Little Brother

An excruciating failure of a book, but its heart is in the right place. ( )

I read this book in two sittings--and would have read it in one if I didn't need to get up and go somewhere the next morning. There isn't a dull moment, and there is hardly a moment that doesn't make me boiling mad at what our country is being turned into by unchecked government power. Little Brother starts with a terrorist attack in San Francisco, in which a group of teenagers is caught up. Swept up by the Department of Homeland Security as suspicious characters, they are whisked away to the middle of San Francisco Bay and treated like terrorists, forced to hand over their cellphone passwords and stripped of their dignity and their rights as American citizens. After Marcus Yallow is released, he watches in horror as San Francisco is rapidly turned into a police state. Citizens movements are tracked through their Fast Passes, their transit cards, and by surveillance cameras everywhere. Marcus has a weapon, however--he is a hacker. And soon he has a band of followers who are successfully throwing monkey wrench after monkey wrench into the DHS's assault on the privacy and freedom of San Franciscans. Can a teenager succeed in his quixotic quest to make people put away their fear of terrorists and realize that the greatest danger to our freedom comes from within? Can he make anyone understand and appreciate the meaning of the Bill of Rights or of the words of the Declaration of Independence? You'll just have to read the book to find out.

Doctorow compares the current security insanity with an autoimmune disease: "Right now, America is going into anaphylactic shock over its own freedoms, and we need to inoculate ourselves against this."

If you have any interest in technology, you will be riveted. Of course, things change quickly, and the recent horrifying revelations of the NSA's illegal spying and their ability to perhaps compromise encryption techniques thought to be secure, makes this book a little dated. Although Doctorow exaggerates a bit to induce in the reader the necessary state of paranoia to understand and embrace the book's message, these recent revelations show that he was definitely on the right track. Every American should read this book and follow in the footsteps of Marcus Yallow. Our freedom is at stake. ( )

A triumphant story about kids facing down totalitarian impulses of the state. Full of geekery and a pretty scary dystopian "what if" based on post-9/11 law.

I've been meaning to read Little Brother for a long time, so when it came up for the SF/F course on Coursera, it seemed like it was finally time. Maybe it got built up a bit too much over time, because I found it fairly disappointing. There's something very immature about it -- in some ways, that's part of its charm, because it's enthusiastic and straightforward and the characters/plot are earnest.

But. While I enjoy Cory Doctorow's non-fiction writing (he writes very clearly about copyright, piracy, etc), I haven't enjoyed his fiction nearly as much. He seems to write still partly in a non-fiction mode: we get lectured about the world he's setting up, rather than seeing it in action. It's like a thought experiment, a way of playing out his concerns. There's a place for that, of course, but it's a lot easier to swallow when it's wrapped up in prose like that of Ursula Le Guin. This probably is a fairly direct comparison to books like Charlotte Perkins Gilman's Herland: it's a story born of convictions more than of the urge to tell a story, I think.

For a reader who is used to Cory Doctorow's work and already interested in this kind of thing, the narrator's explanations are unnecessary, and even for those who are not, it's a bit heavy-handed. Doctorow's writing is clear, and he gets his points across... but for me, that was a trade off against flow and interest.

I don't really see why people found this so fascinating and absorbing, I'm afraid. ( )

Definately entertaining - if not a little hysterical. Post 9/11 security measures were draconian on paper and haphazardly applied in practice - which led to gross injustices in some hands and benign neglect in others. Not to say that we should never be concerned about Big Brother (or in this case Little Brother) - but this novel - of what happens after a 2nd 9/11 in San Francisco seems a tad overblown and reactionary. I'm not sure that I understand why, but I'm fascinated that the author is very interested in the protections that the Constitution gives US citizens not being infringed or trampled. Protections and freedom that were purchased and held at the cost of American lives - but yet he is Canadian - a country that did not have to fight for its rights - and renounced his Canadian citizenship and became a UK citizen - a country that doesn't even *have* a Constitution. Ironic at best - but that aside - it was a good read, clearly a YA novel - but much more real world and plausible than others that could be named. ( )