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tome15 's review for:
Attack Surface
by Cory Doctorow
Doctorow, Cory. Attack Surface. Little Brother No. 3. Tor, 2020.
Cory Doctorow must be the love child of William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson. Attack Surface, a loose sequel to Little Brother and Homeland, has the a near-future tech glitter that makes our everyday world seem as surreally Kafkaesque as Gibson’s Sprawl. It also has obsessive attention to detail and earnest tone of prophetic warning that we see in Robinson’s ecological science fiction. Doctorow is worried that when we put most of our lives in the cloud, we risk creating a tyrannical corporate surveillance state. Our protagonist, Masha Maximow, whom we met in the earlier books, is a hacker/analyst who has spent her life working for morally dubious government and corporate organizations, but she has also occasionally helped some well-meaning protesters. Her life has been one round of rationalizing cognitive dissonance after another. She has dealt with the potential for crippling guilt by compartmentalizing (her term) the things she doesn’t want to think about. Her morally challenged, self-aware character elevates Attack Surface above Doctorow’s already impressive body of work. Highly recommended.
Cory Doctorow must be the love child of William Gibson and Kim Stanley Robinson. Attack Surface, a loose sequel to Little Brother and Homeland, has the a near-future tech glitter that makes our everyday world seem as surreally Kafkaesque as Gibson’s Sprawl. It also has obsessive attention to detail and earnest tone of prophetic warning that we see in Robinson’s ecological science fiction. Doctorow is worried that when we put most of our lives in the cloud, we risk creating a tyrannical corporate surveillance state. Our protagonist, Masha Maximow, whom we met in the earlier books, is a hacker/analyst who has spent her life working for morally dubious government and corporate organizations, but she has also occasionally helped some well-meaning protesters. Her life has been one round of rationalizing cognitive dissonance after another. She has dealt with the potential for crippling guilt by compartmentalizing (her term) the things she doesn’t want to think about. Her morally challenged, self-aware character elevates Attack Surface above Doctorow’s already impressive body of work. Highly recommended.