Today’s SciFi prompt is “Little Blue Dot”, or books about coming and going from “this fragile Earth, our island home”.

Contact comes to mind immediately, and given that today is Carl Sagan’s birthday, I can’t imagine a better response.  Contact is a ‘hard’ SF read that’s very accessible to a popular audience: Sagan wanted to depict what a realistic first contact with aliens might be like, achieved through radio waves instead of LGMs floating down from the ethereal planes.   This is one I’ve read several times over the years, and the movie version of it is probably what made Matthew McConaughey one of my favorites – not because I liked his character, but because his questioning of technology and meaning rattled my cage a bit back in 2006, and then came Neil Postman!   The plot features a radio astronomer connected to SETI stumbling upon a signal which leads to  a machine being built and establishing first contact: I’m trying to skate all the way around the plot without revealing much,  but I read it fourteen years ago and it’s never left my mind.

And now, wish-fulfillment and cariacture disguised as a climate change novel!

Imagine The Turner Diaries, but with moral smugness added to the hatefulness. That’s The Lost Cause, a novel so execrable that it’s ruined the author for me. Doctorow has been a favorite SF author for a while now, in part because he’s written so many thoughtful SF novels that touch on politics & policy in the 21st century: Pirate Cinema, for instance, explored intellectual property, and Little Brother was great on the cyber-police state. This, however, is hyperpartisan and obnoxious, overwhelming any potential interest the nascent-solarpunk aspects might give it. The setting is Burbank, 30 years from now: politics have radically changed, with all guns being confiscated and the economy slightly socialized as part of a ‘green new deal’. Our main character opens the story by having to investigate an alarm on his school’s solar panels because an old man with a MAGA hat is destroying them. Why? Because he’s an Old White Guy and that’s just what they do, doncha know. The….story, such as it is, consists of the MC inheriting his Hateful Old White Guy Grandfather’s house and discovering that he has gold and guns, which the main character reacts to like he just found a stash of corpses and CP. Both the feds and grandfather’s old pards are very interested in the stash, especially since there are evidently enough guns (main character can’t even bring himself to say gun, he has to spell it out) to arm a militia. As the story progresses, the Old White Guys decide to violently rebel against the city’s plans to seize a neighborhood via eminent domain (i.e. theft) and build high-density apartments to house all the refugees coming in. The OWGs are not just bad, they’re comically bad, always hatefully against whatever the main character is for — whether that’s immigration, light rail, solar energy — and do stuff like lighting crosses and gassing a city. I suppose it’s par for the course given the polarization of these days, but it’s a shame given Doctorow’s previous thoughtful works: in Attack Surface, his heroine was someone who would have been the villain in Little Brother, but here the baddies are so thin and flimsy they don’t even merit being called strawmen. Hateful, moronic, and wholly un-interesting.

Doctorow needs to get outside, touch some grass, and maybe have a conversation with someone he disagrees with. I’ve never voted for the T-man, myself, but this depiction of his supporters is as ignorant and vicious as his opponents believe he is.