Doctorow is a pundit and pseudo-futurist who thinks he can write (or at least has convinced some small subset of this particular delusion.) In small doses like short stories or selected snippets from his novels there is a bit of fun, but too much and it becomes apparent that he is better at the idea than the literary execution.
I tend to agree, except with the tone of your message, or the tone as it arrived at my end at least.
I think there is a lot of value in the ideas there, we desperately need them, and they are very clearly formulated. Just a bit^Wlot too clearly. He should have chosen a different format, although I can't really think of a good one either. World building needs plot to give it any credibility, and tee point was to give these ideas exactly that.
So I don't want to trash talk Doctorowh in general here.
Don't want to trash talk Doctorow, but I just think he missed his calling at the New Yorker or somewhere similar writing near-future short stories that were subtle critique of current issues. If we criticize Neal Stephenson for building great worlds and telling an interesting story but not being able to consistently stick the landing then I think Doctorow builds the world but can never really get a good story going. They are all better writers than I, but overall Doctorow to me seems a bit over-hyped for someone who under-delivers on the possibilities of his world-building.
That is true but a chef is classed as a (usually) expert so knows what they're talking about. Put another way, I value the opinion of a chef about food than everyone else.
To the point though, if somebody told you that Bills Burger Bin had great burgers and you responded with "How would you know? Where are all the burgers you've made?", that would make you a jackass.
I think he's a much better essayist (and polemicist) than he is a fiction writer. I'm skeptical about his positions a lot of the time, but I enjoy reading him when he's making cases about technology and free speech. The problem comes when he tries to rewrite those same essays in narrative form, which does not play to his strengths.
This. I think it's good to have someone who can communicate this clearly and mostly understands the tech they're writing about (and actually bothers writing about it regularly)
