I got my grubby paws on an advance reading copy of this by virtue of, as Granny Gertrude put it, being a web whore. 😉 Thank you, Harper Voyager (@_TheVoyager_ on Twitter)!
For the Win is a young adult novel in true Doctorow style. Readers of Little Brother will be familiar with it: action-packed, gritty, polemical, sickening and empowering all at the same time.
For the Win is set in the not-too-distant future, all around the “real” world and in virtual reality. It features a set of diverse teenage protagonists from all sorts of different backgrounds: from the Jewish-American Wei-Dong Goldberg (smitten with the idea of China), to the Mumbai slum children Mala and Yasmin, the Chinese gold farmers Matthew and Lu, to the Indonesian union leader Big Sister Nor and her gang.
In a world where some of the largest economies are MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-PLaying Games – think World of Warcraft or Second Life next generation) run by multinational corporations like Coca Cola and Nintendo, playing for money – extracting “gold” and valuable items from the game to sell to lazy rich Western players – is big business. It’s the kind of big business conducted in sweatshops in China, India, Singapore, HK, KL, Russia, Africa and South America, run by corrupt and criminal “bosses” exploiting gaming kids. It’s also the kind of business that the corporations running the games really don’t like as it cuts into their bottom line – leaving the “gold farmers” very much between the frying pan and the fire.
(And if you think this stuff is made up, have a look at this hilarious way of advertising your farmed gold in WoW and Second Life’s US$64 million GDP in 2006. This is only the start of it.)
Into this toxic mix step two leaders: Big Sister Nor, the union organiser who has moved from real-world factories and unions into the online gaming space, and Jie/Jiandi, the Chinese underground reporter who re-establishes the links between the gold farmers and Chinese factory workers through her online radio show. As strikes break out in online space, they are joined by striking union workers in Chinese and Indian industry. We witness epic battles online and off, and as some are lost and some are won, at least a small part of the world is changed forever, with hope that others will follow soon.
The polemical passages in this book are more focused than those in Little Brother, which ranged from computer security to city planning. In For the Win, the focus is strictly economics. In some ways, this is very much a book of the credit crunch. Cory Doctorow does have one of the best explanations of credit default swaps (using game gold to add to the irony) that I have ever read. And again, where Little Brother was unashamedly left-wing in its politics, this book is refreshingly and unashamedly left-wing in its economics, unfashionable though left-wing economics has become since the end of the Cold War and especially since New Labour. It bites the bullet that I’ve been struggling with recently – namely that while sweatshops are horrible, for the people working in them they’re the best option available – and offers a way out. We don’t come out with a socialist utopia, but we come out, to quote an obscure 1980s rock band, a little better than before, and that’s a start.
Something else I like about this book is its spectacularly socialist take on diversity: the only difference that matters is class. We have characters from different nations, different races, different religious backgrounds, different genders and abilities – and they all work together. And (admittedly from my white middle-class European perspective), Cory Doctorow does a damn good job of writing the Other. One of the most passionate passages in the book is Ashok addressing a group of traditional national trade unionists, explaining to them how the national borders they operate in work against them, how the only way to truly achieve something is to work across borders – a statement as true now as it was 160 years ago when Marx published the Communist Manifesto, and a goal a lot more achievable now than then.
And finally on the diversity note, does this book pass the Bechdel test? (Recap for non-feminists: Bechdel Test: 1. Does a movie/book/other work of fiction have more than one female character in it? 2. Do these female characters at any point in the plot meet and have a conversation? 3. Is that conversation about something other than a man?) For the Win blows the Bechdel test out of the water. We have pretty much a 50/50 gender split in main characters. The women in the book are at least as much part of the action as the men, and often more so. They are competent and passionate, they drive the plot forward, lead real world trade unions and gamespace armies, they talk to each other about politics and economics, justice, work, life. They are characters in their own right. It’s sad that 10 years into the 21st century this should be a notable thing, but barely half the books I read last year came even close to passing Bechdel, and this book is completely in a league of its own. Thank you Cory Doctorow!