I don't usually do fedi book reports, but I finished reading #thelostcause by @pluralistic and I'm kind of bipolar on it. Ultimately I settled on liking it more than I dislike it, specifically because he wrote a real fucking ending which in my neighborhood counts for a lot.

My byline for The Lost Cause is that it's the hyper-local spiritual sibling to KSR's globally set novel The Ministry for the Future. If you liked that book or are otherwise solarpunk adjacent it will be worth reading this one.

But back to being bipolar on it. To be frank, the main characters annoyed me well into the halfway mark of the book. There's an agenda behind how each one is written, which is fine, but it's blunt. That said, Doctrow's bluntness worked well in other areas. His understanding of online culture and dynamics was great; his down to earth descriptions of climate change driven events gave me flashbacks; and he's unapologetic about his politics.

So what kept me going even though I was annoyed for half the book? The community that the characters existed in was engrossing even though I was not keen on the individuals, and the strongest energies in the book were when the characters were problem solving together. I suppose that's the "hopepunk" part. At times I'd catch myself being cynical, thinking "the world doesn't work that way", but then detouring to "wait, why can't the world work that way?". Taking that step back is extremely powerful, and Doctrow dares you to take it.