of plutocrats is arguing for rugged individualism, never mind that many will die. Strengthens the strain.
This book is joyful, didactic, heartbreaking, and hopeful. Awesome people take the time to educate Brooks about the real fights -- what we owe each other; how we get exploited and how we can stand together to stop it; what it takes to make a good legal argument or a good shelter -- and Brooks is earnest enough to listen.
It's not a perfect book. The speechifying is intrusive at times. Doctorow has a lot to say and while I love him saying it, there's time it took me out of the story. He also seems to be taking on Chekhov's Gun in a way that I'm not sure needed to be tackled. The female characters were astonishingly cool and smart in a way that makes me terribly skeptical they really would have gone for this kid.
But it was one of the best books I read this year. I love Cory Doctorow. How he can stare straight into the face of the forces making the world demonstrably worse and still be hopeful impresses the hell out of me. ...more
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