Lost Cause
* Book: Lost Cause. Cory Doctorow, 2023.
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Via the publisher:
"In the book’s backstory, the Green New Deal is kickstarted by a series of (ultimately) fortuitous coincidences: first, a set of late-breaking electoral scandals results in Canada’s NDP winning a large parliamentary majority in a year that they had anticipated losing badly. The new Prime Minister is a Metis woman who had been picked by party grandees as a symbolic candidate in an election she was supposed to lose.
Instead, she finds herself commanding a bulletproof majority just as floods wipe half of Calgary (a city where unregulated developers have built extensively on floodplains) off the map. Rather than continuing the cycle of rebuilding and reflooding, the new PM commands that the city of Calgary will be relocated off the floodplain altogether.
This is the foundation of the “Canadian Miracle,” which leads to the creation of national high-speed rail, national renewable electrification, and, eventually, an international civilian conservation corps that travels around the world, learning from and assisting in comparable projects everywhere.
Lost Cause is a novel filled with wildfires, zoonotic plagues, internal refugee crises and flashfloods. But it’s a utopian novel – because it’s a novel where we got to the point of peak indifference before we crossed the point of no return. It’s a novel about confronting problems, rather than ignoring them."