Radicalized

The cops announced that LisasDad1990 had used Tor Browser extensively and had left behind no browser breadcrumbs, nor any records at AT&T's data centres. Inevitably, this set off a whole witch hunt over the “darkweb” and everyone wondering where the mystery man from the video had been “radicalized.”

I picked up Radicalized because it's on the shortlist for this year's Canada Reads program – an annual “battle of the books” run by our national broadcaster, meant to encourage Canadians to read and debate Canadian books – and while I've never read Cory Doctorow before (speculative sci-fi isn't really my thing), I guess I was expecting more from this. Only the first of the four stories, Unauthorized Bread, is set in the near future (with a plausible warning about where present actions could lead if we continue to sleepwalk in that direction), and the other three stories serve as activist commentary on present-day life in the U.S. (concerning racism/white privilege, health care, and income disparity). Of course sharing the longest undefended border in the world with America means that what happens down there has plenty of impact on life up here, but even though Doctorow was born in Canada, I fail to see how Radicalized really fits this year's brief as described by the CBC: The books reflect this year's theme – "one book to bring Canada into focus" – and aim to inspire readers to consider a different perspective about the country and themselves. These stories are fine, and I may have enjoyed them more if I had picked this book up for any other reason, but this honestly didn't feel like a necessary, or Canada-focussed, read.

There was another world, vast beyond her knowing, of people who didn't know her at all, but who held her life in their hands. The ones who thronged in demonstrations against refugees. The politicians who raged about the scourge of terrorists hidden among refugees, and the ones who talked in code about “assimilation” and “too much, too fast.” The soldiers and cops and guards who pointed guns at her, barked orders at her. The bureaucrats she never saw who rejected her paperwork for cryptic reasons she could only guess at, and the bureaucrats who looked her in the eye and rejected her paperwork and refused to explain themselves.

Unauthorized Bread begins by exploring the refugee/immigration camps in a near-future America, but when Salima is finally free to pursue the American Dream, she will realise that literally everything has a price and is controlled by unseen authority. I thought that this was the strongest of the four stories and best explored a recurring theme of powerless people trying to disrupt entrenched and unfair systems.

The American Eagle had seen a lot of man's inhumanity to man in various war zones across the decades, had even had to clean up after one of the “good guys” had lost his shit and done something not so good. But this affected him differently. This hadn't happened on a battlefield in the fog of war, this had happened in a little private parking lot in Staten Island in broad daylight, committed by a group of guys who could have stopped each other, but instead shouted “stop resisting” for the benefit of one another's body cams.

Model Minority sees a very thinly veiled Superman confront his own presumptive whiteness in the age of BlackLivesMatter. If the American Eagle – who isn't even human, let alone American – really has been around for decades, fighting for the underdog, just where was he in the days of Emmett Till and Woolworth's lunch counters?

You know what happened next. Their insurer told Lacey that it was time for her to die now. If she wanted chemo and radiation or whatever, they'd pay it (reluctantly, and with great bureaucratic intransigence), but “experimental” therapies were not covered. Which, you know, OK, who wants to spend $1.5 mil on some charlatan's miracle-cure juice cleanse or crystal therapy? But adaptive cell transfer wasn't crystal healing and the NIH wasn't the local shaman.

The title story, Radicalized, is about the American health care system and allowing life-saving decisions to be in the hands of money-making insurers. Again, the powerless will attempt to disrupt the system, but I really didn't think that this added much to the current conversation. At least there was some Canadian content here, of the sort that the CBC would revel in: The Canadian prime minister weighed in on the subject and said that even though she was a conservative, she understood that there were some places where markets couldn't do the job, and health care was one of them. And while we Canadians love our socialised health care, there isn't enough money in the communal pot to pay for the experimental cancer treatments that this story is about: these treatment plans would likely be denied here as well.

Before The Event, Martin Mars spent a lot of time trying to game it out. Would the collapse be sudden, catching him off guard and unprepared, having to fight his way to his fortress as he escaped from Paradise Valley and into the desert hills? Or would there be some kind of sign, a steady uptick in civil disorder and failures from the official powers that counted down to the day, giving him a chance to plan an orderly withdrawal to Fort Doom?

In The Masque of the Red Death, a group of the filthy rich escape to a hidden bunker as society begins to collapse; having a great time playing at survivalists until they are confronted with actual threats. In a not very subtle turn of events, it's the common people outside the bunker who learn to cooperate and actually survive.

Speaking about Radicalized with the CBC for Canada Reads, Doctorow said, “If you want to write speculative fiction that is both salient and perennial, just write stories in which the underlying reality of technology doesn't change, lawmakers continue to fail to come to grips with it, and the consequences of that failure become more dire with every passing day.” And that is precisely what we have here: not so much a warning for the future as commentary on the now; and not particularly piercing or enlightening at that.