dystopia

The less obvious the lesson you are supposed to learn is during the story, the better, and in only 1 of the 4 stories was it painfully obvious in this book. ( )

Each of the short stories had a slightly different flavor to them. I thought unauthorized bread and model minority were the better two of the four short stories in the novel, but I did find all of them to be slightly repetitive. The stories seemed to be at a weird intersection of being too short to fully flesh out the nuance of an idea, while also being too long for just the one specific perspective on a topic. I do still think it is a book worth reading. ( )

Four novellas, progressively more disturbing, but worth reading. The events portrayed could very well come to pass. ( )

5 stars
Unauthorized Bread
Capitalism has risen to new outrageousness when the apartment you had waited 18 months to move into, and had subsidized rent, had appliances--toaster oven, dishwasher, washer/dryer, refrigerator, microwave--that would only work if you bought the more expensive bread, soap, food, etc., that were made to go in it. Then one day the company went bankrupt, so all the appliances stopped working. The deep net showed a way to hack them so they'd work, but they'd all have to be put back to factory settings when the company got bought up by bigger fish and went back online.
Have you ever heard of a virtual machine? Specializing in the humanities, I only know about it because when my University was closing down, we peasants needed to work on files that were confidential, and the big boys in Baltimore couldn't know about it. Well this is how Doctorow helped his characters solve their dilemma.

3 stars
Model Minority
I never thought about Superman being around today and being a civil rights activist. But Doctorow did, and this is how he imagined Superman acting when he sees three cops beating up a POC after they planted a bag of dope on the middle console of his vehicle. Doesn't go the way you'd expect.

4 stars
Radicalized
Joe's wife Lacey is diagnosed with Stage IV metastasized breast cancer and has 3 months to live. Her doctor says she is a good candidate for an alternative, radical treatment that costs a million $. Insurance company, of course, immediately negs it. Joe's family is devastated, and Joe is outer-space angry. Instead of getting help for his all-consuming anger, Joe finds a forum for men whose wives are dying of breast cancer because the insurance company won't cover a radical treatment. Members of the forum share their grief, but they also talk about getting even. The reader lives a little vicariously in this one.

5 stars
The Masque of the Red Death
"Little by little the world's cities filled up with powerful, self - governing people whose discipline, hard work, and brilliance meant that they got richer and richer.
Give the socialists credit, they had this figured out. They knew that the world was heading to a state where the number of betas and gammas the alphas needed to keep the systems running would far exceed the demand, and that those unnecessary people would be squeezed out, little by little, and then, all at once. They wouldn't go without a fight, of course. Of course! Who would? p.250
"...the smartest and best had figured out how to improve even the most marginal assets, well beyond the capacity of the 99%, and now the 99% had found themselves relieved of all their worldly goods and lacking the sums to rent anywhere to perch while they waited to die.
This was an "adjustment period," two words that sounded bloodless and bureaucratic, but which described the chaos that would reign while the unnecessariat were Eased out of existence and humanity realigned itself around the strongest and brightest that evolution could select.
Economists called it an "adjustment period" but people like Martin called it The Event." p.251

Are you prepared for Armageddon? All the 1%ers are, you can bet on that. In this little gem, Martin is one of the 0.1%ers, and he plans his Fort Doom out to the last decimal. His place out in the Nevada desert can support him and the 29 others of his carefully-selected kind for a month, until things settle down. His first mistake is calling Armageddon just a few days before the real thing set in. That meant that not everyone showed up, when they realized that he'd jumped the gun. It also meant that a couple of the ones that did show up, thought about turning around and leaving again. That was just the first of the many things that Martin could never have foreseen.
This story had me on the edge of my seat.

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