Book Review: The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

Browsing at Powells (aka The REAL Happiest Place On Earth), I happened on Cory Doctorow's The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, a sci-fi novella coupled with a transcript of a lecture on copyright and the arts, and a trascription of an interview with Cory from a couple years back. It was a cheap buy so I picked it up and threw it in my travel bag.

The lecture on copyright is good, but offers little over other talks I've seen him give, so while good, it did little for me. Same goes with the interview. Feels like the publisher added them to pad it up and justify the book price.

That said, the novella was quite clever. It's about a transhuman boy who is sort of an alpha-version of an immortal, who is separated from his inventor/father and forced to make sense of what he is while finding a way to fit in with a very strange and evolving future world. There are a few surprises and twists along the way. Like many of Cory's books, Disney artifacts play a role in the story as well.

It was clever and I quite liked it.

The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow