The Lost Cause was published by Tor Books in 2023. Brooks Palazzo is a young man in Burbank, California, part of a generation that has inherited both the climate crisis and the political will to address it. The federal government has committed to massive green infrastructure projects — solar farms, desalination plants, high-speed rail, managed retreat from coastal areas — and Brooks is a volunteer with one of the crews building temporary housing for climate refugees.
The opposition comes from an unexpected quarter: not from fossil fuel companies or climate deniers but from armed militias composed of older Americans who have organized around the belief that the Green New Deal is a conspiracy to destroy their way of life. They don’t deny that the climate is changing; they deny that anyone has the right to change their communities in response. When the government proposes to build refugee housing on a vacant lot in Brooks’s neighborhood, the militia occupies it, and the conflict escalates from zoning dispute to armed standoff.
Doctorow’s novel is simultaneously utopian and dystopian: the utopia is that humanity has finally mobilized to address the climate crisis; the dystopia is that a significant minority would rather burn the world than share it. The technical optimism is genuine — Doctorow describes the green infrastructure projects with the enthusiasm he usually reserves for hacking and 3D printing — and the political pessimism is equally genuine. The result is a novel that is both more hopeful and more frightening than most climate fiction.
Collecting The Lost Cause
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2023): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12