Makers

Cory Doctorow has Opinions. (We knew that already, right?) He has Opinions on issues such as copyright, lawyers, entrepreneurship, digitization not only of information but of life itself, the role of technology in transforming our view of the world, etc etc etc. And that's all well and good; while I don't always agree with his conclusions, his opinions on the issues are always intriguing and well-informed.

The trouble is that when he puts it all into novel form - using the same idea as Stephenson's Diamond Age, the changes in society that happen when material abundance is available to everyone while information is restricted - then as much as I'm fascinated by the ideas, the what-ifs and the probably-wills, I never get rid of the feeling that he's preaching at me. The story moves in fits and starts, the world is for the most part limited to what the lead characters get up to (it doesn't help that they're all Fantastic at what they do except when it's a plot point that they're not), the villains (because you gotta have villains in a story about entrepreneurship) are one-dimensional... And the probably most intriguing storyline, that of a collective building a coherent story out of apparent chaos, is alluded to several times only to be unceremoniously dropped before Doctorow tries to explain what that story is.

Makers makes me want to read Doctorow the non-fiction writer. That's a compliment to the writer, but not to the novelist.