Córy Doctorow rarely disappoints, and "Radicalized" delivers four interesting, timely and engaging stories. If you're looking for some science fiction with a contemporary, real-world political connection, then this collection is a must read. Recommended.

Cory Doctorow is one of the most prescient writers of speculative fiction currently being published. His books reflect his concerns about the impact of cyber security, technology, totalitarianism, the First Amendment, and social media, I am very grateful to NetGalley and Macmillan / Tom Doherty Associates for providing me with an advance reading copy of RADICALIZED, a compelling collection of novellas set i n the very near future.

Doctorow’s chilling stories are connected by social, technological and economical concerns of today and where they may lead us into the very near future. The result is chilling. Everything seem so logical, so believable - the breakdown of community as the result of the economic stratification and monopolies; the extreme actions some privileged individuals will take to survive - community be damned; the disastrous costs of a out of-control health care system and insurance companies; and, sadly all too true, the societal acceptance of the corruption of those individuals and organizations charged to protect us, and the demonization of those who challenge their actions. Doctorow’s power as a writer is to make these situations all too real, all too unavoidable., all too frightening.

Proceed carefully here... else you may lie awake all night wondering where and when everything ent so wrong.

Radicalized is a no-holds-barred look at the major issues plaguing our modern day society, incorporating science fiction and technology elements into smart, on point storytelling. I couldn’t put it down, marveling at how well he is able to discuss and breakdown issues like income inequality, racial profiling, a corrupt health system, and the effects of an apocalypse. The book splits its stories into four standalone novellas:

Unauthorized Bread is a multi-faceted story, showing us a future where everything is monetized, benefitting corporations at the expense of the working poor who inhabit low-rent apartments. We see the absurdity of a system like this and watch as one woman leads the way to overcoming this restriction on behalf of her neighbors. It’s also spotlights the life of a refugee in the United States, showing the difficulties they face throughout the painstaking process.

Model Minority expands the superhero narrative to include the ever-present racial divide in America. We see a superhero called the American Eagle who flies into an instance of police brutality. What ensues is the result of a corrupt and racist system, causing the public to turn against the American Eagle and the man he’s trying to defend. This is smart writing, showing the corruption at home and its rampant disregard of freedom for all.

Radicalized details the health insurance crisis, showing a group of cancer support group members who target insurance companies and senators bent against improving healthcare. It’s a pretty terrifying novella, showing the desperation the existing system creates in people who want the healthcare they’ve paid for.

The Masque of Red Death is a post-apocalyptic tale, following a man who spent years planning for the end and built himself and thirty others a high-tech, fully stocked shelter. We see the desperation build in each of the inhabitants as events of the world come down upon them. It starts as a tale of survival and ends showing us that surviving isn’t worth forgetting your humanity.

Overall, Radicalized is a brilliant use of science fiction to tell stories we need to hear. It’s incredibly inventive and insightful, giving us a glimpse at multiple futures that unfortunately don’t seem far from our own.

Review will be published on 5/1: https://reviewsandrobots.com/2019/05/01/radicalized-book-review

Four novellas providing context for how and why people might deal with futures in which corporate control of everyday life, financial collapse, or other disasters befall the world. I most enjoyed the first of these, in which a smart woman and her allies struggle with corporate control of their lives. The characters were great and well-crafted, and the story was real and thoughtful. In the second, which I found somewhat overlong and tedious, Superman--under a different name here, I assume to avoid copyright violations--wants to get involved with actually making individuals' lives better, but doesn't know how to do so in the complicated racial and social landscape. In another, insurance companies determine who lives and who dies, until there's a revolt. And in the final novella, which is probably the least original and interesting, a man uses his wealth to try to protect himself from a societal collapse, only to die from disease alone. Readers of dystopian fiction will enjoy this, as well as those interested in the ongoing struggle between corporations and individuals, the victims of majority/government brutality, and how and why the future of the world looks the way it does.

I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised by Cory Doctorow's four novellas collected in Radicalized. They felt fresh and topical, powerful and hilarious, well-written and shocking. Inside Radicalized are not-too-farfetched apocalyptic scenarios, class comparisons using food and technology, a superhero learning about the state of race relations, and much more. I would recommend this to any sci-fi and short story lover.

Back in the mid-eighties, when cyberpunk was young, the dystopic future was safely far ahead in the future. Weill, Cory Doctorow has been to the future, now only a year, or week, or a few minutes away, and he's come back with his report. The future still sucks, but now in new and different ways. Ways that are only the barest projections from the reality we're already in.

Radicalized is a series of four unconnected novellas about things to come, or are already here, it's hard to tell at times. It's as if John Oliver had lost his sense of humor and done a series of Last Week Tonight episodes about the very near future using today's social crises. Immigration, the Internet of Things, Structural poverty and racism, healthcare costs and insurance companies, and the folly of survivalism in the face of apocalypse.

All couched in stories with impeccable research and relatable, though not always lovable, characters. About the only SJW topic he doesn't touch is gender identity.

Although these stories are clearly thought experiments and cautionary tales, Cory is honest enough to present some counter-arguments to his characters rage against the machine. For the most part, you won't' find any convincingly happy endings here, nor solutions to the world's ills, but each story should set ou to thinking, no matter where your thinking started from.,

Usually I am rather a fan of Cory Doctorow. However, I found myself unable to finish this book. I am already aware how awful the american system is in regards IP, race relations, and healthcare, and the unrelenting reminder of just how bad it can get became too much to stomach. I had to give in by the third segment.

Have no doubt, it is well written, and the exaggerations to highlight the parlous state of the US system are effective and clever. It just was not for me.

Meant just to skim this ahead of an interview with the author, but I was sucked in and read it start to finish. Gripping tales. Highly recommended.

Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow, is a collection of four independent stories set just a moment in the future. If you want four Black Mirror episodes filtered through Boing Boing, you’ll absolutely love Radicalized.

There’s an intensity, a purity in these stories, that really keeps you reading. They are moral, they’re cutting, they’re biting. They’re about otherness and othering. These are stories written by an immigrant, the son of an asylum-seeker, and someone who has spent his life fighting for our digital rights. They’re not going to make you feel good.

The first story, Unauthorized Bread, is about a refugee who gets a spot on one of the “poor floors” of a posh high-rise, living in a Silicon Valley dream Internet of Crap dystopia, who learns to jailbreak her things.

There’s a story, Model Minority, about a Superman-alike who witnesses some senseless police brutality, steps in, and has to deal with the consequences. Superman realizes Black Lives Matter but then struggles because he can’t punch police brutality in the face, and learns how quickly otherness can happen. I loved the interplay between the Superman-alike and the Batman-alike.

The third story, Radicalized, was quite difficult for me to read. It’s about a man who joins an online support group for folks dealing with terminal cancer in their loved ones, and their health insurances refuse to authorize their treatments. The support group becomes more and more extreme, and he just can’t tear himself away. It’s easy, too easy, to dismiss angry alt-right 20 somethings in chat rooms, but what’s it look like when that same rage is focused on health insurers?

The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, is from the point of view of a rich financial trader, Martin, who has created his own “Fort Doom” and picked thirty lucky folks who will shelter out the apocalypse with him. Doctorow has talked a few times about the choices we have when “it hits the fan”. When your neighbor comes over for help, do you work together, or do you point a gun at him? We’ve seen what working together looks like in Walkaway. Doctorow shows his increasing skill in this story with point of view and word choice. Every moment we see the world from outside of Martin’s POV is simultaneously great and heartbreaking.

I know there will be a lot of people turned off by this book, who will get a whiff of it, feel feelings for things that they don’t want to have, and dismiss it as “propaganda”. Midway through the first story, Unauthorized Bread, I had a different worry—are these all going to be Electronic Frontier Foundation fiction think pieces? I *love* the EFF, don’t get me wrong, but I do not need to read a novel yelling at me about the evils of DMCA and DRM and the Internet of Crap. However, these worries were unfounded. Radicalized quickly digresses into dark glimpses of the world we’re creating for ourselves.

I received this book at no cost from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

These four thought provoking tales original and brilliantly constructed by an author that makes it clear he is son of an asylum seek, father of an immigrant, writing with something that his heart beats at one with.
4 Moral tales, tragedies and injustices, things that occur at conflict with the human heart all laid down with many truths in fiction, a must-read and a best book to be published in 2019.

Unauthorized Bread

Rich and poor
Immigrant and native
Refugee
Camp and subsidized apartment in tower block
Factory default – jailbroken
Following rules and breaking them
Doings and undoings

Single bookkeeper Salima and single mother Nadifa seamstress with kids.
Living on a sheet of ice upon a freezing river.
They have to watch their step in their subvortex of love and hate, part of a vortex of divergent mostly haves.
Boulangism toaster of the future, new future, new dilemmas, but same current affairs, same real problems around us upon this earth.
With all the hack talk contained within, firmwares and the jailbreaking of this device, there is something else real in this tale of immigrants and asylum seeker survival, people in refuge, pursuits of happiness caught in a network of inequality.

Actions and the reasoning behind actions, poverty, disenfranchised, the immigrant tale, the subsidized life, and then the rectification of errors with helping hand of surprising other city dweller.

Model Minority

There is in this tale the Mason-Dixon line that separated white Staten Island from black Staten Island, there will be a trial, ensuing riots, demonstrations, and superheroes.
Foursome of Staten Island cops beating a black man down and down, and whilst cams running creating false idea that he is resisting.
The American eagle intervenes, he had been saving lives and intercepting many things, many in the cause of the white people of America and there benefit in enterprise, many years past, but why now has he only turned to the plight of the black man in oppression and subjugated to violence and hate. This story tries to address that fact and that a American figure of greatness, a hero, a deputized federal Marshall that can fly, defender of good beater of bad, decided to say that enough was enough, he made a stance and he just couldn’t stand anymore of the injustice and outraged at it.
This innocent man beaten, saved from further beating, then charged, he has made it his mission to see him have a fair trial.

Well this author has brilliantly crafted something very real in the framework of fiction and unsettling but also heroic, this superhero American Eagle, realigning and readjusting to what does he really stand for, fiction echoing reality where everyman has the power in a sense to take this stance of the hero standing up for things, the plain injustice, this can’t help but bring me back to this quote that I and few authors and readers love from author William Faulkner.

“Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame. No matter how young you are or how old you have got.”
William Faulkner – Intruder in The Dust

Radicalized

With all the desperation, loss, hostility, and anger, radicalization followed.
The lack of funding for healthcare, debts, insurance not paying up, lack of health care support, cancer taking lives with no mercy, an underground forum, a network of furious kin of people dying of cancer, encouraging f**k cancer, characters in a network of online community ones spreading out murderous rage and violent actions.
Will there be some solution to end this radicalization?

The Masque of the Red Death

Thirty in lockdown in a remote location called Fort Doom in Arizona.
There will be self-preservation at a cost, deaths, invasion, riots, arson, cities fallen, scavenging, marauding and of all things, “Armageddon tired of waiting around,” till what end?