The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow is SF about SF—its childish preoccupation with hardware, its retrofutures that drag on the genre like The Carousel of Progress tied to an escape zeppelin, and the immature demands for “positive” futures and happy endings. Ah, but happy endings for whom?

What makes Doctorow’s story so unique is that in almost every science fiction story meat-space is privileged over cyber-space. The hero wins when they successfully resist technology and establish their humanity as an opposing force against the tyranny of the machine. Doctorow and other techno-positive thinkers like him argue forcefully that such thinking can only lead to dystopia and suffering. In a world of ever-quickening technological upheaval the question remains important for us: Change or Progress?