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A review by soniagracelm
Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
5.0
I'm consistently impressed by Cory Doctorow. I also think it is important to know a little bit about him and his background in order to fully appreciate his books. Doctorow is a blogger, a geek, a computer and gadget guy, a character in XKCD, and one of the champions of the Creative Commons movement. If you don't know what that is you should go check out the website HERE http://creativecommons.org/. He is outspoken and knowledgeable about copyright and open source issues. His nonfiction is, in my opinion, at least as good a read as his fiction.
That said, his fiction is excellent. Little Brother is an updated 1984. Most of George Orwell's inventions actually exist in the world now, but when they were conceived they were just that: conceptions of what the world might look like someday. Doctorow does the same thing, and his imagined near-future world is terrifyingly plausible.
His characters live in what is essentially a police state, where Americans are kept docile by the nebulous threat of terrorism. When a teenage hacker, Marcus, experiences the illegal and unjust practices of Doctorow's Department of Homeland Security firsthand, he decides to take down the government using his cracked Xbox. Doctorow does a good job of exploring all of the ways a decision like that is terrifically stupid, and also the ways in which it is incredibly smart. Marcus doesn't get away with anything just by virtue of being the protagonist, he has to work to achieve each tiny victory, running the risk of imprisonment without trial if his identity is discovered.
Little Brother is about revolution, surveillance, hacking, and the power of the people. It's not hard to see where Doctorow got his ideas. All you need to do is look around. Much of the technology he writes about exists already. Doctorow is good at explaining complex technical subjects in ways that make sense to the uninitiated. I know nothing about cryptography, but his descriptions of how it works made sense to me, and he interspersed the technical stuff with a lot of interesting true history. It was a great book with a chilling message: you are being watched. Read it with attention to detail.
That said, his fiction is excellent. Little Brother is an updated 1984. Most of George Orwell's inventions actually exist in the world now, but when they were conceived they were just that: conceptions of what the world might look like someday. Doctorow does the same thing, and his imagined near-future world is terrifyingly plausible.
His characters live in what is essentially a police state, where Americans are kept docile by the nebulous threat of terrorism. When a teenage hacker, Marcus, experiences the illegal and unjust practices of Doctorow's Department of Homeland Security firsthand, he decides to take down the government using his cracked Xbox. Doctorow does a good job of exploring all of the ways a decision like that is terrifically stupid, and also the ways in which it is incredibly smart. Marcus doesn't get away with anything just by virtue of being the protagonist, he has to work to achieve each tiny victory, running the risk of imprisonment without trial if his identity is discovered.
Little Brother is about revolution, surveillance, hacking, and the power of the people. It's not hard to see where Doctorow got his ideas. All you need to do is look around. Much of the technology he writes about exists already. Doctorow is good at explaining complex technical subjects in ways that make sense to the uninitiated. I know nothing about cryptography, but his descriptions of how it works made sense to me, and he interspersed the technical stuff with a lot of interesting true history. It was a great book with a chilling message: you are being watched. Read it with attention to detail.