Electric eclectic
destiny

Open-source, mash-ups and cool stuff is how
Cory Doctorow envisions the future in Makers
Plus: Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind

by MARK SLUTSKY
and SACHA JACKSON

Makers
Science fiction is sometimes called “speculative fiction” by those looking to jazz up the genre’s tawdry image. But in some cases, the moniker really fits. Cory Doctorow’s new novel Makers feels like an extrapolation, an educated conjecture of the way the world might go in the next few years or decades. And if you’re familiar with Doctorow’s writing on the blog Boing Boing, you’ll also be familiar with the ideas he’s playing with here: hacking, crowd-sourcing, mash-ups and, most importantly, making cool stuff.

Makers is set in the not-too-distant future, when visionary entrepreneur Landon Kettlewell merges the listing Kodak and Duracell corporations into one company, Kodacell, and then completely rewrites their mandate. They become corporate sponsors for small teams of people, artisans and inventors who use technology to create and spread new products and ideas, mostly built on the trash heap of mass-produced electronics.

Suzanne Church, a Silicon Valley journalist, finds herself embedded with a pair of them, Perry and Lester, as they turn a Florida junkyard into a seething mass of ideas that threaten to revolutionize not only electronics, but the whole economy. But before that becomes a reality, the market crashes, and the book skips ahead a couple of years to see what’s become of the detritus of that particular mini-boom, a world where Perry and Lester are still tinkering with their inventions, but to much stranger purposes.

It’s fun to see Doctorow nimbly build his vision of the future, one where Disneyland has gone goth and teenagers edit community-created amusement park rides like Wikipedia pages. That said, if you’re not onboard with his particular open-source philosophy, and even if you are, it could read as tendentious. Makers lives up to its subtitle “A Novel of the Whirlwind Changes to Come,” though it’s a vision you might not agree with. (MS)

Changing My Mind
When Zadie Smith first hit the literary scene with White Teeth in 2000, she was both celebrated and disregarded. Readers and critics approached with caution, suspicious that the success of her debut novel was little more than beginner’s luck.

Ten years on and two novels later, Smith has proven herself to be more than just a precocious 25-year-old; White Teeth has endured (it’s on many best-of-the-decade lists) and she’s often viewed as one of the best writers of her generation. In Changing My Mind, her first collection of essays, she proves herself to be an astute reader and thinker, tackling everything from Barack Obama’s many voices to the difficult brilliance of David Foster Wallace.

In this collection, the literary essays are thought provoking, threaded with a duality that befits the title and nudge the reader to rethink authors like E.M. Forster or Franz Kafka. In “Rereading Barthes and Nabokov,” she finds a wonderful balance between reader and writer, a way of understanding the need for both to be able to own a text and inhabit it.

Smith is most ill at ease when acting as a journalist. “A Week in Liberia” is more observation than investigation and Smith seems as exhausted by her role as reporter as the young girls she interviews. “Ten Notes on Oscar Weekend” yields not a single celebrity namedrop (these people are in some way her people). A series of film reviews, “At the Multiplex, 2006,” however, yields different results. She’s at home here trashing Date Movie and makes a strong case for Syriana as a thinking Hollywood film.

Though not a sentimental writer, it’s the essays about her family, and her father in particular, that are in many ways the most stunning and poignant—for anyone who’s been brought to tears over a good joke, “Dead Man Laughing” will likely make you shed a few. (SJ)

MAKERS BY CORY DOCTOROW TOR
BOOKS, HC, 416 PP., $31.99
CHANGING MY MIND BY ZADIE SMITH,
PENGUIN CANADA, HC, 299 PP., $33