This book could be a bit divisive and the central topic is divisive and the clash between generations and different ideas.
It could be set anywhere as the growing number of people being brainwashed into believing any fake news.
It's disturbing at times and gripping.
I found it intriguing and well plotted
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

There are some great ideas in this book but mostly it just annoyed me, probably too YA for my tastes. Narrated by 19yo Brooks, the dialogue is so bad (wow is used 37 times, amazing 41 times) and I really didn’t need all the relationship stuff or just the description of every vegan meal they cook and sit down too (it’s all amazing). The description of a society that is coping with climate change has a lot of positive initiatives (all the young people are sooo positive), refugee programmes (these are internal refugees) etc. Brooks lives with his grandfather who is against all these initiatives, he’s a member of a Maga club and his buddies are all the same. The inevitable clash of the two groups made this a read I didn’t give up on even though it takes a fair while to get going.

This is a tough one to review. I want to give it 5* (for effort?) but I just can't.

An Amazon reviewer wrote: "Doctorow has long abandoned entertaining or educating with his fiction. Now it's just about venting his mindless and ignorant hatred for Capitalism, Trump and his followers, Western Civilization, and people of pallor (at least the ones with penises)."

Well, that only makes me like it all the more, apart from the 'mindless and arrogant' comment. What's not to hate about [present-day US] Capitalism, Trump and his followers, and entitled uber-rich white men? The MAGAs are awful and terrifying (disgustingly terrifying -- like the bubonic plague, not like a lion). And where better than in fiction to point out their danger? Doctorow presents a believable picture of the world (or at least the US) 30 years from now, where climate change has taken a heavy toll on populations, MAGAs are old, white and angry, and even more aggressive than today, and the 'plutes' are enjoying life on their mega-yachts off the coasts of sunken islands.

We shouldn't just be warning the world, we should be screaming it from the rooftops. I applaud Doctorow for trying. He has something worthwhile to say.

Oh but why oh why didn't he employ a ghost writer to write it? This novel is So. Badly. Written. The main character is like a puppy, with only two modes of being: exhilarated or exhausted. And no, it's not cute, it's annoying. (Everyone seems to love him, but it's hard to tell why.) I know that the author is a 50-something writing an 18-year-old, but he actually comes across like a 12-year-old. The dialogue is very poor, with far too much polemical speechifying. The characters are cardboard cut-outs.

The Lost Cause has what seems to me a fundamental contradiction at its core. It ostensibly proposes a socialist approach to society (and handling the climate crisis) whereby everyone is taken care of and nobody is left behind. And yet this is being led by an individualist hero figure, Brooks. It's your typical American lone-hero-rises-above-adversity-to-save-the-day. Sure, he gets lots of help, but he is the centre of this universe, the real 'hero' of the story. It's ironic that a novel that sets out to criticise present-day America has a protagonist who is a prime example of the American hero complex. It's as though Brooks has glimpsed a different way of seeing the world but just hasn't understood it, being so deeply stuck in the American viewpoint that he cannot see what he is.

In fact, everything about the novel is so 'American' that it just feels alien to me, European. The protagonist with the hero complex. The 'good guys' vs the 'evil' adversaries. The hierarchy of 'decent ordinary people' who come together to follow the hero/leader and make it all better (a hierarchy where everyone is equal but some - the Blue Helmets and the activists - are more equal than others), taking care of the 'poor refus' (refugees) in a highly paternalistic fashion. The ineffectual politicians who cannot move for fear of political repercussions.

Amusingly, the Democratic party is now known as the Socialist Democrats of America, but I feel they wouldn't recognise an actual Socialist if one bit them on the leg. Spouting about taking the means of production into your own hands does not a socialist make.

Nobody ever seems to go shopping, but there seem to be endless supplies of high-quality food that just 'appear', ready to feed 70 people. Oh there are so many unlikely scenarios that I can't even begin...

Still.... writing aside, I did get caught up in the story. Most of all, I found myself gazing beyond the story into this frightening future. Really, someone ought to do something about it....

Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for the ARC.

The ambiguity at the heart of Doctorow's near future climate and political work-out is key. The book is pitched with an idealistic teen in a 2040's America which has finally taken the climate crisis seriously. Except politics remains the same so after a few terms of a visionary President with bold Green New Deal policies, the other side are back in. But more importantly, there are aging but militant MAGA's still around, fighting against the mitigation and belligerently looking to willfully ignore the science, not even for short-term goals but almost out of spite. Our hero Brooks's grandfather is one of them, with a cache of arms in the basement and his buddies coming over to discuss insurrection. But is their's the Lost Cause, or is the greater truth that the climate itself is a lost cause because it is all too late?

Doctorow has often delighted in teasing ideas out from basic principles, and it is clear that here he is a dog with a bone with some of these things. He applauds the idealism of the younger generation that he talks about here, but cannot let go of the difficulties that they will face and the assumptions of their idealism. Brooks in quick order becomes a teenage property owner in a relatively affluent part of California (Burbank), or at least affluent in as much as it is not poisoned, or suffering too much from catastrophic climate crisis. But his idealism is challenged by the refugees he wants to help, the UN worker and the reality of being embroiled in a one-sided war against a bad-faith opponent. Doctorow takes pot-shots at some of his regular bugbears, he takes onboard the few good arguments for cryptocurrency for example whilst still arguing firmly against it. And there is a joy in watching the more quotidian aspects of scientific progress locking horns with a thoroughly out-of-date legal system and enforcement system.

The Lost Cause is good polemical science fiction, it never loses sight of its base edict to entertain whilst being a late coming-of-age romance. The idealism combined with the fast learning curve of reality, coupled with a solid central voice means the more philosophical political arguments do not happen in a vacuum, and are relatable. And that questioning of idealism, and the one-sided warfare aspect, leaves Chekov's cache of guns as a central part to its denouement where youth and cynicism come into direct opposition, and you see if and when idealism dies. Entertaining first, but a proper serious post-climate disaster thought experiment too,

Creo que este libro se ha hecho más conocido por la campaña de mecenazgo que Cory Doctorow ha llevado a cabo para costear la producción del audiolibro, esquivando el monopolio de Audible. Tras leer The Lost Cause, he de admitir que siento cierta fatiga del buenrollismo del autor, que ojalá tuviera razón en sus extrapolaciones optimistas del futuro.


The Lost Cause está situado treinta años en el futuro, en la ciudad de Burbank, como ejemplo de lugar donde se ha llegado a un acuerdo sobre la lucha contra el cambio climático y otros temas de calado social, pero donde un recalcitrante sector de la población continúa con sus ideas reaccionarias. Lo más terrible de la extrapolación que nos ofrece el autor es que ese sector que reclama su modo de vida actual seremos nosotros en un futuro (salvando las distancias en cuanto a posesión de armas y proyectos terroristas). Se dice que conforme se va acomodando la población tiende a tener una visión más conservadora y Doctorow nos muestra este conflicto intergeneracional en toda su crudeza.

La lucha contra el cambio climático provoca oleadas de refugiados que huyen de zonas catastróficas bien por los incendios, las inundaciones o un conjunto de variados factores. Mientras que los más jóvenes de las ciudades que aún pueden recibir población se organizan para estas acciones humanitarias, la vieja guardia ve peligrar su modo de vida y está dispuesta a todo con tal de seguir embarcados en su bote salvavidas mientras los demás perecen ahogados.

Cory Doctorow no es nada sutil en su planteamiento, incluso se podría decir que está adoctrinando a la audiencia. Creo que se encuentra en las antípodas del pensamiento de Neal Stephenson, por ejemplo, enfrentando el individualismo exacerbado de los protagonistas del creador de Snowcrash con el cooperativismo del canadiense. Y a veces este optimismo tan exagerado cambia, porque es muy difícil admitir que se pueda conseguir el cambio y la revolución de un sistema solo a base de desobediencia civil.

El libro, por otro lado, tiene cierto toque juvenil que no me convence del todo tampoco. El protagonista es un joven de 19 años que recibe en herencia la casa de su abuelo que le crió pero con el que tuvo sus más y sus menos precisamente por estas ideas políticas enfrentadas. Teniendo todo a favor para mantener una actitud inmovilista, se decanta por el activismo para ayudar a los demás. Ojalá todos fuéramos así, pero es difícil de creer, la verdad.

Creo que The Lost Cause es un ejercicio bienintencionado de proyección futura, pero también creo que se queda bastante corto y resulta poco realista.

Set in California in the 2050s, Cory Doctorow's latest novel, The Lost Cause - referencing the white supremacist Civil War myth - is narrated by nineteen-year-old Brooks, who is committed to social justice and angry at his grandfather's Maga friends, who, in his words, 'were the people who'd spent half a century telling us that we didn't need to do anything about climate change, and the next half century telling us it was too late to do anything about it'. When a new wave of internal refugees reach Brooks's town, the Magas mobilise, securing an injunction against the building of emergency housing, which scuppers Brooks's plans to provide the refugees with somewhere safe to live. Although Brooks has grown up being told that his is 'the first generation that doesn't need to fear the future', due to transformative policies like the Green New Deal and the Jobs Guarantee Programme, he feels like this progress is being undone - and he needs to act.

Like Doctorow's earlier and superior novel, For the Win, a lot of The Lost Cause is about the practicalities of activism: how to organise, and which strategies will actually work. It's enormously refreshing to read a vision of the future that is neither utopian or dystopian, although maybe this is a new trend: Naomi Alderman's The Future, also out this month, takes a similar tack. And although it's pitched as about generational conflict, and starts with a simplistic match-up between the bad Magas and the good activists, it ends up in more interesting places, as Brooks finds himself in conflict with people that he thought were on his side. Doctorow does a good job, too, of not excusing the Magas but not presenting them as mindlessly evil: as Brooks comes to realise, 'they weren't wrong because they were cruel. They were cruel because they were wrong'. And as ever, Doctorow shines in his imagining of new technological and micro-political advances, from teens suddenly flooding live-streamed townhall meetings to prefab high-rise apartments you can put up in a matter of days.

So, good novel: shame about the protagonist. Brooks is easily the weakest part of The Lost Cause, and one of the biggest reasons I preferred For the Win, with its larger, more diverse cast. He feels like a bit of a wish-fulfilment fill-in for woke white men, although Doctorow is careful to show him getting things wrong. He has a traumatic backstory, but it barely seems to slow him down except when he evokes it for credibility points, and he is implausibly attractive to women, entering an easy #instalove relationship with an older woman whom everybody agrees is out of his league. (Brooks self-defines as pansexual, but this never comes into play.) Frankly, he's a bit annoying to spend time with, and I wished we'd been able to get out of his head. The generations also felt skew-whiff to me, which robbed the book of some cultural plausibility, despite its interesting politics and economics. In the 2050s, I'll be in my sixties, so surely part of the Maga generation (!), and yet Doctorow writes as if boomers are still around and millennials are still young; indeed, Brooks reads more as a millennial to me than anything else, and yet he's actually at least a couple generations younger. This is still absolutely worth reading just because it's so different to most other fiction out there, but I'd recommend For the Win above this one.

I received mixed impressions from this novel. There is a society, in the immediate future, strongly marked by climate change and the damage it has done, and a generation that is somehow trying to live with these effects and somehow find a way to improve the general conditions of existence. And an old generation that is tied to the past, denialist, retrograde and embittered. The focal point and fuse of the narrative is a fervent climate activist boy, whose grandfather - with whom he lives - is one of the most fervent deniers.
The story is interesting, with many insights and well narrated, but I was quite disturbed by the young-old dichotomy (anagraphically speaking, I am supposed to be part of the old generation, but neither I nor any of my peers I know would espouse their positions), and this constitutes an oversimplification. I was also disturbed by the author's failure to adhere to a principle he himself expressed, namely that an individual cannot be the engine of change, whereas throughout the narrative the engine, the one who has the winning ideas or endorses the ideas of others, is always and only the protagonist. I understand that it is difficult to write differently, without giving all the cards to a main protagonist, but one should avoid contradiction.

I read Doctorow's novel Walkaway in 2017 and liked it a lot, so was hoping for more of the same here. Oddly, The Lost Cause feels closer in spirit to his YA-adjacent Little Brother. It's not marketed as such, but it definitely feels young: the protagonist is 18, says "wow" and "oh shit" a lot and uses the word "nazi" as catchall for "bigoted motherfucker". It's a pretty convincing picture of what social intercourse might be like when Gen Z are the age millennials are now—negotiating enthusiastic consent is a given in romantic encounters, checking in with someone's emotions and needs when they're sad or angry likewise—but it also feels very innocent and teenaged, both in a good way (all that energy, all that passion) and an exhausting one (all that energy, all that passion). I'd give this to any young teen into climate activism and making a better future, but personally I need my near-future nightmares a little less earnest. (The final quarter is very well-managed, though.)

I've been reading a lot of near future / climate change sci-fi and this one was disappointing. I wouldn't call it sci-fi, this is more of a political novel and, since I share Doctrow's politics I thought I would enjoy this book. But I didn't. It's written with so much detail around things that don't matter (please stop describing what people are eating) and so little about things that do matter. (why does the Flotilla accept tourists? How much did it cost to visit?). There is no cause and effect - when the refugees leave his garden, they plant a garden bed. This would take time and money and supplies. These are people crossing America on foot. If they had resources, would they be camping? Maybe they could catch a bus. It's just not thought out - the refugees are there to make a point, not to be people.
Most of what happens seems to be a chance for Doctrow to lecture us about his very good ideas, rather than actual plot.

Possibility the biggest issue is that Brooks, our main character, does not feel real. He's an example of what a politically engaged young person could look like, and all of his interactions are teachable moments. Oh no, he's so shocked when he learns that you can be a refugee AND believe in the blockchain. Oh no, he can't remember the difference between Eritrea and Ethiopia. That was basically his whole personality. That and despite telling us he was pansexual, sizing up every woman (and only the women) he met as potential romantic and sexual partners. Its just tedious.

All of this was a shame, because the worldbuilding was strong. This just needed a whole lot more editing.

Thanks to NetGalley and Head of Zeus for the e-Arc of this book in exchange for an honest review.

2.5/5

This book has such a compelling premise: If we finally start making progress on the climate, the divisions in our society aren't going to go away - what will that mean? But, sadly, execution lets The Lost Cause down badly.

First, the positives. In one sense this book does exactly what it promises - it looks at how the divisions and disparate views that characterise modern western societies could play out against the backdrop of a worsening humanitarian disaster. And no effort is spared fleshing out the author's world and ideas about those divisions. It's also a fairly quick read.

But, even for an "idea forward" novel (which this is), the plot and characters are weak. More than anything, they respectively seem a setting and props to facilitate the author's musings and opinions. Without spoiling the storyline, certain events start and stop when it's time to move on to new ideas, rather than for reasons that feel authentic to the world Doctorow has created. The characters are generally thin, and hold the (sometimes inconsistent) views the author needs to show off the various competing "sides" in this near future world. The romantic arc is also really implausible - it's feels like it is there to provide more props for the author to work with and to tick a box.

The prose, while readable, is ... cliche. Rather than feeling like it belongs in a near future world, it feels .... like an attempt to be cool *now; for instance, I doubt slang will stay that static over the coming decades.

Thanks to Head of Zeus, Netgalley and Cory Doctorow for this ARC (provided in exchange for an honest review).

As much as the idea is good and ideal (pun intended), this book by Doctorow does not have a good rhythm in my opinion, and somehow drags, especially from the middle on, as if the protagonist and therefore the author somehow, did not know how to go on, undecided between the beautiful ending of the fairy tale or the more realistic ending of the tragedy. I have read better books by him.

Per quanto l'idea sia buona e ideale (perdonate il gioco di parole), questo libro di Doctorow non ha un buon ritmo secondo me, e in qualche modo si trascina, specialmente dalla metá in poi, come se il protagonista e quindi l'autore in qualche modo, non sapesse come andare avanti, indeciso tra il bel finale della favola o quello piú realistico della tragedia. Ho letto di meglio da parte sua.

I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.