I managed to turn out five posts last week, despite being on tour with my latest novel, *The Lost Cause*, a hopeful solarpunk novel endorsed by Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. The tour went great - the book's now a national bestseller on the *USA Today* list! Here's an essay I wrote explaining the structure of the feeling that the book is meant to convey:

https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/14/cory-doctorow-the-swerve/

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This is a climate emergency novel full of rising seas, terrible storms, wildfires and zoonotic plagues, and yet - it is a *hopeful* novel. What makes it hopeful? It depicts a future in which we are treating these phenomena with the gravitas and urgency they warrant, with our whole society's focus shifting to moving coastal cities inland, weatherizing and solarizing our housing, and creating permanent housing for internal refugees.

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While it would be infinitely preferable to live in a world where none of that is necessary, that's not the world we have. This is an sf novel, not a fantasy novel, so all the climate harms we've locked in through decades of expensively procured inaction are present. But the difference between disaster and catastrophe is how and whether we address those harms.

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Sure, this is a world where superstorms wipe away whole cities and Miami is a drowned mangrove swamp, but it's also a world in which oil executives do not chair UN climate summits or complain that oil companies are being "unjustly vilified":

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/27/opec-says-oil-industry-unjustly-vilified-ahead-of-climate-talks-.html

I write a *lot*, and it's not just this newsletter. Writing transports me from my anxieties and aches.

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That's how I came to write *nine* books during lockdown ("when life gives you SARS, make sarsaparilla"). *Lost Cause* was one of *three* books I published in 2023.

I'm going to greet 2024 with another novel, *The Bezzle*, a sequel to 2023's *Red Team Blues*, about the hard-charging, high-tech forensic accountant #MartyHench:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

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*The Bezzle* is a story about the #ShittyTechnologyAdoptionCurve - the way that the worst technologies we have are first rolled out on the people least able to complain about them. After these bad technologies have their sharp edges sanded down on the bodies of prisoners, refugees and kids, they move up to blue collar workers and discount store shoppers, and so on, until we're all living under their thumb.

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In *The Bezzle*, a dear friend of Marty finds himself serving a long sentence in a privatized California prison that flips from one private equity fund to the next, each with even worse, more extractive ways to use technology to bleed prisoners and their families dry. You can read the opening scenes in a just-published excerpt on #TorBooks's site:

https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/

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The period immediately before a book's publication is always a tense one, as the first reviews trickle in. #LibraryJournal's #MarleneHarris is the first out of the gate, with a *spectacular* review:

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-bezzle-1802415

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> Marty’s reminiscences range from obscure financial machinations to heaping helpings of social commentary but always move the underlying thriller story forward in a backwards heist tale that delivers a righteously satisfying ending to the surprise of both the reader and the villain. This novel, like his previous outing, rides on Marty’s voice.

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> He has a jaundiced view of everything, but he tells it with such style and verve that readers are caught up and ride along on the surface until the shark beneath the water jumps out and bites the villain where it hurts.

I'm headed into #SkyboatMedia's studios on Monday with #WilWheaton to record the audiobook for this one, directed as ever by the amazing #GabrielledeCuir. Keep your eyes peeled for a presale crowdfunder in January!

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I am often asked how I decide when to present an idea through fiction and when to do so with nonfiction. The answer is a complicated one, and I got into it in some detail on #Nature's Working Scientist podcast, in discussion with #PaulShrivastava:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03394-8

When it comes to politics, fiction and nonfiction are intensely complementary.

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Nonfiction can convey the data about a social phenomenon, but fiction can convey the *meaning* of the data. It's one thing to see a chart about inequality, and another to inhabit it through fiction. Marty Hench's narrative adventures are a way into the feeling of living in a corrupt oligarchy.

There are other ways into that feeling, of course. Take #BarryBowen's "Lifestyles of the Blessed & Famous: Preacher Homes Sold in 2023" for #TheRoysReport:

https://julieroys.com/lifestyles-blessed-famous-preacher-homes-sold-2023/?mc_cid=9678383b64

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If a picture is worth a thousand words, then carefully staged realtor drone shots ganked from the Redfin listing for a "pastor"'s $3.5m mansion in #NewportBeach is a full-on *sermon* about the corruption of the #Hillsong megachurch:

https://www.redfin.com/CA/Newport-Beach/503-30th-St-92663/home/12363926

Narratives and photos are all well and good, but there's always room for some *data*. The USA's weird breed of federalism and devolved power makes for some very interesting data.

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Writing for #TheAmericanProspect, #PaulStarr rounds up several studies evaluating the "natural experiments" created by enacting very different policies in otherwise similar states:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-12-08-life-death-cost-conservative-power/

The data is in: #ConservativismKills. Living in a red state shortens your life expectancy. The redder the state, the worse it is. The bluer the state, the longer you're likely to live:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1468-0009.12469

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The exemplars here are Connecticut and Oklahoma, whose life expectancies were at par until they began to diverge in policies. Oklahoma got more conservative, Connecticut got more liberal. Today, the average Oklahoman will pop their clogs at 75.8, while a Connecticutensian can expect 80.7 years.

Different scholars have parsed out different policy outcomes. Giving Medicaid to children, for example, shows benefits for the next *50 years*:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171671

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The big one, of course, is #GunControl. Here's the topline: "restrictive state gun policies reduce overall gun deaths." Water also wet:

https://journals.lww.com/epidem/fulltext/2023/11000/the_era_of_progress_on_gun_mortality__state_gun.3.aspx

Fact-free spiritual beliefs like "an armed society is a polite society" are key to conservative policymaking. Pesky progressives who confuse the issue with relevant facts are playing dirty, pointing out reality's unfair leftist bias.

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But after 40 years of neoliberal deference to corporate power, the worm is turning. Somehow, a world on fire, filled with megapastors in megamansions who brief for lethal policies, has finally inspired a global vibe-shift (and not a moment too soon!). One of the most tangible expressions of that shift is the revival of #antitrust, which has been in a coma since the #Reagan administration.

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All over the world - the EU, the UK, Ireland, Australia, and the USA - there are new competition enforcers challenging corporate power in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. If I'd written an enforcer like #FTC chair #LinaKhan in 2010, critics would have slammed me for wish-fulfillment too unrealistic for science fiction.

But today, Khan is taking *big* swings at corporate power, fighting against a calcified edifice of decades of bad, pro-monopoly precedent.

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The pro-monopoly press *hate* her, which is why the WSJ keeps publishing sweaty op-eds insisting that she is wasting her time and that monopolies are good, actually:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

But she is still out there, fighting for all of us. After a pro-monopoly judge stymied the FTC's bid to block the rotten #MicrosoftActivision merger, Khan re-filed, appealing the decision:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/us-ftc-tries-again-stop-microsofts-already-closed-deal-activision-2023-12-06/

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Critics insist that she's on a foolish errand, but Khan is tackling the most promising face of a sheer cliff, and the plainly anticompetitive merger between one of the world's largest console makers (a convicted monopolist!) with one of the world's largest games publishers is the right place to start. If she can get her piton into one of the hairline cracks in that face, her arduous climb gains a solid anchor for the next stage of her assent.

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Of course, Khan's highest-profile action is her case against #Amazon, the omnipresent, dystopian poster-child for #enshittification, a platform we can't avoid, but which is so haphazardly policed that the bestselling bitter lemon energy drink you order might be bottled piss harvested from its immiserated drivers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/20/release-energy/#the-bitterest-lemon

In a world of murderous, community-destroying monopolies, Amazon stands out for the sheer number of ways it makes the world worse.

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Amazon maims its warehouse workers and kills its drivers with impossible quotas. It poisons Black and brown neighborhoods with truck exhaust from its giant depots. It destroys small businesses that sell on its platform. It was part of the studio cabal scheming to destroy actors and writers' livelihoods with unfair contracts and AI. Its audiobook monopoly stole at least $100m from independent authors.

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It makes goods and services more expensive at *every retailer* (not just Amazon), and price-gouges on its own storefront:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

Keeping that scam going requires a *lot* of skullduggery. A new set of leaked internal Amazon documents shed some light on how that inedible sausage gets made:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/wxjbm9/amazon-brags-it-cultivated-california-mayor-with-donations-in-leaked-policy-document

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