Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctrow, is above all things, a journalist and activist. Sadly, the passion for this subject is the book's biggest failings -- we sacrifice character and plot a bit for huge dumps of information that slow and clog. Having met the man, spoken with him -- I hear Marcus speak with his voice and that's the major failing of the book. I hear Cory in every page. His journalistic background injures him here, because the author is supposed to vanish into the page, to not be a character themselves.

I'm going to forgive that, though. I'm going to forgive that Marcus doesn't sound quite like any teenager I know or knew, I'm going to ignore that sometimes we got bogged down in technical details or historical details instead of moving plot or developing character a little further, because this is the book that every post-9/11 kid should be reading. This is the book that reminds of what we were before, what we are now, and what tools both we and the enemy have to sway us in the direction of both freedom and tyranny.

I'm going to buy a copy for my niece and nephew. (I might even give him my signed, paper copy!) I want them to know how important this is. How important Marcus's fight is, because it's the fight they're inheriting from adults that failed to protect their liberties. I want them to remember they're young, but they're capable of creating great change. I want them to be able to hope again. I want them to get mad at the idea of Marcus being shipped off shore to Syria or wherever else torture is being outsourced. I want them to feel the same passionate rage I did when Severe Haircut Woman escapes real punishment. I want them to be able to draw parallels between real world events and the fiction used to teach them about it.

I want them to think, and for all the flaws this book has -- this will make them think. So I highly recommend it for anyone with young relatives, anyone who wants to remember just how much power a single citizen can have, and just how bad it got and how could it could be again.

So: Little Brother, 4 out of 5 - a must read not for it's skill or artistry, but because it's a damned important book for our times.… (more)

This YA book was our March monthly assigned read for my SF book club. I had been familiar with Cory Doctorow through his work with the EFF and his writings on www.boingboing.net. These biases show clearly in Little Brother, but the novel does not suffer for it at all. His writing is clear and tight. Even when delving into hyper-technical geek talk, Doctorow’s explanations did not pull me out of the story. (But then, I am a self-confessed geek.) Within the first dozen pages he has drawn interesting and engaging characters, and I was intrigued to see where things would go.

The overall story is about how the main character, 17-year-old Marcus, deals with a security crackdown in San Francisco directly after a terrorist attack. As the new city-wide security protocols are implemented, he describes a few harrowing incidents that echo elements in The Handmaid’s Tale. In a classic example of doublespeak, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says, regarding the hundreds of citizens pulled over randomly on the street for database checks: “[You’ve been] momentarily detained so that we can ensure your safety…”. It is a key point in the novel that the catch-and-release policies of DHS are not uniformly applied.

Released in 2007, Little Brother is prescient regarding present-day surveillance technology (cf CBC's Spark). Though the terrorist attack is used as the McGuffin to get us to the issues of privacy versus security, it is clear that they can’t put this genie back in the bottle. Once DHS installs new spyware in existing cameras around the city, and infiltrates the existing internet and POS technology, it is virtually impossible to restore the city to the pre-attack state of decentralized data. In Canada, we saw this with the “temporary” security cameras installed for the Vancouver Olympics that then became permanent. Once laws and procedures are put in place, they have a political imperative to remain.

As can be expected from Doctorow, there is great use of language: “He’s a sucking chest wound of a human being.” And “…the chandelier of gear hung around their midriffs.” There are also nods to elements in pop culture, such as Harry Potter and The Matrix, that will be familiar to the target YA audience.

One weakness of the book was its focus exclusively on the plight and reaction of middle-class white teenagers. There were two brief moments towards the end of the book acknowledging the deeper nature of the problem – one of systemic racism in choosing who is a “potential threat” – in a conversation with Marcus’ friend Jolu, and Marcus noting the predominant skin colour of his fellow prisoners.
I would, perhaps, have liked a more overt acknowledgement that the escalating cyber-revolution Marcus starts was, in fact, seeded by the very acts of aggressive suppression and incarceration perpetrated by DHS.

Marcus’ character is a dissident without being too obnoxious – this is a useful contrast to the rebellious character in Boneshaker [see my review]. In addition, Marcus regularly engages in self-reflection and matures through the arc of the book. He comes to realize that actions regularly have consequences that he cannot fully foresee. Therefore, he becomes more thoughtful and less reactionary in his responses and the form his activism takes.

In the Afterword, Andrew “bunnie” Huang (a noted crypoexpert) presents an interesting metaphor. When artists, hobbyists, and iconoclasts (however that is defined) can be so easily implicated as terrorists, what do we call this dysfunction? Huang writes, “...it is called an autoimmune disease, where an organism’s defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells.”

The message is clear and repeated often: the terrorists win if we act scared. If we give up privacy for security, we don’t deserve either. In fact the repetitive “message” was beginning to bog the novel down about one-third of the way through. Fortunately, the plot picked up, took a turn, and kept moving.

This book is a call-to-arms to know what your rights are and to recognize when others are trying to take them away from you. It is a great talking tool for parents and their teens re: the limitations and boundaries of privacy, security, and personal versus government responsibility.

Subversive and hyper-geeky, I liked this book very much. Have the terrorists already won? Not as long as people like Cory Doctorow are sounding the alarm.
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