Makers [Hardcover]

Cory Doctorow writes about the near future. All of his novels are set in a world that is still within the realms of the imaginable. It makes them not always easy to classify - they can seem a bit utopian or dystopian or too futuristic or not futuristic enough... basically, they sit in a genre and class of their own.

Makers is a novel about people who like to be creative and invent stuff. It's about a future where everyone can become a mad inventor, like the one in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, with minimal resource investment and without understanding all the inner workings of their inventions. Basically, he's extrapolated about 10 years into the future. Maybe less.

The characters in his novel are: Perry and Lester - two "makers", Susanne - a journalist assigned to cover their story, Kettlewell - a visionary business man who merges two old economy industrial behemoths, liquidates all their industrial aspects and turns the new corporation into a venture capital investor for mad inventors, Tjan - a manager brought in to monetise the mad inventions, Freddy - a vicious little journalist, and Sammy - a Disney Parks manager who tries to innovate the park and fight the competition.

But the truth is, the characters are secondary to the ideas. The novel chronicles their actions and lives for a few years, then a skip of a few years, then another few months, with an epilogue set another fifteen years later. But it never feels like a story. Yes, there are conflicts and struggles, but some of them happen off-stage, some are just flamewars on teh interwebs, some are a little forced. There is no overarching story arc - it's more like a lengthy series of events, a murky, undirected collection of lives that intersect at these two points, important to all sets of lives, but not perhaps all-important.

No, the important thing in this book is not the people. It's the ideas. It's why they all spend so much time discussing, debating, talking about ideas. It's why the book sometimes reads like a discussion in a forum, or the kind of conversations students at university can have, when they're still convinced that they have a future of changing the world before them, and want to play out ideas about what that future world will or should be.

So, the ideas:

We don't need to understand the workings of stuff to invent it. These days, there are libraries of source code, computer applications that can compute almost anything, modular codes that you can combine without ever having seen a line of source code yourself, open APIs and mashups... so anyone can quickly put something together without being particularly smart or educated that would have taken prior generations a hundred people and a year. (Witness the App development boom on mobile phones, and the way little computer games are made these days)

What if the same were true for physical objects? Cue the 3D printers (which already exist, but are pricey). They print 3D objects out of plastic. What if you could have programmable, learning robots using and assembling those objects, and working for you. You could be a factory...

The other ideas are mostly about organisations, patents, copyrights, trademarks: fundamentally, wouldn't it be nicer if intellectual property did not exist? If everyone could mashup not just songs, but ideas, objects, products, inventions, without needing permission, and then sell them on...

There's other ideas in there too, about American nutritional habits, biotech, poverty and poor communities etc. but ultimately, the thing that drives the novel is frustration with the existence of intellectual property, and lawyers.

The book is an interesting read, but never a funny one. Sometimes characters roll on the floor laughing, but it's over things that you need to be there to find funny. It's not a very tense read either - all the energy goes into discussions, debates, plans of action, but events just sort of sneak up on people, like hurricanes, and characters are more reactive than authorial in their own fates.

I suppose the thing I found most difficult about reading the book is that it started out with huge energy, and then fizzled into defeatism. It read a little like China Mieville's novels - not in the language, which is purely functional and not decorative at all - but in the affection for a political mode that the novel itself seems to think cannot work, not because the model is bad, but because it would require people to be smart and good and believe in it. Just like Mieville's socialist collectivist people power organisations, the ideas and political models in Makers need not just momentum, but inertia, and neither author can convince himself that critical mass could be reached. So we read about movements that struggle, fizzle, die... get reborn, struggle... it starts out with a bang and continues with a whinge, heads for a whisper. Which makes the reading experience not satisfying in that part of your brain that likes well-rounded stories with a climax and genuine excitement at the end. It may make it intellectually satisfying, but I read books to be satisfied in my story-sense as well as my intellectual sense, and this book delivers the latter without the former.

A good read, especially if you are interested in hardware/software hacking (in the creative sense of the term), open software and collaborative working, small business entrepreneurs in the near future. He clearly knows this area well, and the sci/tech bits are great.

The book is clearly about ideas, and (though I cared about them) the characters have an element of cardboard about them - they speak in an unnatural way, so that the author can get his ideas over to the reader. Also, he tells you rather too much about what they think about each other, rather than letting you figure it out.

Though the characters are unconventional of course, (bloggers, hackers etc) the book is quite conventional and obvious in places. 'Shouldn't girls be involved in technology?' someone has to say. (Yes of course, but we get it already), and the villain has bad teeth bad breath, and bad hair.

I recommend the book. I'm glad I read it!

i just grabbed this book because the cover looked cool and when i picked it up i couldnt put it down, i havent read much hard science before but this was amazing.