Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
I tried very hard to like this book. I loved the pretext and I really wanted to like it, but it’s so hard going, nothing much seems to happen and it’s much, much too long.Focussing on a very near, wholly believable future, the story kicks off brilliantly, the characters start out interesting but then - nothing. The characters quickly merge and become indistinguishable, so that you have to work rather too hard to keep up with who’s doing what, where and why. What story there is is so heavily padd...
ugh
I hesitate to mark this book as 'read', but I did read over half of it. I usually don't stop in the middle of books, but this book was an exception. I didn't just dislike it - it made me actively angry.It's not the concepts or politics that made me angry - I'm familiar with Doctorow's agenda, and I agree with most of it. I'm a lefty, I'm interested in technology and decentralized/local production of goods and services, I think activism can be important, and I think copyright is broken. I didn't
This is a book people will either love or be "meh" about. The best I can do for a review is tell people what to expect. So if you're okay with the following, then the book may be for you..The book has a non-traditional story arc. The narrative doesn't go where you think it's going to go at any point in time, and resists attempts to categorise it. Some people may feel it that it meanders, or that it doesn't have a point. I am okay with this.All of the characters are flawed. There is not a single
Cory friggin Doctorow. I don't know what to make of this guy. I really want to give this book both a 0 and a 5. He is full of fascinating ideas. This book is fascinating. He shows the implications of technology, really doable tech, but with huge consequences in society. What happens as three d printers get better and making more stuff. When the distance between design and the product gets shorter and easier. What will people do? What will corporations do when anyone can do what they do? He prese...
At first, I was a little annoyed with feeling like I was just reading BoingBoing in novel version. All the usual suspects show up: DIY everything, creative economic models, subcultures, nonsense legal actions, open source, 3d printing, Disney, online meeting/consensus tools, revision control systems, police brutality, urban decay, and of course citizen-journalism.But then a whole plot appears and it's compelling. The book doesn't quit bringing new ideas and twists and I really like how it follow...
I’ve always wished that I had the engineering knack so I could invent something like a robot that does laundry or flying cars or something cool like that. Hell, I’d be tickled if I could figure out something fun like dropping Mentos into Diet Coke. After reading this book, I’m kind of glad to be technically challenged because it seems like there’d be a dark side to being that kind of guy.This realistic sci-fi story takes place in the near future where economic woes have left corporations as shel...
The future is now, kids, and Makers shines a light on the irrepressible heroes of the humming hive of creative, cooperative production. Perry and Lester are a couple of tinkering tech whizzes whose tastes and talents gear towards fabricating new, cool stuff out of junk. Bankrolled by biz visionary Kettlewell, and media-documented by the astute tech chronicler Suzanne Church, they manage to spawn a whole new approach to goods production, The New Work, and in the process rehabilitate a squat site...
did not care for this. doctrow's fetishization of returning to the days of hand crafts and tooled leather belts and blah blah seemed more retro than futuristic to me, and when he got into a future word where weight loss was easy but you could still tell who the former fatties were, he lost me for good. didn't finish.
Some 30 years after the Reagan revolution transformed the American economy and refocused all our resources on a wealth transfer to the richest among us, we can see that the goals of that Revolution have been nearly completed. The middle class is disappearing rapidly and well on its way to being converted into a huge mass of people who can no longer be called working class since the jobs have disappeared. Without a socialist intervention in the very near future, America can expect to end up in a
I have a good contender for worst read of 2015!The first half of this book is simply a message with a story slathered thinly on top. The practically all-male cast is cardboard and hollow, and their characters seem to be half developed based on what clothes they wear and food they eat. The female main character is a Mary Sue who can do little wrong (every single male character professes himself in love with her at some point). The other female characters are weird wish fulfillment girl (a college...
I am so glad this one is finished with. It's strange, I really quite like Doctorow but only in short bursts it seems. His ideas are great and his message worth while but it gets a little tiring being preached to in your fiction and in Makers there's a whole lot of didactic dialogue. Doctorow takes his idea and spins it through several revolutions of basically the same plot for 400+ pages in an attempt to make it an epic spectacle that takes decades to come to fruition, instead leaving you feelin...
Economics is weird. The economy is a social system. Once upon a time, it was based somewhat in reality, with gold standards and natural resources forming a large part of this anchor. At present, it has transformed into a mostly speculative beast, the taming of which is the goal of any number of hedge fund managers, stock market analysts, and economics professors with cushy degrees from Ivy League or wannabe-Ivy League schools. To make matters worse, the economy is based on the behaviour of peopl...
As a Gen Xer I've been regaled with tales of those early PC days when the prehistoric hackers worked from garages and slept under the VW buses together, and I think Cory Doctorow has as well. In Makers he takes the same idea of the passionate artists and technology hackers pushing the boundaries with new technologies and places them in the near future - the twenty-teens. In this brave new world he explores the implications of junk yards full of hardware and kitsch mass-marketed detritus, obesity...
Buzzword dump.Lots of interesting but weak ideas. Barely adequate characters. A sex scene that I didn't dislike as much as others but it was as out of place as a tuxedo on a frog (yeah, I know, Hello, mah honey, helo, mah baby ...). A Heinleinesque style where the world has three incredibly smart people and six billion morons. Cory's Disney obsession again. Two things in particular wrecked it for me. First, the assumption that within a few short years, you can put generic goop into a 3D printer...
This was winding and kinda messy, just like what it was trying to say. Doctorow explores a potential evolution of capitalism, where the means of production are more accessible to the people, at the same time as the availability of stable jobs is shrinking. Through the eyes of the producers, a journalist, a couple of suits and a bad guy or two, we see how the ability to build and create can connect and people and create movements.I liked this, but it was fat and weird and meandering. If you like
3.5 This is a departure from other Doctorow I have read. Full to the brim with ideas and society's reactions to those ideas, and a little more sx than I can recommend to the kids I normally recommend him to ;) I like the epilogue as a bit of a cautionary tale.
One of the most boring books I've read. I didn't care about the characters or what they were doing. Ugh...what a waste of good reading time. I marked it as read but gave up after getting halfway through. I guess I was hoping it would get better. It didn't.
Cory Doctorow's Makers is a book full of ideas and possibility, which makes up for a somewhat predictable plot and flattened characters.I read this book after I had read Doctorow's Little Brother; the two have very strong similarities in plot structure. It's a serviceable - if a bit transparent - structure, but the girders and siding are definitely showing after reading both of these books.This isn't surprising - both books are idea books. Where Little Brother is concerned with personal freedoms...
It's such a page turner that I stayed up all night to finish it. Three new ideas a page. Interesting things:The novel is purposely designed to force the reader to make moral judgments and avoid easy answers:-- Lester and Perry make different choices at the end. Which one is more realistic about the nature of capitalism. Which is the more moral choice? Are they both fantasists?-- Can you morally coexist with the MBA types? Is the company structure the only effective way to get things done?-- Are