For The Win!
Feb. 26th, 2010 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dennyRecently I was lucky enough to win a pre-proof copy of Cory Doctorow's latest book, For The Win. (That's the book's title, not (just) me being excited.) The book is due to be published in April, by Voyager, who very nicely decided to give away some copies via their Twitter stream.
I've read two of Cory's previous books - Little Brother, which is absolutely brilliant, and Makers, which was a bit more hit-and-miss for me both in writing style and subject matter. For The Win definitely sits alongside Little Brother for me as far as the writing and characters are concerned, it's very well-paced, with no slow spots and in places it's a definite page-turner.
The plot of For The Win is partly about online games - particularly gold-farming, and set partly in the culture around the kinds of games that happens in. I'm not much of a gamer, but I do have the usual overview that any self-respecting net-geek has, so I felt at home in the world the book was set in. This might have been one of the reasons I found it easier to get along with than Makers, but I think also the writing is just better... Makers was less engaging in places (most particularly the fat-phobic plot, which was so heavy-handed at the beginning that it almost put me off the book, and I never did figure out what point was being made in the end). Little Brother is of course about politics, privacy, and all those other things I get over-excited about, so it was a surefire win on subject matter, but also the writing is again very engaging all the way through, and the characters are particularly well done, and I think it's these aspects that pull For The Win and Little Brother ahead of Makers for me.
Anyway, although it centres around gaming, For The Win is actually mostly about worker solidarity - unions and strikes and protests, mostly set in industries where unions are unheard of, and in countries where going on strike gets you night-time visits from men with big sticks, and protesting gets you tear-gassed, badly beaten, and possibly shot. (It's a very multinational book by the way, with large plot threads happening in India and Asia, and smaller ones in the USA.) Most of the characters are quite young (another thing it shares with Little Brother), and this makes the seriousness of the situations they find themselves in all the more apparent.
The gold-farmers end up finding commonality with everyone from textile factory workers to the people who write and staff the games they 'work' in, but they still have to work hard for their own chance at a win.
If you liked Little Brother then I think you'll like For The Win - it pushes the same geeky/political buttons, and it's written in the same well-paced, engaging style, with characters you care about and a cause you can believe in.
Update: somebody on LJ wrote a much better review, you can see it here: http://elmyra.livejournal.com/495323.html
I've read two of Cory's previous books - Little Brother, which is absolutely brilliant, and Makers, which was a bit more hit-and-miss for me both in writing style and subject matter. For The Win definitely sits alongside Little Brother for me as far as the writing and characters are concerned, it's very well-paced, with no slow spots and in places it's a definite page-turner.
The plot of For The Win is partly about online games - particularly gold-farming, and set partly in the culture around the kinds of games that happens in. I'm not much of a gamer, but I do have the usual overview that any self-respecting net-geek has, so I felt at home in the world the book was set in. This might have been one of the reasons I found it easier to get along with than Makers, but I think also the writing is just better... Makers was less engaging in places (most particularly the fat-phobic plot, which was so heavy-handed at the beginning that it almost put me off the book, and I never did figure out what point was being made in the end). Little Brother is of course about politics, privacy, and all those other things I get over-excited about, so it was a surefire win on subject matter, but also the writing is again very engaging all the way through, and the characters are particularly well done, and I think it's these aspects that pull For The Win and Little Brother ahead of Makers for me.
Anyway, although it centres around gaming, For The Win is actually mostly about worker solidarity - unions and strikes and protests, mostly set in industries where unions are unheard of, and in countries where going on strike gets you night-time visits from men with big sticks, and protesting gets you tear-gassed, badly beaten, and possibly shot. (It's a very multinational book by the way, with large plot threads happening in India and Asia, and smaller ones in the USA.) Most of the characters are quite young (another thing it shares with Little Brother), and this makes the seriousness of the situations they find themselves in all the more apparent.
The gold-farmers end up finding commonality with everyone from textile factory workers to the people who write and staff the games they 'work' in, but they still have to work hard for their own chance at a win.
If you liked Little Brother then I think you'll like For The Win - it pushes the same geeky/political buttons, and it's written in the same well-paced, engaging style, with characters you care about and a cause you can believe in.
Update: somebody on LJ wrote a much better review, you can see it here: http://elmyra.livejournal.com/495323.html
