Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

read book

Makers

3.71 of 5 stars 3.71 · rating details · 2,757 ratings · 406 reviews

From the New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, a major novel of the booms, busts, and further booms in store for America

Perry and Lester invent things—seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems, like the “New Work,” a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the...more

Hardcover, 416 pages

Published October 27th 2009 by Tor Books

more details... edit details

Get a copy:

Friend Reviews

To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.

Lists with This Book

The United States of Atlantis by Harry Turtledove

2010 Prometheus Award nominees for best novel

3rd out of 11 books — 6 voters

Atlas of Remote Islands by Judith Schalansky

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot

KiwiFoo 2011 Recommendations

9th out of 77 books — 14 voters

More lists with this book...

Community Reviews

(showing 1-30 of 3,000)

filter | sort: default (?) | rating details

May 17, 2010 Nicole rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: dnf, sci-fi

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...more 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 love Little Brother, but I really liked it. I should like this thing.

But I hated it. And here's a long explanation why.

First: This is a near-future speculative fiction novel. It's chockablock with recognizable technology - stuff I can point at and say "hey, I just read about rudimentary version of that on Boing-Boing!". Some of it is stuff that Doctorow has actively blogged about. There's nothing wrong with this.

But if you're going to base your whole plot on this type of thing, where a bunch of the research has actually been done and prototypes are being made and you can get interviews with the people who are doing it...you better back it up with at least some implementation/technical detail, or if not, be really good at characterization or description. Basically, the plot reads like a lot of really cool gadgets strung together, with a thin overlay of cardboard people. Lots of hand-wavy stuff to get from one gadget to another. It just seems lazy.

This laziness makes me livid. This is stuff I care about. I wish Doctorow had taken better care of these ideas.

Second: It smacks of Mary Sue and shoddiness. When a blogger writes a novel in which a (female, nice cover, Doctorow) blogger becomes the most important journalist EVAR and changes the world...my eyes start to roll. The evil journalist is 100% evil. The activists are young and hot and anxious to get with the dude thrust from tinkerer into the spotlight of movement leader. Tsk.

Third: This book is preaching to the choir. Again, if this is such potentially important stuff, why write the book so as to appeal only to those who agree with you? This book is not going to change anyone's minds. It's a collective wank, not a manifesto. Probably that's unfair - it's just a novel after all. Unfair or not, that's how I feel.

I'm pissed. And I can't wait to move onto something else. (less)

29 likes · like · see review

Aug 25, 2010 Kemper rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi, future-is-now

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...more 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 shells of their former selves. When a rich entrepreneur comes up with a plan to finance smart people who use all the leftover tech laying around after a generation of poor sales to come up with off-the-wall ideas, a new economic model called New Work is invented. The concept revolves around coming up with an idea that can be generated for a relatively small costs thanks to cheap production methods available via new ‘printers’ that can be programmed to manufacture materials, selling the product until cheap knock-offs take the profit out of it, and then coming up with a great new idea.

Lester and Perry are two good-natured and talented geeks who do things like scavenge microprocessors from discarded toys to build small robots, and they quickly become the poster boys for New Work thanks to the blogging of a business journalist. Despite coming up with great ideas and making some money for their investors, New Work doesn’t last, and years later, Lester and Perry have built a museum/tribute/theme ride to the New Work revolution. When their ad hoc concept becomes an underground phenomenon, a rogue executive from Disney becomes frightened that the guys have hit a new type of amusement park ride that could threaten the Mouse House, and he starts taking drastic action to shut it down.

On the surface, this could have been just another story about brilliant underground types fighting an evil corporation, but it isn’t that simple. Lester and Perry have their own problems in trying to reconcile their simple desire to just build cool things to the business demands placed on them by their own successes. And the story points out that if you want to do something big, whatever system you build to make it happen will almost invariably become some type of corporate infrastructure. Plus, when people start believing in what you’re doing and try to help build on it, what kind of responsibility does that put on the creators?

In the end, even two good guys who just want to cobble together stuff in their workshop will find that the demands of what they create will test their own convictions and their friendship, and they’ll learn that the ideas and the building are the easy part compared to dealing with what you do with what you’ve made.

This was a great concept, and it was interesting to read a sci-fi book that was mainly about speculating about where business and the economics of the easy and cheap availability of high tech gadgets is going to take us, but done in a story that was very relatable.(less)

5 likes · like · see review

Apr 22, 2010 Ben rated it 5 of 5 stars

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...more

8 likes · like · see review

Jan 19, 2012 Ruby Tombstone rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: wheres-my-effing-jetpack

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...more 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 wholly perfect character in it, and even the "evil" characters are rarely pure evil. In a lot of cases, the characters act unpredictably, make mistakes and experience moral ambiguity. I am okay with this too.

The book has as many big, brilliant, magical and inspiring ideas (about everything from technology to commerce to social systems) as it does pages. But all of these ideas have upsides and downsides, and the downsides are described in as vivid detail as anything else. There is no single idea that is held aloft as a shining panacea to society's ills. I am okay with this also.

Doctorow is not a devoted author of literary fiction. While he writes clearly and concisely, there are little things scattered along the way that let you know that writing fiction is not his primary occupation. For example, you don't always know who is speaking, or who is in the room. And there are very few phrases I would be putting on a needlework tapestry to lovingly remember. There are no chapters and the underlying structure is vague. The timeframes are also vague, and somewhat unlikely. I am less okay with this, but I'll deal.

Now that our dead cats are on the table, I'll get to the scoring. Since the rating system is based on enjoyment of the book, I have to give it 5 stars. I ploughed through this book at a rate of knots. I'm going from Makers straight to another Doctorow book. I'm even reading BoingBoing more. Boogie-Woogie Elmo will always have a place in my consciousness. The ideas in this book are inspirational to such a degree, it's hard to imagine that they wouldn't have a permanent effect on my own thinking. Can you really ask anything more of a book?(less)

6 likes · like · see review

Sep 28, 2009 Maya Panika rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

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...more

4 likes · like · see review

Jul 14, 2010 Ben Babcock rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2010-read, canadian-author, didactic-fiction, science-fiction, owned

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...more

1 like · like · see review

Nov 02, 2009 This Is Not The Michael You're Looking For rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, science-fiction, own

This is sort of a strange book. It was hard to figure out whether this book was about people or about technology or about business or about creativity or (as is most likely) an amalgamation of all four. The story takes a few jumps: at the beginning it seems to set itself up as one thing and then shifts gears rather dramatically into another direction.

Cory Doctorow also continues his fascination and love/hate relationship with Disney. The only other book of his I've read, Down and Out in the Mag...more

1 like · like · see review

Mar 17, 2013 D.L. Morrese rated it 3 of 5 stars

In an economically struggling America, two good friends, Perry and Lester, invent and sell novelty items made of junk. This places them in the vanguard of the New Work movement, and they ride that wave until it busts in obvious parallel to the bursting of the dot-com bubble. They shake themselves off, and build an ever-changing amusement ride in south Florida. It seems to be catching on, which in turn, catches the attention of a nervous Disney executive concerned about declining attendance at th...more In an economically struggling America, two good friends, Perry and Lester, invent and sell novelty items made of junk. This places them in the vanguard of the New Work movement, and they ride that wave until it busts in obvious parallel to the bursting of the dot-com bubble. They shake themselves off, and build an ever-changing amusement ride in south Florida. It seems to be catching on, which in turn, catches the attention of a nervous Disney executive concerned about declining attendance at the Disney World attraction he oversees in Orlando.

And that’s pretty much the plot. It’s the story of Perry and Lester, two guys with lots of imagination but not much business sense. They are joined by Suzanne Church, a journalist turned blogger who reports on what they are doing, and by a few other supporting cast members.

Mainly this is a book of social commentary. It highlights contrasts between protecting vested interests and investment in new ideas, open and proprietary technology, and big corporations and small entrepreneurs. It did all of this fairly well, I thought, and the future it paints is somewhat depressing but believable.

The characters are also believable, for the most part. I have only read one other Doctorow novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and the characters in this one are a definite improvement. They aren’t admirable or even especially likeable, but they have understandable motivations and personalities. Even the two characters serving in the role of villains are more pitiable than evil.

The prose is serviceable and the story flows logically. My biggest gripe about the storytelling was the inclusion of a far too descriptive sex scene, which felt like it was cut and pasted out of some steamy erotic romance novel. It wasn’t required, and it didn’t fit. Oh, and it talks about people smoking clove cigarettes, which are no longer legal in the U.S. and I doubt they will be again in the near future. You can still buy small, clove cigars, but they’re not as good. (Yeah, I used to smoke the things.)

Anyway, as a near future tale about two average geeky guys, this isn’t bad. It’s not silly. It doesn’t rant. The characters aren’t cardboard stereotypes, and it brings up some interesting ideas. I can recommend it for readers interested in seeing one possible future that believable extensions of current technology and economic trends make possible.
(less)

1 like · like · see review

Dec 07, 2012 Tac Anderson rated it 3 of 5 stars

Reading a Cory Doctorow book is always interesting because even if you know what the book is about, you really don't know what to expect. Doctorow always goes off on so many twists and turns, so fast that you're left moving from one scene to another without having fully digested what you just read, but you don't dare slow down.

This book could have been a trilogy and I probably would have enjoyed it much more. There's just so much packed in there and he glosses over so much, I would have loved m...more

like · see review

Oct 19, 2012 Tara rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, fiction

I was really looking forward to reading this, and perhaps I expected too much; merely setting myself up for disappointment.
I expected more of Doctorow as a writer, I don't know why. I expected better content, better quality of writing, better .. something. I didn't expect romance and a "Disney" happy ending.
The book has a great premise, and it's fun. Doctorow could benefit from a good editor, potentially turning this into a great book.
Around halfway through I started to think the reviewer com...more

like · see review

Jul 05, 2012 Kevin rated it 3 of 5 stars

I read this as a serial on Tor.com. I really appreciate the use of serials to give people an easy opportunity to read new authors. Makers follows three people, Suzanne Church, a newspaper reporter turned blogger on the tech beat, and Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks, a pair of chronic tinkerers who create a new industry based on the availability of 3D printing. A forward-thinking executive from Kodak/Duracell divests the company of its unprofitable divisions and uses the cash to invest in micro-st...more

like · see review

Jul 02, 2012 Mark Harding rated it 4 of 5 stars

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...more 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 Lester and Perry so caught up in their own world that -- fundamentally decent people as they are -- they ignore the suffering around them? Such as how long it took them to visit Death Waits in hospital. Or never helping Francis the mayor with his medial bills.Or is there only so much anyone can pay attention to?
-- The character of the Disney exec Sammy, I found the most difficult. He seems to waver from stupid to very clever, self-obsessed to obsessed with creativity, pathetic to pantomime villain, selfish to the point of evil to reasonable guy. He is unhappy most of the time and comes to realise it. Is he happy at the end of the novel? Does he grow or does he simply change with circumstances. A rather unbelievable character. But perhaps there are unbelievable people?

An unusual aspect of the book, is that although the conclusion isn't exactly 'happy' the book is fundamentally optimistic - about human nature and the power of creativity. It (and Doctorow's public persona generally) seems to suggest that there is a limit to capitalism because the world's resources are limited. But the new capitalism is about creativity and the mind. There is no limit to that. Is that true? And will everybody be saved by the creative economy? And doesn't the current banking system show the result of creative capitalism? The book is fundamentally optimistic but it's far from saying there are easy answers. I guess it's better to be optimistic enough to try, rather than just give up...

--

Make money by doing what you want well.(less)

like · see review

May 26, 2012 Tim Hicks rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Doctorow fans

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...more

1 like · like · see review

Apr 09, 2012 James rated it 3 of 5 stars

It's been my experience that Cory Doctorow's novels are, in general, generally better thought of as "concept pieces" than as exercises in characterization and plot; I can remember some of the ideas and (what I believe is a fair representation of) Doctorow's philosophy from a few of his previous books, but not a lot about the characters. Makers does somewhat better on that score -- it has an engaging plot, and the characters seem more three-dimensional. They have a bit of a whiff of Mary Sue abou...more

like · see review

Feb 01, 2012 Angela rated it 3 of 5 stars

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...more 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 kind of neo-feudal economy, having a tiny number of extremely wealthy people with the rest of the population struggling to survive, and corporate entities replacing the feudal warlords of old. This is the kind of world that Makers is set in.

This kind of economic cycle certainly wasn't invented by Reagan; in fact the reforms that Reagan and later Bush/Cheney dismantled to make the haves into "have-mores" dated from attempts to recover from such a wealth transfer in the 1920s and prevent it from happening again. The difference is the landscape of the ruined economy, with huge amounts of non-biodegradable debris everywhere for the taking, and the masses themselves having such technological skills and know-how that never could have existed in a previous age. So Makers takes us on a kind of optimistic journey through that ruined America. Americans always were good at making things in the past, and even though the corporate media tells us again and again that we can't possibly tackle problems like global warming without harming the "economy" or the "job-creators," this is still the country that went from theory to atom bomb in four years or from zero to moon in ten. So Doctorow probably isn't all that off-base when he imagines people freed from work in a traditional sense throwing themselves into the process of creating new things from the rubbish of a more wasteful time. He certainly gives us a lot of interesting sociological food for thought in this novel.

I'm only giving him three stars, however, because as interesting as his ideas are, they are just that, interesting ideas. It doesn't make for an interesting or exciting story because the characters never really come alive for me. I like character-driven work, and as much detail as he gives us about the main characters, I only ever found myself empathizing with one of them- the relatively minor Death Waits, the young goth kid who naively kept stumbling into situations he really didn't understand. The rest of them seemed more like hat stands for hanging ideas onto. (less)

like · see review

Jul 30, 2011 Laura rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: being-human, fanfiction, science-fiction, semi-dystopian

MILDLY SPOILERY AND RANTY.
Doctorow’s books are, I think by design, heavy on the fictional explications of various cultural and social forces that are crashing through history; light on the characters. The role of art and design in the age of mechanical reproduction; rights in the face of the total awareness society; how the state’s monopoly on the lawful use of force works once the state is no longer the biggest bully on the block, hacking, cooperative efforts, yaddy yaddy. At least the ones I’...more MILDLY SPOILERY AND RANTY.
Doctorow’s books are, I think by design, heavy on the fictional explications of various cultural and social forces that are crashing through history; light on the characters. The role of art and design in the age of mechanical reproduction; rights in the face of the total awareness society; how the state’s monopoly on the lawful use of force works once the state is no longer the biggest bully on the block, hacking, cooperative efforts, yaddy yaddy. At least the ones I’ve read are less about individuals coping with the things and more about the things themselves. Whether by accident or design, very few of his characters are particularly memorable; they’re just a little smarter, a little nicer, a little meaner, whatever. The nice thing is that they don’t get in the way of the ideas. The bad thing is that they are sometimes hard to care about.

In Little Brother and For the Win, I was so engaged by the explication, I didn’t care. I was emotionally invested in the tension between civil liberties/total awareness society in the one and workers’ rights/world wide corporations in the other before the books were written. But in Makers (and the other two I’ve read, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and Eastern Standard Tribe) I didn’t already care. I’m benignly aware that the Makers’ movement exists. I have no emotional investment in it. I suspect the characters in this book are drawn from the type of person who is deeply engaged in the culture, but I’m not attuned to the nuances, so many of the characters become hard to distinguish, and their intense nostalgia for the flowering of Maker culture is intense nostalgia for a party I wasn’t at.

There were some great lines. Steve Jobs is in a lamasery. That’s awesome. The villains were lawyers, but saurian enough to amuse me. There were ideas simmering in this story I think I could have really liked. See, there’s these rides, in tension like the Two Towers of Middle Earth. One set are pirated; set up in empty shopping malls and corn fields, set up by true believers and crowd sourced by every person who goes through them (the riders interact with the ride, telling the ride itself where they think this or that piece should be); creating a story of growth and loss that is deeply meaningful to the people who ride it. The others are at Disneyland itself; prepackaged, produced by experts and focus groups; prepackaged and calculated to excise maximum profit. Two very different stories –

Only we never hear what those stories really are. I suppose we’re supposed to fill in from our own experience. Meh. And the clash (SPOILER) just kinda peters out. The dramatic climax is pulling a hoax on a muck raking journalist who seemed to me to be a minor irritant, like the people who troll on newspaper comment fields rather than a believable villain.

Given, I might feel different if such trolls showed up to my parties. And I have gotten pretty upset by some of the things they’ve said about my work over the years, and there are troll-like figures who have figured out how to use the machinery of government in a way that is personally inconvenient. But for the most part, they seem like sad, bitter, impotent individuals best just avoided. The real villain of the piece was the overall economic catastrophe that was simmering right outside the main story line. I wanted them to hack that.

I may be projecting.

Makers ends on an ambiguous note. Hacking proprietary equipment, good; body hacking, not so much. Our hero-journalist-Mary-Sue was implicated in publicizing technology that resulted in a lot of joy and a lot of death. Death stalks the land like a giant stalky thing. There was all sorts of interesting possibilities lurking there.

It was a good glimpse of a world mine brushes against. Maybe an important world.
(less)

like · see review

Mar 20, 2011 Jack rated it 5 of 5 stars

Wow was this good. I started it Thursday night. It's Sunday. It's done.

The book is a lovely set of interlocking love stories. Of two great friends, who together make each other's best imaginings possible. Of boys and their technology. Of entrepreneurs and capitalism. Of technology and capitalism. Of art and the need to put food on the table. Of the great friends and the women they find. Some of these love stories are incredibly rich and heartwarming. Some are very bleak. All are told very well i...more

like · see review

Feb 09, 2011 Amber rated it 5 of 5 stars

I've read from several reviewers that Cory Doctorow can see the future...and may even live there. I have come to believe that just as fervently.

This book centers on two friends, both gearheads who are genius creators, the kind of people who can look at a technology and see 10 new uses for it. We follow their stories through the all-too familiar phases of life - the dazzling promise of youth, the pressure of adulthood, and the unforeseen changes that life brings with each passing year. Things do...more

like · see review

Jan 28, 2011 Clay rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf-fantasy

Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” (Tor, $24.99, 416 pages) isn’t really a traditional science fiction or fantasy novel – it’s much more serious in intent and execution, though it is set in the near future.

Doctorow’s topic is creativity, and the human urge to make things. The central characters are a pair of tinkerers in a slightly dystopic future where the American economy has collapsed and junkyards are the repository of the remnants of the consumer culture. The pair are endlessly inventive, creating pl...more

1 like · like · see review

Jan 25, 2011 Billpilgrim rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, humor

This story takes place only a few years in the future, but a lot has changed. The economy is still in the tank. After Kodak and Duracell merge, the chief executive decides to invest money in new technology, funding inventors who make things using existing parts for components, in creative ways. This gets the name, New Work. He hires a technology reporter to write the story, Suzanne Church, promising her full access. She finds the most talented of the inventors in Florida, Perry and Lester, and t...more

like · see review

Dec 20, 2010 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Tom and Camille

Recommended to Jeff by: found it in the Oswego bookstore

Shelves: science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

like · see review

Aug 22, 2010 Steven rated it 3 of 5 stars

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...more

2 likes · like · see review

Aug 09, 2010 Katy rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This is perhaps the first time I have read a book by a contemporary writer about my same age—I have avoided the other young fiction writers, feeling like I still had so much to learn from the masters.

Plus, I didn’t want to deal with the fact that some folks were published and I hadn’t been able to successfully finish a work! So Makers was the opportunity for a new experience. But reading this book revealed my expectations for speculative fiction, most of which Doctorow did not meet. Although Ma...more

like · see review

Jul 26, 2010 Kersplebedeb rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: young people interested in technology

Shelves: science-fiction

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Doctorow excels at 5-minutes-in-the-future sf, and has an obsession with corporate big guys squelching the potentials of new technology, and the latter's potential to revolutionize not only the economy, but the whole world. Nerds are his heroes, and his natural inclination is to give us a happy ending - one which he reigns in at times with a surprising and sad final twist.

All of these elements are alive and well here, in a story about some geeks who use 3-d printers and open source blueprints fo...more

like · see review

May 25, 2010 Tracy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: teen, science-fiction

First I want to say that I don't think this book should be labeled as teen - none of the characters are teens nor do I think the situations presented would appeal to teens. The technology - real and imagined - would probably be the only draw for teens.

That being said, I loved Part I and had the book continued in the same manner, I would have given it a higher rating. Part I introduces Perry, Lester, Suzanne, Kettlewell and Tjan, the driving force behind the concept of New Work, which can be sum...more

like · see review

Mar 24, 2010 Alice rated it 3 of 5 stars

This is a book full of BIG IDEAS - and if you're the type of geeky tech-obsessed person who loves BIG IDEAS about the future of tech, business, litigation, fitness, etc., you'll enjoy the truly speculative fiction element of this book. I enjoy that sort of stuff just fine, but I already read a million blogs and New Yorker articles about it, and when I read fiction I want to read FICTION. Doctorow is a terrible fiction writer; as much as I love his blog and his ideas (and he's an amazing person t...more

2 likes · like · see review

Feb 10, 2010 Chill Cheslow rated it 3 of 5 stars

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...more

5 likes · like · see review

Jan 26, 2010 Marc Weidenbaum added it

Doctorow's novel tries to imagine the near future as impacted by inexpensive 3D printers just as much as we have in our time been impacted by the Internet.

The book follows two natural inventors who glom onto 3D technology, inspire a collective project that spans the globe, and find themselves doing litigious battle with Disney.

In brief: new tech + hive mind vs. corporations.

This formula has become something of a theme for Doctorow. But as Nick Lowe once sang, "This rut I am in, it once was a...more Doctorow's novel tries to imagine the near future as impacted by inexpensive 3D printers just as much as we have in our time been impacted by the Internet.

The book follows two natural inventors who glom onto 3D technology, inspire a collective project that spans the globe, and find themselves doing litigious battle with Disney.

In brief: new tech + hive mind vs. corporations.

This formula has become something of a theme for Doctorow. But as Nick Lowe once sang, "This rut I am in, it once was a groove," and I worry with Makers that Doctorow's groove has become a rut. Especially because we find him once again digging deep into Disney, which he's returned to time and again since his debut novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. And that's not the only plot device that will be familiar to longtime Doctorow readers.

My biggest problem with the book, though, has nothing to do with ongoing subjects of his fiction. It's specific to this book, related to the subject of the global hive-mind operation he describes. It involves (non-Disney) theme parks built up around nostalgia for objects created in the early days of 3D tech, and somehow the collective watching of these halcyon objects helps transform the exhibit into something of a story for people who visit. (If the ride sounds a bit like an extrapolation of Boing Boing, the website of which Doctorow is a partner, then you won't be surprised that the novel's journalist character, Suzanne Church, ends up seeming like a Boing Boing blogger.) The problem is, I can never quite figure out what the ride is like, how it functions, what it's like to experience. Since the ride is the engine that fuels the book's narrative, its ambiguous quality gives Makers a mushy-at-best spine.

In addition, an end-of-novel turn of events (involving the relationship between Disney and the protagonists) is so sudden, and so goes against everything the characters have stated up until that point, that it seems more like a quick way to bring the book to a close than a natural or otherwise meaningful development.

Still, there's tons of fun in here. Doctorow really can look clearly ten minutes and ten years into the future, and his take on 3D tech, on the science of dieting, and on business culture are highly entertaining, and much more thought-provoking that the story itself.(less)

1 like · like · see review

Sep 17, 2011 Rob Preece rated it 3 of 5 stars

If you love Doctorow, you'll definitely love this one. It's got a strong political message, an intriguing view of the near future with an emphasis on economics and social change, and a "geeks rule" mentality. If you like a character-centered novel, or if you've struggled with Doctorow before, you might want to stay clear.

I chose to upgrade the star-count because I think Doctorow is doing what speculative fiction is intended to do--looking into the future and playing what-if. I think Doctorow is...more

like · see review

Jul 15, 2012 Colin Mcgann rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels, science-fiction

This is my second Doctorow book after For the Win and I still don't know how to feel about his work. I enjoy how he weaves near-future ideas into his work and paints the reader a portrait of dystopia America that is already being created. My frustration with Doctorow come when he puts his sci-fi ideas first and focuses on character development second.

In Makers the novel starts with Suzanne Church, a reporter who gets lured away from Silicon valley to find out details about how manufacturing sta...more

like · see review

« previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 … 99 100 next »

new topic
Discuss This Book

topics	posts	views	last activity
Hard SF: BotM: “Makers” by Cory Doctorow	1	8	Dec 31, 2011 02:49pm

combine
Other Editions (10)

More editions...

Genres

Science Fiction

136 users

Science > Technology

12 users

Speculative Fiction

11 users

Science Fiction > Near Future

9 users

Adult

9 users

Science Fiction > Dystopia

8 users

Science Fiction Fantasy

6 users

Novels

6 users

Science Fiction > Cyberpunk

6 users

Literature

4 users

See top shelves...

Readers also enjoyed similar books

About Cory Doctorow

Canadian blogger, journalist and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing.

He is an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books.

Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, Disney, and post-scarcity economics.

http://us.macmillan.com ...more

More about Cory Doctorow...

Books by Cory Doctorow

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

More…

Share This Book

Facebook Twitter Your website

Trivia About Makers

1 quiz

More quizzes & trivia...

Quotes from Makers

“He had them as spellbound as a room full of Ewoks listening to C-3PO.” — 11 people liked it

“We don’t care about what you did yesterday—we care about what you’re going to do tomorrow.” — 4 people liked it

More quotes…

title link	preview: Makers
avg rating	preview: Makers Goodreads rating: 3.71 (2757 ratings)
small image	preview: click here [close]
med image	preview: click here [close]
BBCode	[url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6422238-makers?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book][img]http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347786469l/6422238.jpg[/img][/url] [url=http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6422238-makers?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_book]Makers by Cory Doctorow[/url]

Makers

Friend Reviews

Community Reviews

Share This Book

Share This Book on Your Website