Cory Doctorow’s novel, For the Win

I really enjoyed reading For the Win, Cory Doctorow’s second novel about kids wreaking havoc with systems most of their local adults would claim they don’t understand. At first I was dubious, because there’s a lot of overtly expository economic brain-dumping going on, and also because the opening line was a dud.

But I started to warm to it and eventually realised that Doctorow is doing what I love Milan Kundera so much for doing: interweaving non-fiction-ish philosophical asides with a fiction narrative. Doctorow’s story here was way more accessible to me (an 80s-born Australian nerd who would like to find more time for gaming in his life) than Kundera’s stories, because I am definitely not a 20s-Czech-born French public intellectual. But I love Kundera’s stories for the way they weave in philosophy, and I came around to Doctorow’s way of doing it.

Doctorow is not exactly a master stylist (there are some clunky phrases in there, and some repetition of character description that felt cut-pasted), but neither was H G Wells, or Kundera, for that matter, or PKD, or Asimov. These are ideas novelists, who I love for their ability to squeeze powerful intellectual motives into usually-engaging literary and genre fiction, even if the prose is a bit less than aesthetically pleasing. And I know Doctorow from his powerful online activism, so I didn’t turn to For the Win for delicately undulating prose.

It’s worth a read if you’re interested in unionism, worker rights, global economics and the exploits of highly precocious teens with attitude. If you’re just into gaming though, I expect you’ll be disappointed. The in-game stories were pretty lame (compared to, say, Ready Player One), so I wasn’t surprised to read in the book’s acknowledgements that Doctorow had to call in research support for that subject as well as his pan-cultural references (which also felt a bit glib).

The chunk of economics download I like the best:

And that’s the real reason the powerful fear open systems and networks. If anyone can set up a free voicecall to anyone else in the world, using the net, then we can all communicate with the same ease that’s standard for the high and mighty. If anyone can create and sell virtual wealth in a game, then we’re all in the same economic shoes as the multinational megacorps that start the games.

And if any worker, anywhere, can communicate with any other worker, anywhere, for free, instantaneously, without her boss’s permission, then, brother, look out, because the Coase cost of demanding better pay, better working conditions and a slice of the pie just got a lot cheaper. And the people who have the power aren’t going to sit still and let a bunch of grunts take it away from them.