The Lost Cause
Ratings14
Average rating3.7
It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let go?
For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.
But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam.
And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they’re armed to the teeth.
The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?
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This is an entertaining story of survival in a future that is heavily impacted by climate change. There are a couple of minor story aspects that are nearly impossible to conceive as happening in the real world. They aren't important to the story, however. The most unbelievable sentence in the story:
"On the other hand, I was a democratic socialist who could check any tool, table, appliance, or vehicle out of the public library, a citizen of the twenty-first century who could access every book ever published and every song ever recorded with a few taps on a screen, . . ."
While technology could enable libraries to share every book, song, movie, and other 'intellectual property' - the lawyers will never let it happen.
A rare sustainable development novel.
A more young-adult adventure companion to The Deluge, Termination Shock, or Ministry of the Future.
Add a star if you want a story about adapting to climate change.
Ha, I kinda agree with the 1-star reviews... AND the 5-star reviews.
This is a self-indulgent Doctorow romp that I kept telling myself I'd DNF and ended up... finishing it, lol. It's kinda utopian/dystopian: this is the world a specific set of progressive, Democratic Socialists of America would want. It's not a bad world. But it did strain credulity (e.g. the protagonist's housemates praising the ability to move into his affordable home and pay low rent... and then a few months later, happily and readily agreeing to tear that house down and find a new place to live). The “Magas” were all basically caricatures - your worst white male tribalist nightmare.
I'm deep in Learning from the Germans now (which is great btw) and (1) it has made me appreciate that those people-caricatures DO actually exist as living, breathing Nazis/Lost Cause Confederates, but (2) the Hannah Arendtian “banality of evil” masses, the “thoughtlessly” evil, bystander effect people, aka the vast majority of us!, are, well, the VAST majority. That second category simply does not exist in this book - everyone is VERY driven by ideals. And, yeah, the groups are all compelling and I kept wanting to read about them - Brooks (the hero) and his fun world music-listening hacker DSA friends; the Magas; the (VERY DISAPPOINTINGLY BELIEVABLE) Libertarian plutocrat-wannabes on their anarcho-capitalist “Flotilla” of yachts.
Hmm. I guess Cory shines when he, indeed, writes about ideals - the clash of them (this), the passionate having of them (any of his other books lol), the internal struggle of them vs. pragmatism (Attack Surface). So his world makes sense when we're in the head of the idealist, looking out at all those bystander sheeple and trying to shepherd them to the glory land. But when the ENTIRE WORLD is made up of ONLY righteous idealists - for good causes or “Lost”/evil causes - then it starts to feel unreal.
Oh yeah, and is Cory gunning for a cooking show/podcast? He clearly loves to write about food. (Another reason I kept reading, lol! The loving portrayals of hedonistic gourmandy delight!)
