Review: The Lost Cause

 The Lost Cause is Cory Doctorow's extrapolation into the future of our vastly polarized society: the Magas vs the next generation of climate activists, the NIMBYs vs the builders, the libertarian sea-steaders vs the impoverished refugees. It all takes place in the city of Burbank, where the protagonist, Brooks lives in a Maga-sympathetic grandfather after he was orphaned due to his parents fighting a climate-related crisis in Canada and perishing in that attempt.

After Brooks' grandfather dies of natural causes, he does what every kid his age tries to do, which is to tear it down and build a high density apartment building to help the housing crisis and house refugees. The whole thing then becomes a thinly veiled exposition of the world Doctorow has extrapolated from our own time, with Magas trying every trick in the book to prevent refugees from destroying their perfect suburban Burbank (including injunction against buildings, starting wildfires, etc), and Brooks and his friends trying to outmaneuver them.

It's perfectly good juvenile fiction, and written at a time when California's sky had turned orange and we wondered whether we were too optimistic when we thought we were turning the planet into a hellscape. There's not much character development, and a lot of exposition about how prefab buildings could help solve the housing problems but not much on how society would ever reconcile its differences other than by waiting for the old guys to die out.