Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.92 AVERAGE
3.92 AVERAGE
adventurous
dark
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
This is the third volume of Little Brother series, but it can be read as a standalone. The first one, [b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SY75_.jpg|939584], was nominated for both Hugo and Nebula awards in 2009 and was one of my most prominent reads of 2020 with my review located here. I read is as a part of monthly reading for January 2021 at SFF Hot from Printers: New Releases group.
If the first two books had Marcus as the protagonist, here we follow Masha Maximow, who was mostly “on the other side” working to help to suppress hacktivists, but at the same time supplied Marcus with sensitive data in the second book.
This story starts with Masha working for a private company Xoth that helps an authoritarian regime of Slovstakia to identify and suppress protesters. The imagined country is a mix of both Soviet Union republics and former Warsaw pack countries with a hint of Arab spring protests (e.g. kebab is a local food). Sometimes the author contradicts himself – saying that it was a satellite state (meaning outside the USSR) and a former Soviet republic (i.e., a part of the Union), it uses Cyrillic alphabet and has a tendency to see Kremlin behind everything (therefore, not Russia). The surnames are mostly Ukrainian (security chief Litvinchuk, a protester leader Kolisnychenko), with also Romanian (Anton Tkachi). So, at least partially it is based on Revolution of Dignity, but also on more recent protests 2020–2021 Belarusian protests. Masha on one hand helps to install monitoring systems, on the other, to calm her conscience, secretly teaches a group of protesters to evade the monitoring.
As the story goes on, there are flashbacks about how and why she decided to join first Homeland Security and then a private contractor, where she worked under Carrie Johnstone, the one that supervised Marcus’ torture, which left him traumatized to this day. We see a story of a person willing to do good, but in the world, where goodness is blurry and often loses to needs of the moment. Masha is psychically abnormal even if she doesn’t recognize it.
A very strong continuation of the great edu-tainment series, which teaches how try to minimize the surveillance that is everywhere today.
If the first two books had Marcus as the protagonist, here we follow Masha Maximow, who was mostly “on the other side” working to help to suppress hacktivists, but at the same time supplied Marcus with sensitive data in the second book.
This story starts with Masha working for a private company Xoth that helps an authoritarian regime of Slovstakia to identify and suppress protesters. The imagined country is a mix of both Soviet Union republics and former Warsaw pack countries with a hint of Arab spring protests (e.g. kebab is a local food). Sometimes the author contradicts himself – saying that it was a satellite state (meaning outside the USSR) and a former Soviet republic (i.e., a part of the Union), it uses Cyrillic alphabet and has a tendency to see Kremlin behind everything (therefore, not Russia). The surnames are mostly Ukrainian (security chief Litvinchuk, a protester leader Kolisnychenko), with also Romanian (Anton Tkachi). So, at least partially it is based on Revolution of Dignity, but also on more recent protests 2020–2021 Belarusian protests. Masha on one hand helps to install monitoring systems, on the other, to calm her conscience, secretly teaches a group of protesters to evade the monitoring.
As the story goes on, there are flashbacks about how and why she decided to join first Homeland Security and then a private contractor, where she worked under Carrie Johnstone, the one that supervised Marcus’ torture, which left him traumatized to this day. We see a story of a person willing to do good, but in the world, where goodness is blurry and often loses to needs of the moment. Masha is psychically abnormal even if she doesn’t recognize it.
A very strong continuation of the great edu-tainment series, which teaches how try to minimize the surveillance that is everywhere today.
I was a Kickstarter backer on this book/audiobook
I think there's a side novella or short story I haven't read in the Little Brother series/universe, but as far as I know, this is the first one that isn't from Marcus Yallow's perspective. Instead, this one is from Masha Maximov's point of view. She was mostly an antagonist to him in the previous books, although meant to be a sympathetic one vs her bosses at DHS, or whatever agency she was working at.
The narrative bounces between the past and present. In the present, Masha works for a contractor that provides spying gear and tech to any buyer. Think of The NSO group in the real world. To ease her conscious that she sometimes is working as a contractor for dictators she sometimes helps the dissidents that are being spied upon to get smarter about avoiding the surveillance. In the past, we see how she went from one of the in person RPG folks on the day of the bay bridge terrorist attack to working for Ms Johnson and then to her current employer. At some point she ends up back in America and deals with things here.
As usual with the series, Doctorow touches on surveillance and the slippery slope as well as police accountability. To this he adds the corporate dimension via contractors, both overseas and in America. In the America sections he also touches a bit on some of the housing, homeless. and gentrification issues in the San Francisco Bay area.
As a work of fiction, I think Cory Doctorow balances narrative tension, his desire to get the reader to understand the points he's trying to make, and realism vs happy outcomes. I happen to be incredibly tech savvy and follow these topics, so I am not the best judge of whether some of the technical portions are still too technical, but I think he does a good job of making the info dumps mostly make sense as conversations. (In other words, avoids a lot of the "As you know, Johnson,..." conversation patterns) I think it works well standalone, but you'll be missing out on a lot of the relationship between Masha and Marcus.
As an audiobook, I thought the voice actor did a good job distinguishing voices and accents. They also did a good job conveying emotion where the characters got emotional.
I'd recommend it, especially if you're either a Doctorow fan or have read the Little Brother series.
I think there's a side novella or short story I haven't read in the Little Brother series/universe, but as far as I know, this is the first one that isn't from Marcus Yallow's perspective. Instead, this one is from Masha Maximov's point of view. She was mostly an antagonist to him in the previous books, although meant to be a sympathetic one vs her bosses at DHS, or whatever agency she was working at.
The narrative bounces between the past and present. In the present, Masha works for a contractor that provides spying gear and tech to any buyer. Think of The NSO group in the real world. To ease her conscious that she sometimes is working as a contractor for dictators she sometimes helps the dissidents that are being spied upon to get smarter about avoiding the surveillance. In the past, we see how she went from one of the in person RPG folks on the day of the bay bridge terrorist attack to working for Ms Johnson and then to her current employer. At some point she ends up back in America and deals with things here.
As usual with the series, Doctorow touches on surveillance and the slippery slope as well as police accountability. To this he adds the corporate dimension via contractors, both overseas and in America. In the America sections he also touches a bit on some of the housing, homeless. and gentrification issues in the San Francisco Bay area.
As a work of fiction, I think Cory Doctorow balances narrative tension, his desire to get the reader to understand the points he's trying to make, and realism vs happy outcomes. I happen to be incredibly tech savvy and follow these topics, so I am not the best judge of whether some of the technical portions are still too technical, but I think he does a good job of making the info dumps mostly make sense as conversations. (In other words, avoids a lot of the "As you know, Johnson,..." conversation patterns) I think it works well standalone, but you'll be missing out on a lot of the relationship between Masha and Marcus.
As an audiobook, I thought the voice actor did a good job distinguishing voices and accents. They also did a good job conveying emotion where the characters got emotional.
I'd recommend it, especially if you're either a Doctorow fan or have read the Little Brother series.
A weird one where I liked the story much better than I liked the writing. A number of passages of "dialogue" where it was pretty clearly just the author showing off his (admittedly very impressive) knowledge in a way that took me out of the story and his ability to write from the perspective of female characters was less than convincing.
This book is about an extremely important topic, so it's a shame that half of it is written in that insufferable YA whedonspeak that seems to plague so many recent novels. The tone is just too casual and conversational and irony-poisoned for the subject matter it's trying to tackle, and it ends up unfortunately undercutting important ideas by being annoying and making me hate it. The main character IS unlikeable and I think that's the point, but nobody else here is much better. You might like this book if you use reddit. The writing gets a little bit better and less annoying halfway in when things start getting serious, but it shouldn't take half your book to get me to care.
And NO, you don't get a free pass on quoting 1984 just because you acknowledge that it's a cliche and have your character make a stupid witty comment about how much of a cliche it is. If it's a cliche and you know it's a cliche just don't include it, your book will be so much better off for it.
adventurous
dark
informative
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Imagine a world in which everybody, from teenage upwards, had a chip implanted in their hand which allowed everyone with a few resources - governments, police forces, corporations, even local councils - to track your every movement, to know who your friends are and how close you are to them, to see what you are shopping for (or even thinking of shopping for) - in short, to see into the most intimate details of your life.
Well you don't have to image it, because you're already living in it. That mobile phone in your pocket? That's the chip. The resources needed? That's what this book is about: quite how pervasive the surveillance tools have become, and how easy this is becoming for anyone with an agenda.
This is a proper scary book: well written characters, facing a real threat that we are all in the process of falling into, and to which we are mostly turning a blind eye - the easy automation of mass surveillance.
The hero is Masha Maximow, who works as a counter-terrorism intelligence analyst/hacker for a shadowy multinational which sells these capabilities to anyone with the money to buy them. To begin, we see Masha setting up mass surveillance for a fictitious eastern block country's dictator. She's incredibly well paid for her job, because she's really good at it. But she doesn't always feel that great about it... So she spends her evenings hanging out in bars and clubs with some of the very people the government is surveilling, and trying to educate them into better habits, trying to protect them from the surveillance she herself is setting up.
Soon, Masha returns to the US, when she realises her best friend is falling prey to the same technologies she is rolling out in other countries. What can she do, given it's her former employer who seems to be behind this?
Cory Doctorow really knows his stuff here, and that technical understanding shines through. There are no made-up piles of technobabble, but instead there are straightforward explanations of what's going on and how one might - in principle - protect against it. It's hard, though - as hard in the book as it is in real life.
As we learn more about Masha's past, we see how she came to be in this morally ambiguous situation. We also meet some of the other characters, some of whom will be familiar to those who have read earlier Cory Doctorow books like [b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SY75_.jpg|939584] (but you don't need to have read those to enjoy this book). We find that increasingly the surveillance technology is too powerful, that it's harder and harder to fix these problems with more technology. In the end, the lesson Masha learns is that only real fixes are political, not technological.
This is an important book because exactly that is true out here in the real world. We need to be able to see what's going on inside our governments and corporations and police forces and local councils, and hold them accountable to standards that we set - not that they set, to suit their own agendas. This doesn't mean simplistically demanding that Facebook "take down the conspiracy pages", or that the government promise to track "only the bad guys". We can't rely on Facebook's technology to solve the problems it created, or rely on governments universally to agree with our definition of "the bad guys". The genie is out of the bottle, folks. Bury your head in the sand if you like, but don't be surprised if the world changes on you. You may find someone has grabbed you roughly by the neck and is holding you down - for the greater good, and entirely for your own protection of course.
Well you don't have to image it, because you're already living in it. That mobile phone in your pocket? That's the chip. The resources needed? That's what this book is about: quite how pervasive the surveillance tools have become, and how easy this is becoming for anyone with an agenda.
This is a proper scary book: well written characters, facing a real threat that we are all in the process of falling into, and to which we are mostly turning a blind eye - the easy automation of mass surveillance.
The hero is Masha Maximow, who works as a counter-terrorism intelligence analyst/hacker for a shadowy multinational which sells these capabilities to anyone with the money to buy them. To begin, we see Masha setting up mass surveillance for a fictitious eastern block country's dictator. She's incredibly well paid for her job, because she's really good at it. But she doesn't always feel that great about it... So she spends her evenings hanging out in bars and clubs with some of the very people the government is surveilling, and trying to educate them into better habits, trying to protect them from the surveillance she herself is setting up.
Soon, Masha returns to the US, when she realises her best friend is falling prey to the same technologies she is rolling out in other countries. What can she do, given it's her former employer who seems to be behind this?
Cory Doctorow really knows his stuff here, and that technical understanding shines through. There are no made-up piles of technobabble, but instead there are straightforward explanations of what's going on and how one might - in principle - protect against it. It's hard, though - as hard in the book as it is in real life.
As we learn more about Masha's past, we see how she came to be in this morally ambiguous situation. We also meet some of the other characters, some of whom will be familiar to those who have read earlier Cory Doctorow books like [b:Little Brother|954674|Little Brother (Little Brother, #1)|Cory Doctorow|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349673129l/954674._SY75_.jpg|939584] (but you don't need to have read those to enjoy this book). We find that increasingly the surveillance technology is too powerful, that it's harder and harder to fix these problems with more technology. In the end, the lesson Masha learns is that only real fixes are political, not technological.
This is an important book because exactly that is true out here in the real world. We need to be able to see what's going on inside our governments and corporations and police forces and local councils, and hold them accountable to standards that we set - not that they set, to suit their own agendas. This doesn't mean simplistically demanding that Facebook "take down the conspiracy pages", or that the government promise to track "only the bad guys". We can't rely on Facebook's technology to solve the problems it created, or rely on governments universally to agree with our definition of "the bad guys". The genie is out of the bottle, folks. Bury your head in the sand if you like, but don't be surprised if the world changes on you. You may find someone has grabbed you roughly by the neck and is holding you down - for the greater good, and entirely for your own protection of course.
adventurous
challenging
informative
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
adventurous
dark
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character