(2023-05-12) Watts No Moods Ads Or Cutesy Fucking Icons Red Team Blues

Peter Watts: No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons » Red Team Blues. A number of years ago, while I was just beginning to figure out this whole Writing thing, I tried to classify what I saw as “successful authors”.

Right now I’m more interested in those authors at the other end of the scale, authors that—for one reason or another— I would never even try to emulate. Within that Phylum, I was able to identify three distinct taxa.

There were the authors whose writing made me cringe: clunky prose, wooden dialog, flat characters. There was often a very cool idea at the heart of their novels

There were those whose writing I admired and whose moves, once observed, I might have copied well enough—but there would have been no point because I had nothing to add. Having read Gibson

But there was also this third type of writer, who could tell you exactly what they were going to do—let you watch them doing it— and you still had no clue how they’d pulled it off. They could say I’m gonna write a novel about a guy whose father is a mountain and his mother is a washing machine. And you would say Dude, you’re a fucking loon. No way does that make any kind of sense. And they would shrug and go off and write the damn thing, and reading the novel you had to admit they’d pulled it off, but even with all that data you still didn’t have the first idea how to do something like that yourself. So far I’ve only encountered one author in that category, and his name is Cory Doctorow. He’s got a new book out: Red Team Blues.

His novels don’t just tell kick-ass stories; they frequently moonlight as instruction manuals for revolution. That may make them a bit didactic in places, but it doesn’t seem to have slowed his ascent any.

Red Team Blues—set firmly in the present day and containing no sfnal elements—is the first Doctorow novel that doesn’t qualify as genre.

He seems to be following the same general trajectory that William Gibson did a few years back: science-fiction futures imagined ever-nearer, finally segueing into a Now that still feels like SF.

In this sense Red Team Blues is Cory’s Pattern Recognition, and at least in terms of basic propulsive storytelling I think it’s better

The villains of Cory’s books aren’t really people; they’re systems. They wear punchable Human faces but those tend to be avatars, mere sock-puppets operated by the institutions that comprise the real baddies.

With Red Team Blues it’s Crypto, the paramount tech-bro wet dream of recent years

Those are nitpicks, though. If I had a real complaint about Red Team Blues it would be that its cast of characters is so, well— nice.

I’ve never fully come to terms with the general decency of Cory’s characters

Doctorow the Author is—hopeful. The little guys win against overwhelming odds.

Maybe it’s a fundamental difference in outlook. I’ve always regarded humans as self-glorified mammals, fighting endless and ineffective rearguard against their own brain stems

Or maybe—maybe it’s not just his plots that are meant to be instructional. Maybe he’s deliberately showing us how we could behave as a species.