Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
Jan. 20th, 2009 10:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
THE PUSHBACK STARTS HERE!
Marcus, aka "w1n5t0n", is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works - and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when, having skipped school, he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison, where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state, where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
Can one teenage hacker fight back against a government out of control? Maybe, but only if he's really careful ... and very, very smart.
Set in San Francisco in the near future, 17 year old Marcus and three of this friends decide to skip school to play an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) on the same day that terrorists attack the city. Caught up in the aftermath of the attack, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assumes that they are terrorists and takes them to an unspecified detention facility. There they are interrogated, humiliated and ultimately forced to give up the passwords and security codes for their mobile phones and computers before being released under caution that if they tell anyone about what happened to them, they will be detained permanently. Except that one of Marcus’s friends does not come out with them and Marcus discovers that in the post-terrorist world, ordinary citizens are subjected to closer electronic surveillance than ever, something that most appear willing to accept. Angered by his experience, Marcus decides to fight back the only way he knows how – by taking the struggle for personal liberty to the cyber realm and beating the DHS at their own game.
This book is a polemic about the importance of personal liberty and the right to privacy, so anything other than Doctorow’s opinion gets short shrift. Personally, I agree with him – the amount of surveillance that governments are increasingly trying to force on their populations is frightening, not least because it doesn’t actually keep people safe – but I think the book does a disservice to its cause by not treating any contrary opinion as something that deserves consideration. Almost all of the characters who are pro-Government are thugs, cowards, naive or driven by their grief and horror at what the terrorists have done. No one gets a chance to explain their perspective without the author making it clear that they’re wrong. In fact it’s ironic that at one point a pro-Government teacher makes the point to Marcus that for someone so intent on permitting freedom of expression, he shouts down anyone who he does not agree with because the author is guilty of the same.
The polemic is also US-centric and I wonder how teens outside the USA will relate to Marcus, particularly the way in which he keeps reciting chunks of the US Constitution as I found it difficult to relate. In fact, one of the annoying things about Marcus is that he spends the first 80 pages being remarkably politically and legally savvy for someone his age – he asks for a lawyer when he is first taken into custody, he shouts down his interrogators for infringing his rights – it’s all slightly too much to believe and his smug certainties may well put off some readers from becoming involved in his story. At the same time, Doctorow is keen to show him as being naive, notably in his dealings with the press. For someone who has been following press coverage of the attacks and what is happening to his city, Marcus doesn’t appear to consider how his words could be twisted when he gives an on-line news conference to the world media. Again, this is done by Doctorow to prove a point in that he clearly seems to favour blogs and on-line reporting as offering a truer picture of news events whereas every official agency has an agenda and/or will do what the government tells it.
Doctorow writes well – the key scenes when Marcus is in detention are well depicted and a water-boarding scene chilling in its intensity. A scene involving an impromptu rock concert is also well depicted. I liked Ange, a girl who comes into Marcus’s life as he’s trying to take on the DHS and Doctorow is frank in his depiction of their relationship (and it’s the first YA book I’ve read in a long time that takes the trouble to include condoms in a sex scene so kudos for that). It’s a shame that Marcus’s friends don’t get the chance to develop in the same way (indeed, they only feature sporadically thoughout the book).
Although I found Marcus’s first person narration to be annoyingly smug at times, he does have a distinctive character voice that is well sustained. The plot runs along smoothly from event to event and there’s an urgency to it that I think will keep the reader’s attention and I think that many teens will get a kick out of the technological information that Doctorow packs in, particularly with regard to cryptography, which is very interesting and accessible.
Given that the book was written in 2006 and is a reaction to the Bush regime, it’s possible that it will date badly after Obama assumes the presidency. The core message is a strong and important one, but because Doctorow exaggerates the horrors that particularly concern him (e.g. detention without legal counsel etc), it’s possible that some readers will downplay the seriousness of the issue on the basis that it will never happen. As a Brit I was offended by Marcus’s suggestion that Britain is worse than the US for electronic surveillance and its treatment of terrorist suspects – although Doctorow repeats the statistic that a person in London is photographed every 300 metres, he fails to point out that this is only if the cameras work and while the police can detain terror suspects without charge, it’s not for as long as a year. Not that this makes either situation any better, but given that the USA requires all visitors to submit to a retina scan, submit their fingerprints and notify the US Embassy at least 72 hours prior to travel and receive clearance before boarding, I think Doctorow would do better to focus on cleaning his own house first.
The final gripe I had with the book is that it’s peculiarly coy about race. Marcus is white but is picked up by the DHS anyway. It’s only towards the end of the book that Doctorow casually mentions that most of the people in the detention centres are Arabic and it made me a little queasy. In a nation where racial profiling was heavily used after 9/11, the fact that a Turkish coffee shop owner can refuse to use electronic credit card readers in his store and not be persecuted for it was a strange anomaly in the text – more so because Marcus’s friends Van (a Korean) and Jolu (Hispanic) make a point about not getting involved in his cause because their ethnicity makes them more vulnerable.
The Verdict:
Because it’s a polemic this is a brash, uncompromising read that shouts the author’s views at you. For me, the shouting got a little too wearying and I longed for something a little more balanced. However the technology sections are interesting (particularly two post-script chapters by Bruce Schnier and Andrew Huang), the story is fast-paced and the fact that it’s clearly a book aimed at getting teens interested in political issues is to be applauded.
Marcus, aka "w1n5t0n", is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works - and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when, having skipped school, he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison, where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state, where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
Can one teenage hacker fight back against a government out of control? Maybe, but only if he's really careful ... and very, very smart.
Set in San Francisco in the near future, 17 year old Marcus and three of this friends decide to skip school to play an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) on the same day that terrorists attack the city. Caught up in the aftermath of the attack, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assumes that they are terrorists and takes them to an unspecified detention facility. There they are interrogated, humiliated and ultimately forced to give up the passwords and security codes for their mobile phones and computers before being released under caution that if they tell anyone about what happened to them, they will be detained permanently. Except that one of Marcus’s friends does not come out with them and Marcus discovers that in the post-terrorist world, ordinary citizens are subjected to closer electronic surveillance than ever, something that most appear willing to accept. Angered by his experience, Marcus decides to fight back the only way he knows how – by taking the struggle for personal liberty to the cyber realm and beating the DHS at their own game.
This book is a polemic about the importance of personal liberty and the right to privacy, so anything other than Doctorow’s opinion gets short shrift. Personally, I agree with him – the amount of surveillance that governments are increasingly trying to force on their populations is frightening, not least because it doesn’t actually keep people safe – but I think the book does a disservice to its cause by not treating any contrary opinion as something that deserves consideration. Almost all of the characters who are pro-Government are thugs, cowards, naive or driven by their grief and horror at what the terrorists have done. No one gets a chance to explain their perspective without the author making it clear that they’re wrong. In fact it’s ironic that at one point a pro-Government teacher makes the point to Marcus that for someone so intent on permitting freedom of expression, he shouts down anyone who he does not agree with because the author is guilty of the same.
The polemic is also US-centric and I wonder how teens outside the USA will relate to Marcus, particularly the way in which he keeps reciting chunks of the US Constitution as I found it difficult to relate. In fact, one of the annoying things about Marcus is that he spends the first 80 pages being remarkably politically and legally savvy for someone his age – he asks for a lawyer when he is first taken into custody, he shouts down his interrogators for infringing his rights – it’s all slightly too much to believe and his smug certainties may well put off some readers from becoming involved in his story. At the same time, Doctorow is keen to show him as being naive, notably in his dealings with the press. For someone who has been following press coverage of the attacks and what is happening to his city, Marcus doesn’t appear to consider how his words could be twisted when he gives an on-line news conference to the world media. Again, this is done by Doctorow to prove a point in that he clearly seems to favour blogs and on-line reporting as offering a truer picture of news events whereas every official agency has an agenda and/or will do what the government tells it.
Doctorow writes well – the key scenes when Marcus is in detention are well depicted and a water-boarding scene chilling in its intensity. A scene involving an impromptu rock concert is also well depicted. I liked Ange, a girl who comes into Marcus’s life as he’s trying to take on the DHS and Doctorow is frank in his depiction of their relationship (and it’s the first YA book I’ve read in a long time that takes the trouble to include condoms in a sex scene so kudos for that). It’s a shame that Marcus’s friends don’t get the chance to develop in the same way (indeed, they only feature sporadically thoughout the book).
Although I found Marcus’s first person narration to be annoyingly smug at times, he does have a distinctive character voice that is well sustained. The plot runs along smoothly from event to event and there’s an urgency to it that I think will keep the reader’s attention and I think that many teens will get a kick out of the technological information that Doctorow packs in, particularly with regard to cryptography, which is very interesting and accessible.
Given that the book was written in 2006 and is a reaction to the Bush regime, it’s possible that it will date badly after Obama assumes the presidency. The core message is a strong and important one, but because Doctorow exaggerates the horrors that particularly concern him (e.g. detention without legal counsel etc), it’s possible that some readers will downplay the seriousness of the issue on the basis that it will never happen. As a Brit I was offended by Marcus’s suggestion that Britain is worse than the US for electronic surveillance and its treatment of terrorist suspects – although Doctorow repeats the statistic that a person in London is photographed every 300 metres, he fails to point out that this is only if the cameras work and while the police can detain terror suspects without charge, it’s not for as long as a year. Not that this makes either situation any better, but given that the USA requires all visitors to submit to a retina scan, submit their fingerprints and notify the US Embassy at least 72 hours prior to travel and receive clearance before boarding, I think Doctorow would do better to focus on cleaning his own house first.
The final gripe I had with the book is that it’s peculiarly coy about race. Marcus is white but is picked up by the DHS anyway. It’s only towards the end of the book that Doctorow casually mentions that most of the people in the detention centres are Arabic and it made me a little queasy. In a nation where racial profiling was heavily used after 9/11, the fact that a Turkish coffee shop owner can refuse to use electronic credit card readers in his store and not be persecuted for it was a strange anomaly in the text – more so because Marcus’s friends Van (a Korean) and Jolu (Hispanic) make a point about not getting involved in his cause because their ethnicity makes them more vulnerable.
The Verdict:
Because it’s a polemic this is a brash, uncompromising read that shouts the author’s views at you. For me, the shouting got a little too wearying and I longed for something a little more balanced. However the technology sections are interesting (particularly two post-script chapters by Bruce Schnier and Andrew Huang), the story is fast-paced and the fact that it’s clearly a book aimed at getting teens interested in political issues is to be applauded.
