Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment
Ratings44
Average rating4.1
Reads far too real. I'm quite surprised some of the content hasn't already made it to the evening news.
Prescient. Hard to put it another way. Published in 2019, and not extrapolating that far, Radicalized hits hard. Even though the novellas each end somewhat optimistically, it is hard to not be moved by them. And they're really, really uncomfortably close to reality. Glimpses of the fall of the american empire.
Read this for the healthcare story, and it didn't disappoint. The other three shorts all are good, but the first two don't stick the landings very well and the final one which does is simply a bit generic overall. That said, this was my first exposure to the author and their writing and knowledge of technology will definitely have me looking at their other works in the future.
Four short stories by Cory Doctorow.
Unauthorized Bread (4 stars)
This one was the most fun to read, harkening back to like early/innocent/fun Cory Doctorow: namely, refugee hacker girl figures out how to un-brick her Corporate Toaster (that only allows “authorized” bread from authorized bakers to be toasted). She liberates her other appliances and those of her similarly poor neighbors.
Fun, empowering, social critiquing, progressive. This made me want to hack my own appliances.
Model Minority (1 star)
Ooh, this one felt clunky and painful. Briefly: a Superman parody where Superman decides to intervene in the attempted murder of a Black man by some American police officers. This, obviously, triggers all sorts of disasters - with the story driving home that individual action will never be sufficient to undo the structural racism built into America.
I appreciate that message - and I appreciate that Doctorow's underlying progressivism is always couched in collective action - but this felt, ooooh, so painful to read. First, I just do not connect with midcentury modern comic books. They are an immediate turn-off. Second, the portrayal of race felt so clumsy (if well-meaning). Third, the writing felt kinda lazy - at least, I've read a bunch of protests by Doctorow, and this one felt like a copy+paste?
Radicalized (555555 stars!!!)
Oh wow. The last two stories in this collection BLEW. MY. MIND. They were both incredibly unsettling, fun, clever, and provocative.
In the titular story, we follow a Basic Middle-class White Guy who becomes, ahem, radicalized in his rage against the American healthcare system. If your immediate reaction is: well, fair. INDEED?! In the story, his wife is diagnosed with late stage cancer and their insurance refuses to pay for an experimental treatment that offers a slim (but real) chance of survival.
Ayyy. I found the portrayal of parenting, of mundane suburban existence, of rage at healthcare - IT WAS ALL VERY CONVINCING. Which made it particularly unsettling when terrorism enters the chat. Holy shit.
The Masque of the Red Death (5555555 stars as well, V GOOD)
I was pretty mind-blown from the previous story, but saw that people were saying the final story was “the best”. I... kinda agree? Without going into details (since it works better if you come in fairly uninformed), this story is basically a near future take on preppers and how preppering would play out, like, in reality. Honestly, I laughed and laughed. Doctorow makes such obvious points, it's - ugh - chef's kiss. I want to post this as a reply-comment to all those mainstream (NYTimes, New Yorker) concern-troll articles about preppers. Like, it's not just that the rich are building little fortresses... it's that they think this'll give them an advantage? Really, really enjoyable. And hopeful!
Like all collections of short stories Radicalized is a mixed bag.
I really liked the first story starts with someone getting the oh so relatable urge to unlock a functionality that has been taken away for fun and profit, it was cute in a way and the characters were endearing.
The second story revolves around a superhero from another planet who messes up his public image by getting aligned with a victim of police brutality, that story felt like it has been told before and while it wasn't unpleasant to read it was just too reminiscent of other extremely similar stories to be any kind of memorable.
The third story is about people getting radicalized into terrorism by inhumane insurance companies dictating through refusal of coverage that people should just die probably the most powerfully written story of the book but also the one that seemed the least likely.
The last story turns the survivalist fantasy on its head, it was too long for what it had to say in my opinion.
All in all it was good book, just not a very memorable one.
3 short novellas of potential near futures and a superhero/police brutality thing. If I'd just read the first one maybe I'd have more hope for humanity but now I'm bluuuuue.
One of the things I love about speculative fiction is that it starts from an idea of something that could be, and explores where that could go. As a reader you accompany the writer through their though process and discover the possible consequences of that initial idea. Radicalized starts from a set of key messages that are part of the canon of the current mainstream ideological and political stance in one part of the globe and feels like it has to build a world and a plot that can serve the message, rather than the other way around.
Very shortly summarised :
- Big corporations are bad and xenophobic
- The Police and a lot of people in an entire country are racists
- Big Pharma and the government want to let people die
- The 1-percenters are too selfish to help others and too stubborn to be helped by the nice immigrants
As a foreign observer of the current American culture and socio-political situation I can (with all the limitation of any external viewpoint) see where this is coming from and I sympathise with the objectives. But as an enjoyer of speculative fiction it feels like the pandering to a specific crowd at a specific moment in time is a tad too heavy-handed. I wonder if this books will make any sense to anyone in 10, 20 or 30 years time, as some other books from 50 or 100 years ago still manage to do.
Four dystopian novellas. I really like Doctorow's writing and he brings up some very important issues. My favourite out of these four is probably Unauthorized Bread.