Customer Reviews

Makers

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Remember "The Graduate"? Benjamin, a child of privilege, has no idea what to do with his life. At his graduation party, a colleague of his father's pulls him aside, and says "I have one word for you: plastics."

The rest of the movie isn't about that, of course, but about Benjamin's sexual and romantic exploits. But in some parallel universe, perhaps a different version of "The Graduate" exists, where Benjamin follows his father's colleague's advice, goes into plastics, becomes an inventor, strikes out on his own, and winds up rebelling not against Mrs. Robinson, but Exxon, or GE or IBM.

"Makers" is the closest thing in this universe to that version. It is youthful and exuberant, but also world-weary and wise, and freshly of-the-moment. Part I is a head-spinning avalanche of incident and invention, Part II, a meditation on failed revolutions, Part III the battle plan for a hard-fought, ambiguous, but plausible victory.

The book is many things: let me point out three. One: it is a catalogue of brand-new desirable products. My personal favorite is the lego-block-shaped ice-cubes. I want them so badly. You'll have your own favorites, I am sure. You'd have to go back to "American Psycho" for so many wonderful things to buy on each page. But "Makers" is much hipper: genuine cool versus ironic-cool.

Two: it is a detailed, extremely plausible, and only thinly disguised history of the dot-com bubble and the intellectual property wars since the World Wide Web came into being. It is thus simultaneously about the near future and the recent past. In other words, it is about this minute.

Third: it's the best popular business book I've ever read, better than "The Tipping Point," better than "Freakanomics," better than "The Black Swan."

Finally, you get great value for your dollar. This edition may be a little over four-hundred pages, but the publisher is that marvelous cheapskate Tor. Tightly clustered chapter breaks and a tiny, densely packed font camouflage a much longer book, easily six or seven hundred pages, possibly almost as long as "Under the Dome."

In this case, longer is better.

I won't summarize the plot since so many others have already done that. What I'll offer is a warning: It's apparent that Doctorow knows his science. What he doesn't grasp in this book are characters.

If you're a tech geek, you'll probably enjoy the book. All the bits about gizmos hold ones interest briefly, but after very few pages, I needed more humanity.

Doctorow's characters are as mechanical as his technology. I'm hardpressed to say I liked a single character, let alone can remember any of their names. That's depressing considering the vast amount of time I just committed to reading this book.

Final Analysis:

If you're into hard SF where the characters are secondary to the big idea, you might like this book.

If you need some flesh-and-blood people to populate your fictional worlds, this book isn't for you.

Born to invent and create, Perry and Lester go together like peanut butter and jelly. When they invent a whole new world with someone taking notes of every move, life becomes a little hectic. Then, when their baby crumbles, the whole world is watching. These friends are draw to the limit and it's no surprise that the company and the friendship, may be doomed for ever. Will they be able to redeem themselves?

This is a witty novel that will appeal to nerds everywhere. I'm including myself in this nerd category. So to all you dorks out there, this is a book written just for you. (And me.)

I won an Advance Uncorrected Proof of this book. Just like everyone else, I love winning things, especially ARCs. So when I first started it, I didn't really have any expectations. Of course, the fact I only managed to read about twenty pages before setting the book down for the night led me to believe it would take a long time to finish it. Not so. The next night I managed about another twenty pages--not so hard to believe as small font, long pages and I only spent about an hour reading. The third night I read fifty pages and hated to stop. By that time, Cory Doctorow literally grabbed me and pulled into the story. I got so caught up in the lives of these five people that I hated to stop reading. First off, we have Suzanne Church, a journalist in a press conference given by Landon Kettlewell, new owner of Kodacell--a merging of Kodak and Duracell. A brilliant, manic man who's not happy unless he has some crisis to solve. Kettlewell ends up talking Suzanne into covering his idea of investing money in small groups of entrepreneurs. And so Suzanne ends up meeting Lester and Perry--two brilliant men with zany ideas who make things from garbage. Then Tjan joins them as the "suit" or management. This whole concept of "New Work" takes off. Suzanne ends up quitting the paper and blogging. When New Work tanks, Lester and Perry don't just sit around, they come up with newer and zanier ideas and Suzanne goes off to Russia--the new metropolis of cosmetic surgery.
I really loved MAKERS. The characters are all bigger than life and very easy to fall in love with. Of course, the villains are all easy to hate too, well, except for Sammy Page. Felt a bit ambivalent about him. The action is non-stop and the way Perry and Lester, and even Suzanne react to the world around them is awe-inspiring. Perry especially is determined to do things his own way and stays true to that throughout the book. And this futuristic world Cory Doctorow comes up with, well, don't really think I'd want to live there. With the way things are going now with the economy and all--very plausible. Start this story and you will have to finish it, if for no other reason than to find out what Lester and Perry come up with next.

Like a spoiled child, "Makers" careens unconstrained through a disjointed future with raw enthusiasm, passion, and naivety. Cory Doctorow's story of Lester and Perry, a couple of New Age hacker-inventors in southern Florida, alternates between brilliance and annoyance while my reactions bounced from delight to frustration. If nothing else, "Makers" is provocative, an important read with gems of wisdom buried in an overly long diatribe of clever technology, keen cultural insight and dubious economics.

While we're never told exactly when this all starts, it is sometime in the near distant future - probably the late 20-teens. Things aren't a whole lot different than today - pretty much a linear projection of where cheap microprocessors will lead - from a "Boogie Woogie Elmo" that mimics dance moves and responds to voice commands to virtually ubiquitous robots performing a wide range of specialized tasks. Venture capitalist Landon Kattlewell has engineered the merger of Kodak and Duracell, reshaping the resulting "Kodacell" into a loose network of inventors and hackers, spawning the "New Work" micro-economy that looks a lot more like Bangalore than Boston. The Internet merges with the physical world through 3D "printers" - fantasy devices that can create in mass virtually any device who's component plans and parts can be digitized. On one hand, virtually every shopping mall and Walmart are boarded up, and shanty towns sprawl through suburbia, yet Disney World flourishes, still drawing massive crowds with streams of disposable income. San Jose Mercury News reporter Suzanne Church is assigned as an embedded reporter with the loveable tinkerers Perry and Lester, chronicling this upside-down brave new world. But after losing new job as the old media collapses along with the old economy, she remains on the story, gathering a huge following on her blog which ends up generating more than enough advertising income to keep her afloat and independent. Lester and Perry's genius leads to a bizarre "ride" built in an abandoned WalMart, drawing not only huge crowds but also Disney's unwanted attention. But like all bubbles, "New Work" collapses, Disney takes the gloves off, and the relationship between Perry, Lester, and Suzanne frays.

Doctorow is no fan of big business and big bureaucracy, and "Makers" is at its core a story of the triumph of the little guy. But, fiction not withstanding, his thesis is flawed, cutting huge corners in economic theory to arrive at the micro-economy utopia he has created. Doctorow falls back on tired themes of exploitation of the masses by evil corporations, while suggesting that life would be hunky dory for all if wealth (and technology) was simply redistributed to all. Not surprisingly, the author leans on misinformed parallels to FDR's "New Deal" - like it was "Roosevelt's public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression" (it was World War II - not government spending - that set the economy back on an even keel.) But flaws not withstanding, "Makers" is a powerful novel, a poignant, passionate and rambling epic of the future, the future of technology, and of love and relationships. It's worth taking the ride.

This Cory Doctorow novel takes us to the very near future, a pretty bleak, economically depressed landscape. Into this landscape, Doctorow drops two tech nerds (Lester and Perry), an English venture capitalist (Kettlewell), a blogger (Suzanne Church) and a mid-level Disney exec (Sammy) in a story of how unfettered high tech capitalism and bio-technology might shape the near future, a future in which many of our previous bellwether economic engines, companies such as Kodak, Duracell and Westinghouse have found themselves to be obsolete.

This is a vastly entertaining read, one in which very, very many current economic trends are followed to their potential conclusions, some good and some not so good (think airport security). The wealth of potential new inventions which Doctorow has imagined is staggering. Imagine a world in which obesity is eliminated through biochemical altering of metabolism (with the proviso that the altered individual must consume 10,000 calories a day or starve to death!). Imagine what might happen to Disney World when patrons can undergo similar or superior experiences through virtual reality in one's own home or at a fraction of the cost. Rest assured, Mickey will not go quietly into that good night. As an aside, what is it with Doctorow and Disney?

This is a story told in three parts: First, an attempted conversion of the old economy into a vibrant, creative "New Work" economy in which micro cells of technologically proficient, highly creative inventors are identified, organized and capitalized; second, 5-10 years following collapse of the "New Work" economy, our heroes (Perry and Lester) create a nostalgic look back through construction of a "ride", in which participants not only experience the contents, but grade and ultimately reconfigure it through their collective experiences. Such rides sweep the nation, and are connected and remain identical through technical networks; third, is the clash between the "rides" and the ultimate "ride", Disney World. The Empire Strikes Back, as it were. Suits, countersuits, trademark infringement, industrial espionage all ensue.

Doctorow is clearly no fan of multi-national corporations, bureaucracy, "suits" or even mid-level management. One would almost picture his Utopia as a near anarchical society in which the individual creative genius is given complete control, unfettered by law (intellectual property) or administrative control. Of course, both in real life and in Doctorow's novel, such a society is not sustainable. At each level of the story, a predictable progression of creativity, success and growth is followed by chaos, control, litigation and ultimately collapse. It's a wild "ride" and one well worth the time.

This sounded like a good title and I was excited to dig in, but the flimsy plot, wooden characters, and unbelievable socio-economic developments fail to serve. I found the "porn" scene particularly bizarre... competently done, I suppose, but unnecessary, uncalled for, and rather out of place in the underdeveloped novel around it. Occasional, ham-fisted nuggets of character-building dramatic sequences happen to the story, but these resemble bolt-on literary units rather than successfully setting the tone of the novel.

The author seems like an intelligent guy with a deep appreciation for geek culture, but his character and idea presentation are more like Michael Crichton's campy ain't-we-clever formula than Neal Stephenson's far more intriguing work. Some rare missteps jump out and molest suspension of disbelief as well, such as Doctorow's statement that the Roosevelt administration spent the US out of the Great Depression revealing the unfortunate truth that the author has gaping blind spots in his understanding of economics and history.

At this point the author seems more interesting than his work, and I hope his writing improves. This book will still do well with his fans, obviously, and true believers with an overdeveloped suspension of disbelief ready to latch onto generic celebrations of geek culture. But for something more compelling in this vein I suggest Neal Stephenson if you haven't already dived into that ocean.

In better hands, the characters might've been believable enough for you to care about them. I liked some of the ideas, but I found Mr. Doctorow's sci-fi a bit unbalanced, inconsistent, so the suspension of disbelief that I'd brought to Mr. Gibson's work wasn't possible, nor did Mr. Doctorow's writing induce a suspension of disbelief, as Mr. Stephenson might. In all, the book was worth a few hours here and there, but it never delivered on the promise of the first few chapters.

--#

Cory has put together a pretty fast paced book that does a pretty good job covering the potential implications of ubiquitous 3d fabrication technology on society. The ideas in this book are great, and its nice to see one potential way of synthesizing them into a pretty coherent narrative.

Unfortunately, the characters and the narrative doesn't keep up. At various times, each is cliche, annoying, or tiring. But, if you power through those moments, you come away with a rich perspective to help understand the future.

I've enjoyed Cory Doctrow's stories, but it seems as though what was once fresh and exciting and cutting edge has become formulaic and predictable.

This book, like most of Doctrow's other works, are about oh-so-cool techies doing weird techno-stuff while fighting "the man" and (Doctrow's favorite nemesis) copyrights. Plug in a few references to the tech fads of the moment (Twitter, 3-d printers) and a heavy dollop of political San Francisco sensibilities and you've got another Doctrow novel.

I want to like this book, because I've liked Doctrow's other works, but ultimately <em>Makers</em> disappoints.