Little Brother

Have you ever had the experience of remembering why you enjoyed something? Like reading? Where you sit back and get involved in the book? The characters? The action? And suddenly you find yourself fifty pages from where you started, and a couple of hours have mysteriously disappeared in what feels like a few minutes? Little Brother by Cory Doctrow brought back that original feeling to me.

Little Brother takes place in a post 9/11 future that may be just a tomorrow away. Little Brother is about Marcus Yallow, a seventeen year old San Francisco hacker, and his friends who happen to find themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time, a terrorist attack that fells San Francisco's Bay Bridge, killing 4000 people, and Marcus and his friends are rounded up by the Department of Homeland Security, DHS ( a title worthy of Joseph Goebbels) in the wake of the attack and detained in a makeshift prison on Treasure Island in the San Francisco harbor. The justification of their imprisonment is nothing more than the profile of being a teenager, which can be used to fit the description of any anti-social behavior. Marcus and friends are held incommunicado and subjected to interrogations and various humiliations designed to break them and reveal more terrorist plots. After a week Marcus and friends are released with the exception of one, Darryl. After their release the friends find San Francisco under everything but stated martial law under the auspices of the DHS, and the friends go their own ways. Marcus wants revenge on the system that abused him and becomes a reluctant revolutionary. Another drops out right away wanting only to return to a normal life, and a third helps Marcus set up an underground internet communications system for those who want to resist the DHS' authority and return civil liberties to San Francisco. Echoes of today's events buzz through the pages and I think future readers will find it relevant and as resonant as some of George Orwell's predictions in 1984. Little Brother is listed as YA (young adult) book but I wouldn't let that label deter an adult from reading it, I found it a very engrossing book and if it is truly a YA book it doesn't talk down to it's audience. If there are some critiques of the novel they're MINOR. Some of the information given is basic and repeated a couple of times in the beginning but that's hardly noticeable and probably of benefit to the YA audience the book is intended for. Some of the discussions of the through the rabbit hole world of hacking and cryptographic codes made my head swim a little, but things that close to math usually do. There's a bit of teenage wish fulfillment in it, bully retribution, teenagers are smarter than adults and are the last chance for freedom in America, but given the circumstances and parameters laid out in the book it is a perfectly plausible reaction to the events described in the book.

A "Modern Classic" is an encomium that's used all the readily in blurbs, and those books and authors have faded to obscurity, but I think Little Brother lives up to that sentiment and is a book that should be put into schools curriculum's and remain there for a long time to come. Hopefully in Little Brother the young people who read it will see a path they want to take this country.

The book Little Brother by Cory Doctorow, is a very well written book. Basically Marcus the main character is a very technological person aka a nerd. His and his close group of friends are into this game where you go around town looking for clues based on clues found. They are in downtown Sanfransisco when terrorists blow up a nearby bridge which kills thousands. After the attack they try to get out of the downtown area, but are taken by the government as "persons of interest". While being questioned one of Marcus's close friends is killed to try and get him to admit that he is a terrorist and had something to do with the blown up bridge. He eventually is released from the secret prision seeks to revenge the death of Daryll, and the governments new privacy laws, that make it so where the government can see each and every thing you do. Marcus starts a rebellion, and thousands of people follow him and his cause. After all Marcus has the "dirty" government people arrested, the innocent people being held in secret prision camps freed, the new privacy laws destroyed, and finds his thought to be dead friend alive. I really thought this book was really easy to read. It had many suspensefull parts where you never knew what was going to happen. I couldn't put the book down, which is very rare for me. I would reccomend this book for anyone to read.

How much you are likely to enjoy this book is going to depend on your political opinions, I should say. It is partly a story, partly a handbook of the internet featuring innovations that are not just up to the minute but sometimes well beyond, but above all it is a political tract. In the red revolutionary corner there are the votaries of free expression and confidentiality, in the blue conservative corner there are the forces wedded to the notion that no security can ever be tight enough. How much compromise might have been possible is something we are not told. For the Little Brother and his associates it is a battle for survival against totalitarianism, and I don't doubt that this is substantially the author's own outlook.

There is not much doubt which side the author is on. Several of his characters voice the standard arguments in favour of drastic security measures, and these arguments are quoted fairly (if unsympathetically), it seems to me, without being parodied or misrepresented. What the storyline is concerned with is what these theoretical perceptions are liable to mean in practice, and the starting point of the narrative is a terrorist outrage of the 9/11 variety, this time in San Francisco. The story is told by a 17-year-old boy who gets into trouble with the Department of Homeland Security for being in the wrong place when the incident happens and for subsequently showing an attitude the DHS does not like. He `wins' in the end, but not in the manner of some totally incredible David pitted against a governmental Goliath. He wins because a second governmental Goliath takes on the first one. The eagle of Washington has its wings clipped by the bear of Sacramento. Perhaps we can read into this outcome a parable of how better American instincts (as these are perceived by Doctorow and his Little Brother) prevail over worse. However we are only seeing one round in an ongoing battle, and it is quite possible to see this round as no more than an establishment turf war.

Setting politics aside, I myself feel that the book hangs together well. The geekish explanations of the capabilities, current and potential, of the internet are natural enough when the narrator is a geek. I actually found them rather interesting, but it is only necessary to skim-read those sequences to get anything out of them that makes any real difference to the plot. The personality of an American 17-year-old in the 3rd millennium seems convincing to me, although it is half a century since I was that age and although not myself American I know California well. It is also perfectly natural that the plot-line should take in his sexual initiation, and I thought that this 3-stage process was handled very well, with sensitivity but without either sensationalism or prurience or any unbalancing of the main narrative. The style of writing seems fine to me as well, appropriate to an articulate youngster and without artificiality, affectation or attempts to recall Holden Caulfield. Likewise I buy the character-portrayal in general, except perhaps that of the narrator's father. This is an action-yarn basically, not some in-depth psychological study. In any case the opposed poles of the political magnet constitute the main abstract `issue' in this novel, and Doctorow has more sense than to try to overload his narration.

How many readers of this story will be able to set politics aside when reading it I don't know, but if they are very many I suspect that Doctorow will be disappointed. He is quite explicitly `selling' one side of the argument, and his objective was presumably to have his side cheering, the other side either apoplectic with outrage or experiencing a Damascene conversion, and next to nobody uncommitted, at least by the time they have read the first hundred pages or so. It is, of course, fiction, and to some extent fantasy-fiction. How fantastic the fantasy may be is still a matter of argument, but you can probably settle that matter in your own mind according to what you believe to be justified, or even just simply to be true, about the camp at Guantanamo.

Little brother is an important book. I hope that people, especially young people, give it a read. The story in and of itself is OK, but the point is that this is not abstract fiction. It's a political book. It's a technical book. It's a techno-political book. There is so much stuff these day's that's tempting to overlook: inconvenient truth about our governments, the complicated and confusing technology that has more and more role in the day to day. However, there comes a point at which ignorance becomes the greater evil.

I grew up in the former Soviet Union, where people were also patriotic, where politics and technology were just as inconvenient and where the people who governed, lied, and tortured in the name of communism and other fine ideals were just as "multi-dimensional" as the people in the US department of homeland security. Don't say that "people just aren't like that". They are. What happened in the USSR and East Germany can happen in the US. The human dynamics are the same. I've read russian novels about repression like Children of the Arbat that have many of the same vibes as "Little Brother". George Orwell also wrote about the squishing of the human spirit by the state. Good for Doctorow to contributing and updating the proud literary tradition of stories of people struggling against state power.

Cory Doctorow's declared aim in writing "Little Brother" is "to arm [a new] generation [of youngsters] with the cognitive and technical tools to resist encroachment on their privacy and reclaim the personal liberty that is theirs by birthright". A noble aim indeed. Sadly, I am not convinced that he goes very far towards achieving it.

The story starts well enough but for me felt to come off the rails quite quickly, particularly in portraying "the system" (against which the book's teenage hero is pitted) as not only cumbersome in its responsiveness to attack (which is true enough) but also unbelievably stupid at the technical and strategic levels. While the latter may hold true for large chunks of it, any strategy for defeating it which replies on that premise is doomed to failure in the long run. Indeed, if one examines the story carefully enough, it becomes clear that the final outcome has less to do with any actions of the hero and the younger generation that he has motivated into rebellion, and much more to do with the somewhat simplistic triumph of the more right-minded sector of adult society who finally save the day.

I am also not sure that the book will appeal much to Doctorow's intended audience. The writing frequently descends into unnecessary levels of techno-geek, much of it pitched I would say, at a level that seems more likely appeal to yesterday's teenagers (and is filled with their in-jokes) rather than any future ones, for most I think will consider much of what is portrayed here as already dated--how many teens would bother to use email to communicate with their friends, for instance? Many will also, I suspect, quickly tire of the endless technical explanations (for all that they are well done and easy to follow) which interfere with the flow of the story and make the book feel more like a school lesson than an exciting tale of rebellion.

The central issues are undoubtedly important and all credit must go to Cory Doctorow for doing what he can to raise an awareness of them in the rising generation but I think raising some awareness is about as much as he can hope this book to achieve.