Despite meaning to reread this ever since I first read it, this is my first reread. While it’s very clearly related to Red Team Blues, it’s remarkable how different this book is. Rather than a tight thriller, this feels more like a meandering story that has a clear throughline but skips from event to event as more than a decade goes by. There’s a fun framing device that makes this work, though.

Like anyone who’s read Cory Doctorow’s Radicalized (now free to read here, and you should go read it), I’ve thought a lot recently about its central conceit of an online message board where people stiffed by insurance radicalize each other into gruesome acts of violence. The story is hard to read: It’s vicious in its implied critique of U.S. healthcare companies, but the people being radicalized are also ugly in their response to those companies’ callousness.

This is much darker than the last two Doctorow novellas I read: It involves domestic terrorists taking their revenge on the insurance companies that screwed them over. I know I haven’t read this since first reading this collection in 2019, because it’s almost too dark for me.

It’s better than I remembered it being, though, and while I am not in a hurry to reread it any time soon, I appreciate why Doctorow went dark on this one.

Cory Doctorow is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve also (mostly) appreciated the work of Humble Bundle over the past decade. When I learned this weekend that there’s an ongoing bundle of Doctorow’s fiction, I was ecstatic. The only thing that I was disappointed about is that I’ve already bought so many of these titles… however, that still wasn’t enough to stop me from buying all 18 items (it helps that while I own many of these already, most of the ones I own are in formats rather than epub, so now I’m a multimodal owner). As a plus, this bundle benefits the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a great organization that Doctorow has done a lot of work for.