Makers was published by Tor Books in 2009. Perry Gibbons and Lester Banks are hardware hackers working out of a defunct Wal-Mart in a decaying Florida strip mall. They build things — useful, clever things cobbled together from discarded electronics, 3D-printed parts, and salvaged materials. Their inventions attract the attention of Kodak (reimagined as a venture-capital-backed innovation incubator), which funds their operation as part of a “New Work” movement: thousands of small teams across America building micro-businesses based on open-source hardware and rapid prototyping.
The New Work movement booms and crashes — Doctorow is clear-eyed about how venture capital co-opts grassroots innovation — but Perry and Lester survive the bust and create something stranger: a ride, built in the abandoned Wal-Mart, that tells the story of the movement through salvaged artifacts. The ride becomes an attraction, then a franchise, then the target of a Disney lawsuit, and the novel’s second half traces the legal and economic warfare between grassroots makers and corporate intellectual property.
The novel is Doctorow’s most prescient: published in 2009, it anticipated the maker movement, the 3D printing revolution, the gig economy, and the tension between open-source culture and corporate control that would define the following decade. The technical details are specific and enthusiastic — Doctorow loves the smell of solder and the feel of a well-designed circuit board — and the narrative energy comes from the pleasure of making things.
Collecting Makers
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2009): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$40
- Very good/very good: $5–$15