The Lost Cause

Cory Doctorow

Nov 2023 · Sold by Tor Books

About this ebook

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?

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Ratings and reviews

I'm an adherent to the MMT, and this book has a lot of that, which is nice. It also has this story of people living in an almost utopian future but having to deal with reactionaries, which is an interesting setting. However, for the other stuff, it's bad. Every single character has the same personality in the sense that they communicate exactly the same: a lot of words said very quickly with a lot of expressions, shortened words and slang. International readers will not understand some 30% of what is happening if they don't know a lot about US geography, politics and institutions, so this is a book 100% focused on US readers. Also, every single hero is vegan and a diversity chatacter (black, latino, strong women, gender fluid etc) and 100% of villians are white men and a single white woman, and white men are explicitly villanized frequently. I'm all into the diversity agenda, but this book obviously exaggerates to an absurd level and put a lot of hatred into certain demographies

About the author

Cory Doctorow is a regular contributor to the Guardian, Locus, and many other publications. He is a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an MIT Media Lab Research Associate and a visiting professor of Computer Science at the Open University. His award-winning novel Little Brother and its sequel Homeland were New York Times bestsellers. His novella collection Radicalized was a CBC Best Fiction of 2019 selection. Born and raised in Canada, he lives in Los Angeles.