In his debut novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, Cory Doctorow laid out a high-tech, über-wired fantasy future where boredom was the last real social problem and even death was a temporary inconvenience. By contrast, the high-tech, über-wired fantasy future of his follow-up, Eastern Standard Tribe, seems like an oppressive dystopia, mostly because the world appears through an unluckier human lens.
Doctorow's protagonist, Art Berry, is a fast-talking, argumentative neophile who's both worldly and boyishly naïve; as the novel leaps back and forth in time, he's alternately portrayed as a jet-setting, tech-savvy idea man and a hapless patsy, locked up in a sanatorium on the advice of his backstabbing girlfriend and his treacherous business partner. Art is a user-experience guru, effectively a marketer who evolves simpler, more streamlined, and more multi-purpose uses for existing technology. Some of his brainstorms, like his scheme to merge traffic jams and music downloads, just sound odd, but Doctorow and his supporting characters are so enthusiastic about the concept's revolutionary, guaranteed-lucrative power that it's hard not to go along for the ride.
Unfortunately, Art remains loyal to his East Coast American "tribe"—the people living and working in the time zone where he fits in best, socially and culturally—while his partner, Fede, wants to sell the driving-and-downloading scheme to the highest bidder, regardless of time-zone affiliation. To further complicate matters, both men work in London, for a Greenwich Mean Time company that they're supposed to be sabotaging to give their EST pals a world-market advantage. Doctorow explains the whole system in one breathless mid-book monologue which leaves a lot of questions unanswered; it's a slick, appealing concept, but not a particularly well-grounded one.
That goes for the rest of the book, as well. The far-future weirdness of Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom seemed more plausible, because Doctorow developed it in more detail, gave it a more personal face, and placed it far enough outside our own world that the seams weren't immediately obvious. Eastern Standard Tribe, by contrast, seems plausible in half its particulars and ridiculous in others—particularly in the glossed-over human dimensions, such as Art's hapless love of a volatile, unpredictable, unpleasant woman who inveigles him into fraud within moments of their first accidental meeting. Down And Out and Eastern Standard Tribe are both full of clever, prescient possibilities for a rapidly evolving world, and they're both funny and memorable. (They're also both available for free download at Doctorow's web site, craphound.com.) But Eastern Standard Tribe showcases an author who could stand to spend a little less time showing off his fantasy tech, and a little more time getting into the minds and hearts of the people using it.