Makers is a novel by Canadian-British science fiction author Cory Doctorow released in October 2009. It was nominated for the Prometheus Award. The book focuses on a near-future imagining of members of the maker culture, a group Doctorow characterizes as being composed of "people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet".The novel is available free on the author's website, as a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA download. It is also published in traditional paper form by HarperVoyager. The UK hardcover is 416 pages long.
A mostly feel good (if you're an EFF supporting technoutopian) very near future fantasy about maker culture and its intersection with big business. Tails off towards the end, and has a lot of ideas that aren't fully fleshed out. Not Doctorow's best, and not an essential read but enjoyable if you're in the target demographic.
I must admit that this one didn't grip me nearly as much as I'd thought, hoped and expected from the surrounding fanfare. Some of the tech stuff was interesting, some of the attitudes in line with my own but mostly I found it a boring look into what the world might have ended up being if a certain geek sector took over.
