By Matthew E. Milliken
MEMwrites.wordpress.com
Jan. 8, 2015
Suzanne Church is a popular 40-something business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News when she gets her big break. It begins when she questions Landon Kettlewell, the CEO of Kodacell — the newly merged companies of Kodak and Duracell — at a press conference describing his new corporate fiefdom. Late that evening, the shrewd executive impulsively (and rather improbably) e-mails Church with an invitation to “embed” with one of his company’s free-wheeling entrepreneurial teams. The reporter’s decision to accept the invitation changes the lives of countless thousands of people, especially those of Church, Kettlewell and the two men she is soon living with and reporting on nearly every waking hour.
With this, Canadian-born author and blogger Cory Doctorow sets in motion the plot of Makers, his 2009 science fiction novel about the economy of a near-future United States. The novel is competently written but uneven: Doctorow’s scenario for how embedded journalism will work in the near future strikes me as rather unlikely, and a significant amount of dialogue comes off as pretty didactic — a lecture, rather than a conversation.
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