Erik Marshall

In Makers, Cory Doctorow does what he does best, creating a near-future world that seems plausible and relevant tomorrow, instead of centuries from now. The novel follows a group of inventors, investors and bloggers through a movement made up of loose networks of tinkerers repurposing junk to make cool new inventions. Huge, centralized, top-down corporations are replaced by these quick-moving, loosely affiliated groups. The novel follows two of the tinkerers, Lester and Perry, who, after the New Work movement fails,  make a crowdsourced ride that is created with items contributed by riders. Their nemesis is an executive in the  company and attraction that seem to be Doctorow’s near-obsession: Disney World. Much of the power of the New Work movement and the ride come from Suzanne Church, traditional journalist turned celebrity blogger.

Like many of Doctorow’s previous novels, Makers snakes around many interesting hot-button issues, including copyright, bio-modification (Lester goes through a faddy radical surgical procedure to lose weight), decentralized business, corporate finance, blogging and other social media journalism. Doctorow pits big traditional media companies against smaller entrepreneurial startups to highlight the tension between the litigious old guard and the potential for an entirely new model for economic and technological ingenuity.  The strength of his writing lies in mixing technologies that already exist with educated guesses about tech that might exist tomorrow, some of which may very well be motivated by the novel itself.

This is Doctorow’s longest novel, and it feels it. The prose is, in many places, uncharacteristically inelegant and repetitive. He explains some of the concepts two or three times through dialogue of multiple characters, and his description of interpersonal relationships is awkward at best.  With a thorough edit, the 416 pages of the hardcover could have been reduced to 350 without losing much.

That said, he is a master of complex plot and even more complex social commentary, and the book is well worth the read. If you don’t want to shell out the money and don’t mind reading onscreen, the book is available free online at the Tor website.