Little Brother

This author is new to me. He is a coeditor of Boing Boing and a Hugo Award winner . Plus he really knows his stuff. If you like your science fiction to be about events just around the corner then this is the book for you and your misunderstood teenagers. I can not imagine any young person under 21 who can not relate to the behaviors, attitudes and events in this book. Riping plotline (DHS turns San Francisco into a police state), believable (and recognizable) characters (only the young can get eveyone's freedoms back) , with decent development make this my recommended science fiction gift book of the season, but, you will want to read it too. All the stuff in here could happen. As a bonus, there is a decent learning sets on crypto and security systems embedded in the highly readable text, with some moral business lessons as well. Cleanly written work, a great East - West plane ride book. Microsofties may take some offense - this is an open source advocates zone for certain. Love the names. e.g. Paranoid:Linux, with version names like ParanoidXBox!

Marcus is a seventeen year old high school student. He knows a lot about technology and has strong views on how the world works, and how he'd like to see it work. He and his friends (Darryl, Van, & Jolu) enjoy playing the scavenger hunt game "Harajuku Fun Madness", but in order to fulfill the tasks that are posted on the net, they must sneak off school grounds to get a head start on their search for the clues. Even with advanced security measures the school's security system is no match for Marcus.

Things take a frightening turn for the worst when they find themselves in the middle of the aftermath of a terrorist attack on their city San Francisco. While trying to get help for his friend Darryl who was wounded, him and his teammates are taken by the Department of Homeland Security and sent to a prison where they are locked in cells, and have to sit through excruciating interrogations.

The DHS finally releases Marcus, Van, and Jolu, but Darryl is not released and his father assumes that he has died in the explosion. They are told not to tell anyone what happened, and if they do they will be taken again or worse. After returning home Marcus finds that his city has become heavily secured, and every person is treated like a terrorist. Marcus is afraid that if he tells his story that no one will believe him, so he decides to try and outwit, outlast, and outplay the Department of Homeland Security himself with the help of the Xnet and friends.



"Little Brother" is one of the most exciting, fun, and politically challenging Young Adult books I've read in, well, forever. Cory Doctorow has received high, and well deserved praise for his Young Adult Sci-Fi novel, from the likes of Gaiman, Weseterfeld, and Scalzi. How can avid Sci-Fi readers not be interested in this story? I know I was! Marcus is a very likeable main character, and his drive to accomplish his goals is admirable. Even while fighting the DHS he finds the time to fall in love with the smart, quirky, and charming Ange.

George Orwell's 1984 epitomizes the genre of literature one might call "paranoid-future fiction" or simply paranoid fiction. Cory Doctorow, with his recent contribution to the genre, a YA novel titled LITTLE BROTHER, is a worthy successor to Orwell.

LITTLE BROTHER's near future setting is San Francisco at the time of a major terrorist attack against the city. The underlying premise of the novel is that another 9/11-scale catastrophe would warp the American social environment and political scape to such an extent that fear-based erosion of political liberties, abrogation of privacy rights, and even acceptance of indefinite detention and torture would become the new norm.

The story is about a cohort of cyber-savvy high school friends led by a charismatic kid named Marcus Yallow (possibly an homage to Peter Yarrow, the 1960s folk singer and political activist). Marcus and his buddies get snagged in a dragnet following the terrorist attack and are secretly detained for their Net-related activity. Brutally treated by federal government agents, Marcus is released after a few days, humiliated, scared and angry. He decides to wage nonviolent resistance against the now pervasive government surveillance. He soon unwittingly becomes the leader of a cyber revolution against the government, a movement whose aim is to "take back" his country from a government that would deny the people their constitutional rights. (This is an interesting twist--perhaps not deliberate--on the "Take Back Vermont" campaign of a few years back, which was reactionary and provincial rather than revolutionary and liberal.)

Such cautionary tales of a paranoid future, to be effective, require blacks and whites rather than shades of grey. Commonly, one starts with story about a terrible government-caused or sanctioned injustice, and then populates the tale accordingly: government is bad; people who fight it, even if morally complex, good. Hence, all federal government personnel in LITTLE BROTHER are unrelentingly evil, and the government apparatus cruelly efficient. (Though caricatures of reality, the latter is particularly amusing--see, for instance, post-Katrina New Orleans--but the trope in paranoid fiction, and history for that matter, is that fascism breeds efficiency.) The kids, on the other hand, if not necessarily all good, are reassuringly complicated. In the hands of a less accomplished writer this might result in a cartoonish story, but Cory Doctorow tells his tale with remarkable effectiveness. The story is alternately moving, thrilling and thought provoking, even if one is not wholly convinced of his worst-case scenario.

Doctorow seasons his story with asides that sometimes work against the flow of the story. Digressions, for instance, on the "paradox of the false positive" (pp. 128-129) and on "tunneling" (pp. 278-279), though not totally divorced from the plot, can be both preachy and prolix, and cause the story to sag. Doctorow pays homage to Neal Stephenson's CRYPTONOMICON with mini-digressions on food and drink, notably burritos and hot sauce. (CRYPTONOMICON, for instance, devotes a couple of pages to the best way of eating Cap'n Crunch cereal.) These can be kind of fun, if wholly irrelevant to the story.

In short, LITTLE BROTHER is a good read for both young and more mature adults. It's somehow both junk food, and more nourishing food for thought: it causes us to reflect on the way in which terrorists can, if we let them, really win. As President Roosevelt said famously, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

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.