Canada Reads 2020: Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow

Last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

Akil Augustine is a basketball commentator on the NBA championships who grew up in Scarborough,  a formerly independent city that was merged into Toronto in 1998.

He chose, as the book that he wanted to convince all of Canada to read, Radicalized: short stories published by the Canadian-British author, internet freedom advocate, and technological blogger Cory Doctorow in 2019.

Radicalized is 'of the moment.' It addresses pandemics even though it was published before the coronavirus spread in Europe and North America, and it addresses the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality even though it was published before George Floyd's murder made these subjects leap to everyone's mind again in June. It also addresses the intimate role that large technological companies like Facebook monopolize in daily life.

But as Doctorow is not just Canadian — he lives in the United States, and his stories are set in the United States — Augustine's fellow jurors argued that Radicalized did not have a Canadian focus.

There are parallels of the US to Canada and other countries. As Augustine said, Black Lives Matter and police brutality are not just American questions, and he used his presence on Canada Reads to draw attention to anti-racist activism in Canada. There are also clear differences, of course.

But Akil Augustine's arguments that the coronavirus pandemic and the role of social media companies are international issues and as such should be taken to heart as Canadian issues as well, were rejected by the roundtable on Canada Reads.

A few fellow jurors also felt that the competition has a social function and not just a literary role: they preferred to publicize books from authors whose national background, romantic/sexual orientation, and gender are less traditionally advantaged in the publishing industry.

To quote his publisher, Doctorow's Radicalized embraces these four tales:

Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.

In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.

Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.

The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment [MacMillan]
Cory Doctorow [Wikipedia] 

Cory Doctorow at ORGCon 2012
Attributed to D. Morris, March 2012
via Wikimedia Commons (License: CC-BY-2.0)

Excerpt from "Unauthorized Bread":

“The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.”