Take a photo of a barcode or cover
frasersimons 's review for:
Little Brother
by Cory Doctorow
When Marcus and friends go to play essentially a geocache game, they inadvertently stumble close to the area of a terrorist attack in San Francisco. A bridge is blown up and one of them is hurt. Rather than hail help, though, they catch the eye of the DHS, who illegally detains them them for days, suspending their civil rights, and humiliates, plays them against one another, and tortures them. Told solely from Marcus’s perspective, once he gets out, instilled with fear and shame, he lies to his parents about being detained because they threaten him—subsequently one of his friends are still missing, possibly dead. The events radicalize him and some of the friends and they found a secure protocol over X Net (installed on exploited Xbox), and they begin to fight back against the mounting fascism the DHS continues to ramp up in the wake of the terrorist attack.
This was recommended to me many times as a great piece of present day cyberpunk (third wave, I’m guessing?), but I’ve only just gotten to it. Honestly, it would make a fantastic addition to a school curriculum, as it is YA, lightly touching on sexual experience in high school. The strength of the text, by far and away, is it’s ability to distill fairly complex technical details as they resistance ramps up. And it’s all real, as you’d expect from the author. I own myself a few xbox 360 with the exploit that could run this stuff. It talks about paranoid Linux and various protocols for encryption and communication. It’s really fantastic.
It also manages to show how an event affects the minds of different generations. Marcus’s dad is radicalized the other way, buying into the DHS propaganda because he thought Marcus had died, and that primal fear is always what feeds all breeds of conservatism, especially fascism. Under the guise of freedom of X and safety of peoples, the playbooks is exercised on San Fran, polarizing all of the characters one way or the other, causing plausible—though heavy handed—debates for each side to take place. In school and out of it.
Young adult isn’t my favourite just because of the prose style and how leading the text is. The author is pretty much always wearing his politics on the text, though does show arguments against the leftist rhetoric. The fact that it’s correct doesn’t make it that nuanced of an argument though, and you’ll feel the author using the narrative didactically for communicating, essentially, a real life playbook for resistance against a government that reacted similarly to, say, 9/11. Another reason to make it a discussion text: as with all of this authors work it is available for free, digitally.
Fantastic stuff all round. It would make a great book club, class room discussion piece and the character work is believable. It’s very easy to connect with Marcus and see the thought process behind his decisions; both constructive and destructive. There’s also a romance subplot that was fine, a bit tropey and slightly to be expected for the age range this is intended for. I think it’s handled well, but I didn’t care about it much. Though I tend not to, typically.
This was recommended to me many times as a great piece of present day cyberpunk (third wave, I’m guessing?), but I’ve only just gotten to it. Honestly, it would make a fantastic addition to a school curriculum, as it is YA, lightly touching on sexual experience in high school. The strength of the text, by far and away, is it’s ability to distill fairly complex technical details as they resistance ramps up. And it’s all real, as you’d expect from the author. I own myself a few xbox 360 with the exploit that could run this stuff. It talks about paranoid Linux and various protocols for encryption and communication. It’s really fantastic.
It also manages to show how an event affects the minds of different generations. Marcus’s dad is radicalized the other way, buying into the DHS propaganda because he thought Marcus had died, and that primal fear is always what feeds all breeds of conservatism, especially fascism. Under the guise of freedom of X and safety of peoples, the playbooks is exercised on San Fran, polarizing all of the characters one way or the other, causing plausible—though heavy handed—debates for each side to take place. In school and out of it.
Young adult isn’t my favourite just because of the prose style and how leading the text is. The author is pretty much always wearing his politics on the text, though does show arguments against the leftist rhetoric. The fact that it’s correct doesn’t make it that nuanced of an argument though, and you’ll feel the author using the narrative didactically for communicating, essentially, a real life playbook for resistance against a government that reacted similarly to, say, 9/11. Another reason to make it a discussion text: as with all of this authors work it is available for free, digitally.
Fantastic stuff all round. It would make a great book club, class room discussion piece and the character work is believable. It’s very easy to connect with Marcus and see the thought process behind his decisions; both constructive and destructive. There’s also a romance subplot that was fine, a bit tropey and slightly to be expected for the age range this is intended for. I think it’s handled well, but I didn’t care about it much. Though I tend not to, typically.