Lost Cause

Didn't enjoy as much as Red Team Blues, it felt less like a story and more like a travel book for an imagined future version of socal. RTB obviously had something to say about crypto, and the author's perspective is clear, but it had enough of a thriller plot to drive the story on it's own merits. I got bored with this plot halfway through and felt like I had seen enough of the author's social ideas that I didn't feel bad just letting this one go. Not a bad book at all, I just have a ton of others to read.

Characters were a bit annoying at times; the language and dialogue felt either too unnatural or too pedantic.

But as a climate sci-fi story, it's always good to see authors imagining solutions and more hopeful futures instead of falling back on doom and dystopia as the default. The importance here was more in the laying out of a possible framework or series of steps it might take to get to a more just and responsible society.

A realistic vision of a scary future, with some ideas and hope for what people might do in response. Maybe a bit longer than it needed to be but still very readable.

Doctorow does a really good job of building out the world and the society that the main characters live in. This book still fell prey to the one complaint that I have with Doctorow's fictional writing, which is that all of the main characters (regardless of age/gender/etc) seem to speak with his voice. An example of this would be an adolescent teenage boy calling a teenage girl "a good egg". I have trouble seeing a young person actually talking like that.

However, even with that minor nagging complaint, this was a great book!