Serializing the opening of “The Lost Cause”

My novel of climate hope, out on November 14.

Cory Doctorow
7 min readOct 6, 2023

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This weekend (October 7–8), I’m in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful tale of the climate emergency, which comes out on November 14. Kim Stanley Robinson called it “an unforgettable vision of what could be”:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

I’m currently running a Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell the audiobook, which I produced and narrated myself (for complex and awful reasons, Amazon won’t carry my audiobooks, see the Kickstarter campaign page for details). You can also pre-order the ebook and hardcovers, including signed and personalized copies:

http://lost-cause.org

For the next week or so, I’m going to be serializing the prologue of the book, which gets it off to quite a spicy start. Here’s part one!

I thought that I was being so smart I signed up for the over nightwhen pager duty for the solar array at Burroughs High. Solar arrays don’t do anything at night. Because it’s dark. They’re not lunar arrays.

Turns out I outsmarted myself.

My pager app went off at 1:58 a.m., making a sound that I hadn’t heard since the training…

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