The Lost Cause

Published by TOR.

4 stars (1 review)

It’s thirty years from now. We’re making progress, mitigating climate change, slowly but surely. But what about all the angry old people who can’t let go?

For young Americans a generation from now, climate change isn't controversial. It's just an overwhelming fact of life. And so are the great efforts to contain and mitigate it. Entire cities are being moved inland from the rising seas. Vast clean-energy projects are springing up everywhere. Disaster relief, the mitigation of floods and superstorms, has become a skill for which tens of millions of people are trained every year. The effort is global. It employs everyone who wants to work. Even when national politics oscillates back to right-wing leaders, the momentum is too great; these vast programs cannot be stopped in their tracks.

But there are still those Americans, mostly elderly, who cling to their red baseball caps, their grievances, their huge vehicles, their …

1 edition

Highly relevant socio-political fiction

4 stars

(em português: sol2070.in/2024/01/the-lost-cause-cory-doctorow )

"The Lost Cause" (2023), by Cory Doctorow, is a climate fiction set 30 years in the future. It's not hard to see why it went straight to bestseller lists. The story basically extrapolates the current rift in the US between Trumpists and society to the imminence of something close to a civil war, with a focus on the climate emergency.

It could also be described as Green New Deal fiction, about the (non-fictional) proposal for a massive government investment that, while mitigating the catastrophic consequences of climate change and creating resilience, generates jobs and new technologies.

The setting is the city of Burbank (Los Angeles). Decades after the program began, society is still adapting to the ruined environment but, for the first time, there is hope for a real chance that civilization will recover.

Right-wing extremists have hardened, especially in the face of the waves of …