Radicalized

Cory Doctorow — 2019

From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, Radicalized is four urgent SF novellas of America's present and future within one book Told through one of the most on-pulse genre voices of our generation, Radicalized is a timely novel comprised of four SF novellas connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today and what America could be in the near, near future. Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper. In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims. Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer. The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

Reviews

Darren S. Layne@funkyplaid

Sep 20, 2021

These four smart and disarming speculative shorts were not easy to get through, but that's why I consider them to be necessary to get through. Doctorow unflinchingly describes the scale of injustice and discomfort that millions of "others" experience on a daily basis and is able to demonstrate through discrete, punchy and concise cautionary tales (à la Falling Down and Black Mirror) what happens when those unthinkable institutional biases finally affect the privileged – as they eventually do and will continue to do at an increasingly rapid pace. Reading these stories in the middle of summer 2020 disturbingly underscores how close we actually are to the dystopian fabric of Doctorow's prose; the collection's subtitle Four Tales of Our Present Moment could not have been more prescient as we navigate breaking crests of tidal capitalism, racism, classism, and the other jury-rigged sawhorses struggling to bolster the world's rotting nation-states. On more than one night I found it difficult to sleep for the weight of words and the clarity of structure with which he describes our calamity of inequity. That's what these stories were designed to do. It doesn't matter if you don't "like" them; sometimes the allegorical truth is – mildly or wildly, depending upon one's level of agency – uncomfortable. Knowledge here is power, and, as Doctorow signs off in his acknowledgements, "This isn't the kind of fight you win, it's the kind of fight you fight."