Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

A fascinating book for readers of any age. A great sample of a “Young Adult” book that adults can comprehensively enjoy. It Furthermore, serves as a great candidate to get teens hooked on science fiction. Adults will like it for the thought-provoking topical issues and the insight into the minds of today’s tech-savvy youth. The youth vs. adults aspect is sure to attract teen readers, who will love the book for its defiant themes. Hackers and teaches will love it for the frequent applications of technologies and views at where they might be headed. SF fans (and conspiracy theorists) will love it for the extrapolation of receding civil liberties and privacy issues. In short, this is a book with extensive appeal, regardless of age and background. I would also offer this book as a great candidate to get teens hooked on science fiction. Doctorow has made the book available as a free download.
Marcus and his friends bunk off school to take part in a treasure hunt in the Bay Bridge area of San Francisco. Caught up in what they think is an earthquake, in the ensuing panic they find themselves picked up by the Department for Homeland Security and accused of a terrorist attack on the bridge, which killed thousands. They’re imprisoned, tortured and finally released. Marcus learns that his every move is being watched via the all-seeing eyes of the DHS, and uses his own knowledge of technology to rebel against the pervasive surveillance imposed on the city. The book is a passionate plea for every citizen to be computer-savvy in order to uphold personal liberties in an age of increased government security. It’s also a cracking read.

The book is built around the war between 17 year old Marcus Yallow and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in San Fransisco after a major terrorist attack kills 4,000 San Franciscans.  Marcus and his friends have the misfortune of being near the scene of one of the bombings and are picked up DHS for investigation.  At the time of the bombing, they had been playing an Alternate Reality Game, and were carrying various odd tools they needed to play, including Wifi finders, cell phones and portable computers with hacking software and various gizmo’s they had used to sneak out of school without being caught by the ubiquitous surveillance.   Naturally these devices arouse DHS suspicion, and Marcus and his friends find themselves in that awful world where one is suspected of having committed a crime, where one is forced to prove one’s innocence.  Eventually DHS releases Marcus and several members of his team.  They continue to hold one member of his team.  And when they are released, they are all warned that if they say a word about their incarceration, they will be going to jail for a long time.

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother is being met with lots of praise, and I was curious to see if it was justified. I went in with a little skepticism, but I have to say, this book quickly won me over. What I find interesting, though not surprising, is that the book is being marketed as young adult fiction yet it is easily as entertaining for adults.
It features a young protagonist who meets with some serious rites of passage. Marcus Yallow is a tech-savvy teen who is engaged in the latest trendy game, one that combines computers and reality. While playing this game in the streets of San Francisco, terrorists attack the Bay Bridge and Marcus and his friends are quickly caught up in the net of a near-totalitarian Department of Homeland Security. The teens are imprisoned, treated like criminals, then eventually let go. Marcus takes it upon himself to take down the DHS using some quite enterprising uses of current and near-future technology.
Doctorow never talks down to anyone who might not otherwise be familiar with technology. His no-nonsense descriptions of tech will be easy for even luddites to grasp. But that’s also where, for some, a potential downside appears. This book has so much going for it that it hardly seems worthwhile calling attention to it – but the breakneck speed of the story periodically comes to a halt to dump technical information. The good news is that the infodumps are entertaining in their own right and even educational (Here’s how public/private key encryption works! Here’s how RFID works! Here’s how to hack the next-gen X-Box into a surveillance-free network!), so they are hardly a serious detriment to the overall quality of the story.

Politics aside, Doctorow also weaves in tons of present and near-future cool tech. He’s on familiar ground, of course, and his passion is evident and even contagious.

An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned — hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore).

This is territory the author knows well. Cory Doctorow is an ardent copyright activist, speaker, teacher, columnist, prolific writer of novels and short stories, and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. His grasp of the implications of present-day information technology is authoritative, and his prose features up-to-the-hour Internet-speak .
Cory Doctorow is already a very well-known author, but this is by far his best book yet. Little Brother hosts a careful and accreted argument, not all of which I agree with and not all of which I suspect matters to teens (but the generational differences and understandings of these relationships are also an element of the argument). In other words, it is a polemical book, and all the better for it. In the past I’ve regarded Doctorow as very much an ideas mill, without the bite that makes a really fine writer. Little Brother—angry at the way we regard the young, intolerant of America’s and Britain’s historical intolerance to its own youth—has all the bite and passion one could need.

Doctorow writes: “Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work — if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code.” The framers of the American Constitution were in a sense a bunch of political science nerds too, pulling all-nighters to hack together the code for a government without tyranny. “Little Brother” argues that unless you’re passably technically literate, you’re not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — that in fact it’s your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy.

Enjoy!

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