Cory Doctorow, co-founder of this very website, has a new audiobook in the works: The Lost Cause. He's self-financing it through Kickstarter, making it feasible to produce without caving to the compulsory DRM imposed by Amazon/Audible.
"My refusal to cave to Audible has cost me a lot," he writes. "My agent says that I could have paid off my mortgage and saved enough to give my kid a debt-free US college experience. But I don't sell out that cheap."
The Lost Cause, "a hopeful novel of climate emergencies, set in a world where millions of young people have been mobilized to do the repair and care work needed to cope," is out November 15.
The adversary: a "counterreformation of seagoing anarcho-capitalist billionaire wreckers and seething white nationalist militias are seeking to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat."
Bill McKibben: "The first great YIMBY novel, this chronicle of mutual aid is politically perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful even amidst the smoke."
Stanley Robinson: "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this."
Cory:
It's a hopeful novel.
You know about the difference between hope and optimism, right? Optimism is like pessimism: a form of fatalism, the belief that the things that are gonna happen are going to happen, and what we do doesn't make a difference.
Hope, on the other hand, is the belief that what we do matters. It's the belief that if we improve our situation in any way, that might open a new course of action to us that had been previously hidden from view, a course of action that, if seized, will revewal another hidden foothold, and another, and another.
We need hope right now.
Here's a preview:
