But coming upon Marty in media res all we need to know is that he is an expert in tracking money: legal, illegal, digital, or cash. Given his age, Marty has a long backstory, which we sense implicitly, and which Doctorow doles out judiciously as needed.

He also narrates his own tale, and it’s his affable, distinctive voice, issuing from a fully-fleshed-out fellow, that captivates the reader and makes the novel eminently compelling and a rocketing read. Our hero is the 67-year-old “forensic accountant” named Martin “Marty” Hench.

But if your SF umbrella is large enough, it will surely shelter such a consanguineous narrative. It might be best seen as a high-tech thriller in a league with Neal Stephenson’s great Reamde, a book whose flavors are somewhat echoed here. It takes place about 36 hours into the future, involving no new technologies or sociopolitical trends. The first thing to know is that this book is almost not SF by most hardcore definitions. (And as Sturgeon postulated in “Maturity,” we’ve probably never yet seen a human who exhibits what that word really could mean.) And since the opposite of “mature” is “juvenile,” does that mean I’m casting all of Doctorow’s previous works with their innovative complexity and brio as kid’s stuff? Why don’t we just say that the new book represents a deepening or heightening of vision, of emotion, and of worldview? And after all, is this not a natural human and writerly progression, for anyone not stuck at some earlier plateau? The wunderkind who startled us with “Craphound” nearly 20 years ago is now into his fifties. I’m not a big fan of “maturity,” feeling as many people do that “adulting” all too often consists of boring, hypocritical busywork.

It shows the writer deliberately moving into fresh territory which-the god of critics should strike me down for using such a curse word-seems more “mature” than past efforts.

It has all the great qualities and features that one expects from a Doctorow tale, but any extra praise it accrues is due to what it does differently from past items in his canon. I can’t possibly say enough good things about Cory Doctorow’s new novel.

Doctorow novel