Radicalized - Cory Doctorow
As a relatively short 2hour audio book it's tricky to give you an outline without spoilers, but I'll do my best. Our main character Joe has just turned 36, and on his birthday he discovers his wife has Stage Four cancer, and three months to live. Joe's wife (Lacey) decides to shrug off any treatments that might have extended her life a bit, but wouldn't have saved her and after some understandable emotional turmoil, they settle down to living their best lives in the time they have left together. Despite this choice, friends and family insistently send them information about miracle cures, mostly alkaline diets and crystals, but one of them is actually backed by science. In true fictional story-telling style, there is a doctor specialising in this treatment just down the road - and in true American health-care hellscape style, their insurance won't cover it.
Cue our protagonist Joe devolving into an understandable black ball of rage. While searching for therapists online one night, Joe instead stumbles across a forum tailored for men losing family members to cancer. Specifically, men losing family members to cancer when they might survive if their dirtbag insurers just coughed up and paid the bill. The forum in question "Fuck Cancer Right in it's Fucking Face" (henceforth known as 'F*ck RIFF") isn't the kind of place where people get support dealing with the situation - it's the kind of place where they are encouraged to whole-heartedly embrace the despair and rage that they're feeling.
It was at this point that the audio book had a weird non-fiction cross over and I had to remind myself this was a work of fiction (I checked). See, the book is narrated by Wil Wheaton, self proclaimed nerd and outspoken ex-alcoholic. Hearing Wil Wheatons voice in the audio book describing how most forums of this ilk contain an older generations of recoverees who provide balanced and encouraging stories about how they were once that low and built themselves back up - that part of the story is very real. Wil Wheaton is absolutely someone who would know about the ins-and-outs of alcoholic recovery spaces, and would speak candidly about them. But Wil is narrating a work of fiction, albeit one that is distressingly possibly maybe real? (Definitely not real, I double checked).
Lacey turns out to be one of those spectacularly rare cases of spontaneous remission, in this story her cancer is largely a device to put our protagonist Joe in the middle of F*ck RIFF as both an insider and an outsider. Joe understands the journey of the other men on F*ck RIFF but because of the most unlikely miracle, he gets to view it from the outside as someone who didn't end up losing their family, despite all signs saying he would.
Joe tries to reach out to these men, offer support, guidance, and a soft caring approach. All the while, the long-term members of F*ck RIFF are pushing people to embrace their rage and despair, and hell if you're going out, why not take the bastards with you? What follows is a fascinating fictional take on how people can become radicalized, the birth of domestic terrorism, and multiple tear-jerker moments that put the reader firmly on the side of those men.
Like most of Cory Doctorows storys (okay, the one other one I've read), Radicalized has a rough, unfinished feel to it - not a first draft, maybe a third, or fourth. This definitely added to my feeling of listening an investigative journalism podcast, rather than an audio book. The conversations in the story felt like historical dramatisations. The news headlines felt real. The president was conviently never named (so the story would age well? or to prevent legal issues?) but if you were around for the 2018-2021 US president you know exactly who was being talked about.
Nothing in this story feels impossible. It grabs your attention because not only does it feel like something that could happen, it feels like something that would happen. As with many masterfully written commentaries on our current times, it feels less like a question of 'if', but a question of 'when'.
Radicalized is both the name of the short story, and the name of the collection. While the audio book I access from my library only contained the short story, the collection has three more titles and is available from Doctorow's website https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/. Some of his content is available for free, some for purchasing and all of it is worth your time.
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