“Radicalized” by Cory Doctorow

(Spoiler alert.  There are details about two of the stories below)

I have a reader’s crush on Cory Doctorow.  Maybe you’ve heard of him? 

He’s written 20 books, or maybe 52  –  depending on how the counting is done.  He writes about how the services and products we depend on are getting worse as the companies that supply them get richer, making everything from our daily lives to our politics worse in the process.  This is what he calls (he coined the term) enshittification. 

His latest book is The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to AI: a Short Book About Being a Better AI critic.  Several times a week, he writes essays at https://pluralistic.net/ with lots of links to interesting rabbit holes:

He’s worked for the Electronic Frontier and writes science fiction novels.

You see what I mean?  I have a big crush on him.  I can’t help but give you all this biography stuff because I’m trying to interest you in joining the fan club.  That’s just because I’m a teenager about this writer today.  It’s not really the reason I’m writing this essay. 

I’m writing because of a book Cory Doctorow wrote in 2019 called Radicalized.  It’s three novellas about people trying to get justice and one about a rich guy who thinks he can sit out the apocalypse in a bunker with thirty “superior people”. 

The first story, “Unauthorized Bread,” is about Salima, an Arab-speaking refugee and a Somali mother who live in a multi-story subsidized apartment building.  One day, Salima’s toaster stops working and she hacks it so she can make her morning toast.  In the process, she discovers she no longer must buy the expensive brand of bread the toaster will accept.  She can even bake her own bread.  Things happen.  People on the “poor floors” of the building find empowerment and freedom.  An unexpected ally appears.  The company landlord who has been getting kickbacks from the toaster company comes in force and wins the fight.  Or does he?

It’s a story of one woman courageously and technologically fighting for justice for her community.  I’ve read similar stories in hundreds of science fiction books.  Many writers love to give us stories in so we can cheer for the clever underdog.  But it’s a rare story that shows how the powerful fight back, and the hard choices an activist makes. 

In the second story, a white superhero comes across a policeman and his buddies beating up a black man.  He stops the beating.  Of course he does; he’s a superhero.  But the black man is arrested anyway.  What follows is a dissection of the superhero’s white-guy good intentions flailing against white supremist systems.   Our superhero comes to grips with the harm he’s done to a man he protected from a beating,  a man who tells him to look at his own racism.  Ultimately, in a non-superhero fashion, he must decide whether or not to become a race traitor.

This is not a story I’ve read in hundreds of other books, and Doctorow tells it with depth and verve. 

When I say someone is a great writer, I mean that they are technically able to hold my attention with plot and characters.  I mean they write about power dynamics.  I mean they do it in a setting that is as believable as my own reality.  I’m getting a strong feeling that Cory Doctorow is a great writer.

But, you ask, Why am I writing about a white man on the Racial Justice Allies website?  Aren’t there people of color who write just as well?  Of course.  There are.  And, I’ll write about one of them too.

But, right here, right now, this is the person I read and then got a reader’s crush on.  In this book of short stories, Cory Doctorow tells anti-racist stories I was thrilled to read.