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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 anger. To their "alternative" news sources that reassure them that their resentment is right and pure and that "climate change" is just a giant scam.
And they're your grandfather, your uncle, your great-aunt. And they're not going anywhere. And they're armed to the teeth.
The Lost Cause asks: What do we do about people who cling to the belief that their own children are the enemy? When, in fact, they're often the elders that we love?
About the author
Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, including THE LOST CAUSE, a solarpunk science fiction novel of hope amidst the climate emergency. His recent nonfiction THE INTERNET CON: HOW TO SEIZE THE MEANS OF COMPUTATION is a Big Tech disassembly manual. Other recent books include RED TEAM BLUES, a science fiction crime thriller; CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, nonfiction about monopoly and creative labor markets; the LITTLE BROTHER series for young adults; IN REAL LIFE, a graphic novel; and the picture book POESY THE MONSTER SLAYER. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.
Report
"Completely delightful...Neither utopian nor dystopian, it portrays life in SoCal in a future woven from our successes (Green New Deal!), failures (climate chaos anyway), and unresolved conflicts (old MAGA dudes). I loved it."
-- Rebecca Solnit, author of Men Explain Things To Me and A Paradise Built In Hell
"This book looks like our future and feels like our present-it's an unforgettable vision of what could be."-Kim Stanley Robinson
"Sometimes I think that Cory Doctorow is the last real optimist and idealist left in science fiction" - Locus
"[The Lost Cause] tells a thought-provoking story, with a message of hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak."--Library Journal, starred review
