Customer Reviews

Little Brother

5 star:		(118)
4 star:		(54)
3 star:		(21)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

In some ways, this book harks back to the juveniles of fifties as written by some of the great masters of sf, most especially Heinlein. Like those earlier books, it portrays teenagers that are intelligent, resourceful, game-loving, and confrontational, but are still at times prone to making stupid mistakes in the name of peer-group status. In other words, they are real teenagers.

The setting is the near future, when some ill-defined terrorist group decides to blow up the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Marcus, our hero, and several of his friends are picked up in a rather wide sweep by Homeland Security forces as possible suspects. And therein lies the tale, as the actions of the security forces clash violently with Marcus's idea of what is right and proper in the supposed land-of-the-free America. What Marcus decides to do about this situation is an instructional manual to the reader in just how personal freedom and privacy have been restricted and what can be done about it in today's very high-tech world of security cameras, RFIDs, cryptography, computer databases, and the insidious insinuation of propaganda both at our schools and into everything we see and hear on the internet and our TVs and from the mouths of our political leaders.

The story bubbles with suspense, and the actions that Marcus takes are very believable as something a seventeen-year old could actually do. It is very easy to identify with Marcus and become very sympathetic to his cause, while the situation itself is stark enough to frighten the daylights out of the reader as being all too possible. The info-dumps along the way not only impart some very necessary information to the reader, but are handled very much the way Heinlein did it, as things that are necessary for the hero to either know or learn about to accomplish his desires, making them easy to swallow. The techniques and technology presented are real, as some of the afterword material to this book details.

The other characters of this book, while not presented with the detail that Marcus is (almost a given in any first-person narration), are both intriguing and in some cases frightening. Marcus's father is a major case in point, as a man with liberal leanings who nevertheless finds himself driven to support the majority view out of fear for his son, and Marcus's social studies teacher, who is very reminiscent of some of the `mentors' of Heinlein's books, as her willingness to engage her students in free-wheeling debate and attempts to get them to think for themselves leads to a very plausible and ugly fate. It is just such touches that make the whole situation ring with that touch of reality that marks excellent science fiction.

The politics of this book are decidedly left-wing. The Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security come in for some merciless beatings, but the reasoning behind such depictions is carefully laid out and form a clarion call to all Americans to look carefully at just what we are giving up in the name of `security'. Perhaps it should be compared and contrasted (as one of those infamous school assignments I don't fondly remember) with something like Tom Clancy's Executive Orders, which presents the right-wing rationale of why and when the government should be allowed to exceed the boundaries of the Constitution and its amendments.

Unlike the YA material of the fifties, this book does not ignore an item of great concern to almost every teenager, namely sex. I found the presentation of this material both appropriate to the characters and handled realistically without being too graphic. However, it might make this book inappropriate for pre-teens.

Teenagers should find this book a riveting read, with characters they can identify with, and like all really good YA books, adults should find this book just as riveting, with concepts and philosophies presented that require thought and contemplation. This is the best book I've read out of the 2008 crop so far, and I'd be very much surprised if it doesn't at least make the 2009 Hugo nomination list, if not take the award itself.

--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

I enjoyed this novel immensely. I want to make that clear from the start. There are many reviews that are going to talk only about how important and topical Little Brother is. They're going to talk about how this novel needed to be written. They're all right, but I think everybody should know how much FUN it is to read (even while you're being outraged by how possible it all is). I started reading it and didn't put it down until I was finished.

Little Brother is the first-person narrative of Marcus, a 17 year-old with a talent for technology. Doctorow gets Marcus' voice just right. He alternates between street-swagger and vulnerability, between naivete and expertise. I found him to be an entirely believable contradiction, which is a pretty good definition of a teenager. At first, I found Marcus' love of explaining technology a little irritating, but I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized that it reminded me of my own poorly restrained tendency to try to explain computers to anyone who would listen (35 years ago). Nothing reaches you quite like seeing your own flaws in the hero.

Marcus finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. Without revealing any plot details, suffice it to say that he comes to the attention of a law-enforcement agency with a broad remit and limited oversight. Deceit and mistrust test his family and friendships as he comes face to face with the conflict between personal safety and the responsibilities of a citizen.

Cory Doctorow has managed to create a wonderful fusion of science fiction, action novel, political thriller, and whimsical romp. It's very hard to bring those elements together, but he has succeeded admirably. I haven't seen anyone pull this off since "The Long Run" by Daniel Keys Moran.

Buy it. Read it. Buy copies for your kids. Once they start reading it, they'll finish it.

Scott Westerfeld gives Doctorow's latest novel a blurb of "A rousing tales of techno-geek rebellion."

I was kindly given an Advance Reader's Copy by the unparalleled force known as Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and now in return, its time for me to talk about the novel.

Doctorow is more known these days for his often controversial and definitely iconcolastic positions on matters technological. Editor at Boing Boing, crusader against the excesses of Digital Rights Management...Doctorow definitely doesn't keep his head down.

I haven't actually read any novel-length fiction of his until now, and I am glad that I did, even if I am not the intended demographic of the novel.

Little Brother is set around 2010, in a US which has had a Republican return to the White House in the 2008 elections. The story centers around Marcus Yallow, whose original screenname of w1inst0n and the title of the book gave me immediate "spidey senses" of where this novel was going. We get a primer on Marcus' carefree life, and a lot of infodumping on technology--enough that the novel felt a bit like a throwback to SF novels of yore which would do the "as you know, bob" approach to science fiction.

Marcus' SF becomes the target of a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, and as he and his friends are cutting school as part of an alternate reality game, they are caught in the DHS dragnet. His anarchic and rebellious attitude do him no good, and he spends a short period in a "Gitmo by the Bay".

Once released (and tellingly, one of his friends is *not*), Marcus becomes even more radicalized by the experience, enough that he is willing to challenge the DHS when San Francisco is put into a lockdown that would be the wet masturbatory dream of authoritarians everywhere.

And therein lies the tale.

Little Brother is written in first person, and so we get everything filtered through Marcus' perceptions, prejudices, attitudes and experience. While I suspect that Marcus' opinions may be very close to Doctorow's (although that's not guaranteed; I wouldn't make the assumption that authorial voice always equals protagonist voice), my meta-knowledge of Doctorow suggests that Marcus' radicalization and voice came very naturally to the author.

Too, aside from the infodumps which slow down the book here and there, the novel sounds like a YA novel. The teenage protagonists sounded, to my ear, like teenagers. They are real characters in a near future world that readers in the same age group can identify with.

I think Doctorow softpedals the confrontations between the teenagers and the security forces a little bit, having them result in mostly non violent confrontations. I suppose Doctorow did load the dice a little bit--a couple of shooting deaths at the hands of the DHS would have destroyed Marcus' movement, and would have turned the book into a parallel, rather than a counterpoint, to 1984. This book doesn't end completely happily...but Marcus makes a difference.

It's a very good book, whatever you think of its politics and opinions, and it fits well as a gateway book. This is the sort of YA science fiction that could, and should, and must bring new readers into the graying genre of SF. And for the rest of us, too, its an indictment of the dangers of security theater, and security which does not make us any safer.

I enjoyed it and commend it to the rest of you.

Little Brother fits in perfectly with the rest of Doctorow's body of work: intriguing plots marred by two-dimensional characters who don't actually interact with one another so much as they preach at each other. This tendency isn't quite the narrative buzzkill as it is elsewhere, but it doesn't make the book any more fun to read.

His characters are leaden caricatures without a hint of subtlety. The government henchfolk are Evil with a capital-E, the supporters of the new regime are mindless drones who seem to forget each frustration and lesson as soon as they've happened, and our hero's friends are all good but apparently weak willed. Meanwhile, Marcus, while no paragon of virtue, is simply too good to be true. In fact so many of his beliefs and interests are ported from Doctorow's posts at BoingBoing that I began to feel that Marcus was even less of a character and more of a surrogate for Doctorow's wish fulfillment: an anti-establishment "hacker" who speaks 1337, has a host of neat au courant interests, loves cutting edge bands, believes in the boilerplate of the EFF and the ACLU and gets the girl too!

Not that he doesn't have doubts and fears, but at no point did I ever think that he'd change his ways. No sooner does he worry that he might be going to far but something comes up to prove him right. Over and over again: Will our hero persevere? Of course! Why worry? Especially after the fourth crisis of faith.

Is it an informative read? Yeah. There's a lot of talk about civil liberties and networks and internet privacy that's worth reading. Is it a fun read? Not even close. Between the seemingly constant preaching and the completely unsatisfying conclusion, I finished the book simply to say I was done with it. And I am: I'm done with this book and, unless someone convinces me otherwise, I am done with Doctorow's work.

High school is a bit of a drag, but Marcus manages to get through it--thanks to the great games he plays, and his proclivity for computer hacking. Living in San Francisco, he's learned the way the game is played, and he's willing to face down the Vice Principal who would really love to have him expelled. But when terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge (and the Bart tunnel underneath it), everything changes. Marcus is picked up by a Department of Homeland Security team and, when he uses the same sass on them that he uses on his teachers, he's thrown into a mini-Guantanamo Bay prison camp. When he's freed, days later, Marcus is angry and radicalized, but finds that his normally understanding father has gone over to the other side, willing to accept restrictions in personal freedom that he would never have agreed to before the bombing.

Before DHS set Marcus free, they warned him that they'd be watching and that next time they gather him up, he won't be let go. Considering that one of his friends never was set free from the secret prison camp, Marcus can easily believe their threats. Technology, though, cuts both ways. Although the DHS can use it to monitor activities, to search for suspicious behavior, to track communications, it can also be used to hide secrets--and can be manipulated to overwhelm the human resources who must follow up with the discrepancies technology detects. Using an X-Box hack, Marcus creates a tunnel network in the internet that allows hops from X-Box to X-Box, accessing the Internet through multiple and changing patterns. He then works with a friend to convert San Francisco's music download system to support full encryption, allowing the encrypted traffic among the rebellious youth to hide in the far vaster traffic of music downloads.

Although Marcus is radicalized, his friends are frightened by the constant threat that the DHS, working with the local police, impose. His activities do bring him a new girlfriend, though, which, considering that Marcus (at 17) has only kissed three girls, is a positive step. Still, no matter how much technology Marcus can hack, no matter how clever he is in developing devices that detect hidden cameras, man-in-the-middle attacks, and phishing, the government has far more resources. Sooner or later, he knows he'll be caught.

Author Cory Doctorow asks critical questions about our national response to terrorist attacks. If beating the terrorists requires giving up the freedoms that the terrorists object to, can we really say that we've beaten them? If terrorism is a horrible, but ultimately minor threat (more people are struck by lightning in the US than attacked by terrorists), is it really worth subverting our entire economy and political system to fight it? And to what extent should ordinary people be inconvenienced by techniques that make the government look like it's doing something, but that don't actually reduce the chances of a terrorist attack (taking off shoes in airports, silly color-coding alerts).

Doctorow doesn't spend a lot of time really addressing nuances. The DHS in this story is bad--ultimately using torture at home, and turning inconvenient (but not necessarily guilty) people over to foreign governments for more torture and eventual disposal. I would have found the story more interesting if Doctorow had constructed a less extreme straw man. Unfortunately, a lot of his portrayals turn out to be accurate pictures of what Americans actually have done to one another--in the name of fighting terrorism.

For me, the story is strongest when Matthew is creating new hacks, new techniques to defeat the DHS's 'big brother' schemes to keep a watch on everyone in San Francisco--in the hopes of heading off another terrorist attack. The discussions of the X-Box hack, of public key encryption, of Yippie-style street-theater protests, Matthew's hidden-camera finder, and the RFID switchers, all make good reading and are plausible as approaches that protestors could use to make infringement of liberties more difficult. Of course, setting the story in San Francisco makes the protest atmosphere as well as the high-tech leaning of the story convincing.

Doctorow and Tor are positioning LITTLE BROTHER as a young adult story. Certainly Matthew is both a teen and highly capable--which will be attractive to the young adult market. Likewise, the idealistic freedom-loving element of the story, and the pranks Matthew and his friends play fit with that young adult group. Overall, though, the themes of the story, the issues being dealt with, and the social commentary span all ages.

Before discussing this book, one thing must be established up front: it is polemic, not literary. That being said, polemic fiction must justify itself as fiction, and this book does not. It is simply neither compelling nor believable with shallow, annoying characters. The "good" characters are at best two dimensional and do not talk; they preach. Constantly. As far as the "bad" characters go, one can cut to the point by saying they are caricatures, not characters. In fact, the only character with any gray in him at all is Cory's father, who makes a few cameos to act as an everyman. Unfortunately, his responses are so exaggerated and extreme that they don't come close to passing the laugh test.

As bad as the characters are, the plot is where the book really fails to shine. It reads like a techno-libertarian spin off of Rand's Atlas Shrugged. Just mix one part over-the-top, exaggerated plot with two parts pretension, and you've got this book down. If this sounds too harsh, consider the book's premise: A terrorist attack in San Fransisco, creates a panic in which a teenage boy is stabbed, and when his friends try to waive down a passing army vehicle, they're all arrested and thrown in an Abu Ghraib on Alcatraz, only to be released when the protagonist yields the codes to his phone. The protagonist then organizes an underground to use technology to overcome the evils of Homeland Security. Here's the punchline: this all happened to him because he didn't unlock his phone when the government agents first asked, and they want to show him who's boss. Combine all of this with ridiculously over-the-top characterizations of Homeland Security agents taking unbelievable measures, and you'll have the measure of this book. All in all, this reduces to the Randian proof-by-hyperbole. It didn't work for her, and I don't see why it should work now.

Now take all of the above, mix in a little teen aged angst (which he actually writes fairly well), and you'll have Little Brother.

I was halfway through Little Brother last night when I went to bed. As I lay in the darkness, all I could think about was the book. The questions it raised, the insecurities it provoked in me.
After about an hour of this I got up and went into the living room, sat down and finished it.

Few times in my life have I encountered a piece of art that reflected the zeitgeist so clearly.
This is a fabulously brave and important book, and you will hopefully learn a great deal by reading this.

Cheers to Mr. Doctorow!
This was like reading Ender's Game and the Diamond Age for the first time.

"Little Brother" takes Orwell's "1984", and updates it ala Stephenson's "Cryptomomicon", while taking me back to the young adult stories I remember and loved like "The Three Investigators".

The near-future plot revolves around a group of high school students and the massive security and civil liberties crackdown that lands on San Francisco after a new "9/11" style attack occurs there. It begins with the teens being mistakenly held for military-style interrogation by the DHS, and does a good job (at a YA appropriate level - explicit, but not violently graphic) of describing the mind manipulation and power games that can be played in these situations.

When they're freed, they discover that the Department of Homeland Security has used the event as an excuse for a massive surveillance crackdown in the Bay area, and they chronicle the resultant affect on civil liberties and free speech. Then they fight back, with all the powers next-gen l33t hacker kids can muster.

It's fun, insightful, timely, and it's Doctorow's best work yet. It's sold as "Young Adult" fiction, so don't look in the SF section, but it's well worth reading by everyone.

This book is a great story... exciting and well written.. its also interspersed with some very advanced technology and security concepts.. made easy to understand and follow.

I'd give it five stars for just that reason.

I read the free copy, and have recommended it to about... 10 people or so, and I plan to do so even more often.

I worked in computer security for years, and what I saw there was upsetting and sad, which is why I left. Computer security was being turned from a way to prevent terrorists and criminals from doing what they do, and into a way to prevent people from having freedom and privacy.

Computer security was used as a way to prevent layoffs, by systematically finding little policy violations, often going years back, and using those as grounds to fire.

Vendors who sell security software often liked to quote that 80% of attacks came from inside the company... those for profit entities really sell fear, uncertainty, and doubt... extrapolate that to a near future in which 80% of attacks are said to come from inside the country, and I think you'll see that this slippery slope leads somewhere awful indeed.

This books not just good, its important. I hope it strikes a debate. I hope young folks do read it... because its just that important.

Every student in Marcus' high school is under surveillance through cameras both in and out of class, spy ware in the school computers and identification cards with microchips inside that let the powers to be know where they are at all times. Marcus is a computer guru who lives to beat the system; he and some friends cut school to participate in a scavenger hunt sponsored by a large corporation.

While they are trying to decipher a clue, an explosion occurs followed by a mushroom cloud rising in the sky. Terrorists hit the Bay Bridge and a San Francisco BART station. Marcus' friend Darryl is injured so they stop a Homeland Security vehicle. The teens are treated like terrorists and taken to prison where they are mentally and physically tortured. Three of them are freed but Darryl is nowhere to be found. Homeland Security has turned San Francisco into a police state, but Marcus knows the truth and organizes a resistance.

LITTLE BROTHER is a tense frightening thriller because with little spin it comes from headlines since 9/11. Marcus is a fighter yet a reluctant hero as he just wants freedom without insistent government meddling, peeking, and intruding under the guise of red alerts. Cory Doctorow has modernized 1984 with this exhilarating cautionary thriller; though one must wonder whether he will receive the Rushdie treatment from the Patriot actors.

Harriet Klausner