The Lost Cause by Cory Doctorow

 

The tone of this novel is ... really, really weird. It's set ... less than a century in the future, in a time when all sorts of environmental crises have gotten much worse, but when there are people who are clear on what needs to be done and determined to do it: The world is much worse, but people seem somehow better, at least the POV and (most of) the people he cares about. Of course, there are obvious bad people who for whatever reason/s would rather just see everything burn, at least so long as they and their stuff are still safe and there's still some rump of society for them to be the top echelon of. It took like half the novel for things to really kick, and there's really not much moral complexity in it, and the ending sort of looks like hope, except the world is on fire. It's moderately well-written on most levels--to riff on a line Doctorow riffs on, he wasn't typing with boxing gloves on--but the moral simplicity of it does in the end weigh against it. On the other hand, the novel's point is worth extracting and restating: If people would just do the fucking right thing/s now, we might end up with a world that's not on fire, and wouldn't that be nice?