thefourthvine's Reviews > Red Team Blues

Cory Doctorow has a couple of failure modes for me, and it's early in the novel but I feel like they're strongly in play, to the point where I'm quitting.

1. "I wanted to write non-fiction, but fiction pays better." It's infodump central with your host, Cory Doctorow! And here's the thing: I typically love an infodump. Unfortunately, Doctorow is often telling me things I already know while presenting them as knowledge no one has. Also, he loves having characters do infodumps when they are still basically a name on a page. And that makes perfect sense, because you know it's not the character talking. It's Doctorow, lecturing while moving the character's mouth up and down.

2. "I very much believe in equality and social justice, but also I am here to write dudes being dudes and tech bros being tech bros." This is actually fine, except for the part where I am not all that interested in dudeliness or tech bros.

I don't know. I'd love to hear that the plot is good enough that I'll forget all about this, or that the characters really get good twenty pages after I quit. But until I hear that, I'm sticking this in a box marked "as done as it's gonna get."