Homeland (edition 2013)

This sequel to Little Brother, set a couple of years after that story and involving many of the same characters, isn't quite as good as its predecessor. It goes a bit overboard with all the "here's some cool tech-related stuff and/or people you should know about," and becomes more than a little awkward in how it incorporates the descriptions and explanations into the plot. ( )

I should never start a Doctorow book in the evening because I will surely be up all night alternately reading and pacing and Googling and despairing and hoping.

This sequel to Little Brother is splendid. The technology bits make me frightened and determined to learn more. The story is gripping, the people (with the possible exception of Carrie because I just can't believe in that much evil- for my own tenuous sanity, I mean) are real and wonderful. The quiet defeat of Marcus' parents is heartbreakingly believable. The late-adolescent love stories are a welcome diversion throughout the narrative.

Reading Doctorow now is, for me, a lot like what reading Heinlein was back in the day; there's plenty of preaching but since I'm already sitting in the choir loft, I'm happy to hear it. And I holler AMEN at every opportunity.

Read this one, then give it to all the teenagers you know. ( )

3/10/13 Review TK but the short version: Read this, become paranoid, take action! (Read Little Brother first if you haven't already.)

3/11/13
Homeland is the follow-up to Little Brother. I think it stands on its own; you won't be lost if you pick up the second book before the first, but you may as well read them in order.

Homeland begins with Marcus and Ange at Burning Man, where Marcus' old enemy/ally Masha finds him and gives him a massive trove of documents on a USB/thumb/travel/flash drive/stick, and tells him to release them to the public if anything happens to her. Naturally, it isn't long before Marcus sees the ruthless Carrie Johnstone, formerly of the Department of Homeland Services (DHS), kidnap Masha and her boyfriend Zeb.

When Marcus and Ange return to San Francisco, they must decide what to do with the docs: step one, they decide, is finding out what's there, but there are so many (upward of 800,000) that they need to bring in some friends to help sort them. Someone begins to leak the docs, and once more Marcus is in trouble with...not exactly the law, but some powerful types (also, the law).

Like Little Brother, Homeland is "as current as tomorrow": it includes much more true, verifiable information than most novels, including hackerspaces such as Noisebridge in SF; cameos by real people (including John Perry Barlow, John Gilmore, Mitch Kapor, and Wil Wheaton); and an avalanche of facts about technology, computers, privacy, and security. It includes two afterwords, one from Jacob Applebaum (WikiLeaks) and one from the late Aaron Swartz.

All of this means that, if the reader is inspired, there is plenty of following up to do, and Doctorow helpfully litters the narrative with breadcrumbs ("Google it") and includes a bibliography full of excellent resources for the tech-savvy and politically active (or for those who wish to become so). There is plenty of action in the book, but technology and politics are so deeply woven into the fabric of the story that those who aren't interested in learning about ParanoidAndroid, 3D printers, or homemade flying drone cameras may become frustrated.

However, for those who are even a little bit interested, this is a great way to learn a lot in an entertaining way.


Quotes:

(allow me to pause for a moment here and say, PLUTO IS TOO A PLANET!). (p. 31)

"Dude, estoy aqui por loco, no por pendejo," which was the punchline to the funniest Spanish joke I knew. Okay, the only one. Google it. (p. 121) - I did Google it, and found it in a book called Glimpses by Lewis Shiner. For those who don't speak Spanish, it translates roughly to "I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid."

It was mesmerizing, like channel surfing on a massive cable network that only got heavy, strange programs about corruption, murder, and sleaze. (131)

I could remember how that felt, but I couldn't feel it - the harder I chased it, the more elusive it felt. (162)

"There's the stuff that's happening out there in the world, which we only have limited control over, and the stuff that's happening in our hears, which we can have total control over - in theory, at least. I've noticed that you spend a lot of time trying the change the outside world, but not much energy on changing how the outside world makes your inside world feel. I'm not saying you should give up on changing the world, but you might try doing a little of both for a while, see what happens." (Jolu to Marcus, 162)

I tried to find peace and calm, but it wouldn't come. So I looked for anger, which is an easy place to get to from scared, and yeah, there it was. (186)

"We've got to think like dandelions here....Look at a dandelion: by the time it's seeding, it's made thousands of potential copies of itself, all those little bits of fluff that make up the puffball. When a gust of wind comes along, the dandelion doesn't follow all its children to make sure they have their mittens and a packed lunch with them....Dandelions don't care that every seed survives: they care that every opportunity to take root is exploited." (Kylie to Van, Darryl, Jolu, Marcus, and Ange, 228)

Between the gas and the violence and the sleep deprivation, I felt a strange madness creep over me, a sense that I was invulnerable and invincible, that I was destined to win, because I was able to do things that the hero of a story would do, and don't heroes always win? (316)

"The first step to solving the problem is framing the problem. What if you put together a bunch of possible courses of action, all more or less independent of one another, and had them in your pocket, metaphorically, so that you could just jump and jive and zig and zag on a moment's notice." (Jolu to Marcus, 348)

"Be the trouble you want to see in the world....Legal and illegal are not the same as right and wrong. Do what is right and never give up the fight." (Jacob Applebaum afterword, 386)

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As a slightly nerdy recordkeeper myself, I feel I should have liked this book more than I did, especially after very much enjoying Little Brother. With a Wikileaks-style emphasis on the importance of documents in demonstrating wrong-doing and an insistence that every individual has a chance of changing 'the system' for the better, the story should have been right up my street. But it was off by a mile or two.

Why? Well, the bookshop dedications which I described as 'slightly jarring' in my review of Little Brother were just as annoying in this. But (as I was reading the free download version) this was now joined by several interruptions to the text: asides from the author which threw me out of the story to tell me to go and buy a copy of the book. Look, I'm grateful that you made the book available for free and I like the idea of buying it for a library somewhere. But I don't need to be reminded and made to feel guilty every half hour.

The geekiness felt a bit overwhelming in this book, too. Wil Wheaton in a cameo role; a long stay at the Burning Man event; a lecture on the issues of copyright in orphan works. All these things felt a little over-done to me.

The story itself was interesting but not as strong as Little Brother's. I read the first book two years ago and although parts of it had stuck in my head, the minor characters hadn't and I could have done with more reminders about who they all were and what had happened to them.

I did find the afterword by the late Aaron Swartz moving: especially the part where he said "I know it's easy to feel like you're powerless, like there's nothing you can do to slow down or stop 'the system.'...I feel that way, too, sometimes." :-( ( )

I don’t really seek out overtly political books—mainly nonfiction, but when I come across a fiction book that’s very political, I tend to side-eye it a little more. There’s a reason why books like Fahrenheit 451 works so well is that the politics they discuss aren’t so topically specific. And as a personal preference, I don’t really seek out books that I know I’m going to disagree with or something that’s way more extreme than I believe. (I consider myself a moderate, for the record.) While I consider Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother a great discussion of American security and psychology post-9/11, Homeland feels more like a personal manifesto for Occupy Internet. I didn’t think it works as well—my own misgivings of “A sequel to Little Brother? Really?” aside. (Not that I scoffed at it, just that I wasn’t jumping up and down for “MORE MORE!” )

One of the big problems I had overall was the retreading of major plot points from the first book. I do like Marcus is still dealing with the massive psychological trauma inflicted on him from Little Brother and that it’s not just touched on once or twice, it’s fully explored. I wasn’t as big of a fan of the fact that his torturer, Carrie Johnstone, was dragged back into the plot as one of the main antagonists’ lackeys. I wouldn’t have minded it if Marcus had thought he saw Johnstone at Burning Man, only for him to mistake another woman for her. I actually didn’t mind it when the hackers taunted Marcus with her hacked files and his ‘cowardice’ for not making them public. But having her as a player in the larger events didn’t sit well with me, and it does feel like Doctorow’s rehashing here.

My other major problem is that I really don’t know what the book’s message is. Going in, with the opening chapters set at Burning Man and the implication of sensitive leaked documents, it feels like that the core of the book is going to be about information and it’s widespread availability. (The post-script by the late Aaron Swartz also nods towards this.) But a quarter of the way in, it begins to turn into a rail against the American two-party system and for that, I think it loses its focus. I’m not being critical about Doctorow’s own political beliefs, but this is where the book turns from discussion to manifesto—I never felt like I was reading about a character whenever Marcus was attending the various protests and I was really taken out of the story. And for as much as Marcus rants on big corporations ruining the economy and forcing people to lose their jobs, it’s an extremely privileged ranting. There is never a discussion on poverty nor homelessness or what cash-strapped families are actually like, and if renting out driveaway space is considered drastic measures by Marcus’s standards, that is not even lower middle-class. My family’s income is about the same as Marcus’s and dude, that’s not what being cash-strapped is like. (Allow me to say that I’ve been very fortune with my family’s financial situation, and I acknowledge that.)

This is not completely disagreeing with Doctorow’s points, but in Little Brother, Marcus did come to a conclusion at some points that his knee-jerk reactions are probably not the best way to go about starting a revolution. There’s none of that here. Marcus is (rightfully) more jaded in this book, but even when he tries to work within the system, he ultimately throws up his hands and goes “Nope, can’t work. I’m done.” There is a bit of middle ground with his working with independent Senator Joseph Noss, but by the end of the book, even that’s been chucked.

Homeland’s main strength, however, is showing us how the central core of Marcus and his friends have evolved since the events of Little Brother. I liked that Jolu was ready to help Marcus after years of minimal contact, and that Marcus was willing to reach out to Darryl and Van. And while Ange is still a largely supporting character that doesn’t do much aside from help out Marcus, I do like that she finally calls him out on a lot of his faults and ultimately breaks up with him. As I mentioned above, I liked that Marcus is confronted with a bunch of immature hackers who try to rile him up and post damning files about Marcus’s former foes. (I actually liked that the self-proclaimed master hacker of the first book gets hacked; it’s a nice touch of hubris.) But unfortunately, a lot of this takes a backseat to the larger political discussion at hand.

While I’m not completely opposed to the idea of a Little Brother sequel in general, Homeland doesn’t make as good as a follow-up. It’s not to say that it’s a bad book overall—as I said, I liked how Marcus’s PTSD was handled and how he’s still haunted by his past. But the message just didn’t work for me at times, and it felt like a retread of the first book at points.
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