“Little Brother” is a terrific read, but it also claims a place in the tradition of polemical science-fiction novels like “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and “Fahrenheit 451” (with a dash of “Mr. He sees his father in a new light, cowed and confused by the federal government he learns the meaning and cost of standing up for himself and others.
If Marcus’s journey to adulthood has aspects common to other young-adult novels, they feel real on the page. The first-person voice, however, has the authentic tang of the technologically literate.
His grasp of the implications of present-day information technology is authoritative, and his prose features up-to-the-hour Internet-speak (viz., “She wasn’t h4wt in the traditional sense”), which may already be dated by the time this review comes out. Cory Doctorow is an ardent copyright activist, speaker, teacher, columnist, prolific writer of novels and short stories, and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. He spreads his message through a secure network engineered out of Xbox gaming consoles, to a tech-savvy youth underground (we are now post-nerd, I learned - hipsters and social networking experts have replaced the unwashed coders of yore). Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. The fear and humiliation he experiences in interrogation are vividly detailed, and afterward Marcus takes a principled stand that leads him into an ingenious program of resistance and civil rights activism.Īn entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. That cockiness gets scuffed a little in the disaster, and both the story and Marcus himself acquire grit and interest as a result. Marcus is a likable if undeniably cocky hero - he hacks cellphones, sasses clueless authority figures and quotes the Declaration of Independence from memory. In the opening chapters of “Little Brother,” a near-future terrorist attack hits San Francisco’s Bay Bridge and a teenager named Marcus Yallow is arbitrarily and brutally detained in the federal crackdown that follows.
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