Cory Doctorow

This YA book was our March monthly assigned read for my SF book club. I had been familiar with Cory Doctorow through his work with the EFF and his writings on www.boingboing.net. These biases show clearly in Little Brother, but the novel does not suffer for it at all. His writing is clear and tight. Even when delving into hyper-technical geek talk, Doctorow’s explanations did not pull me out of the story. (But then, I am a self-confessed geek.) Within the first dozen pages he has drawn interesting and engaging characters, and I was intrigued to see where things would go.

The overall story is about how the main character, 17-year-old Marcus, deals with a security crackdown in San Francisco directly after a terrorist attack. As the new city-wide security protocols are implemented, he describes a few harrowing incidents that echo elements in The Handmaid’s Tale. In a classic example of doublespeak, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) says, regarding the hundreds of citizens pulled over randomly on the street for database checks: “[You’ve been] momentarily detained so that we can ensure your safety…”. It is a key point in the novel that the catch-and-release policies of DHS are not uniformly applied.

Released in 2007, Little Brother is prescient regarding present-day surveillance technology (cf CBC's Spark). Though the terrorist attack is used as the McGuffin to get us to the issues of privacy versus security, it is clear that they can’t put this genie back in the bottle. Once DHS installs new spyware in existing cameras around the city, and infiltrates the existing internet and POS technology, it is virtually impossible to restore the city to the pre-attack state of decentralized data. In Canada, we saw this with the “temporary” security cameras installed for the Vancouver Olympics that then became permanent. Once laws and procedures are put in place, they have a political imperative to remain.

As can be expected from Doctorow, there is great use of language: “He’s a sucking chest wound of a human being.” And “…the chandelier of gear hung around their midriffs.” There are also nods to elements in pop culture, such as Harry Potter and The Matrix, that will be familiar to the target YA audience.

One weakness of the book was its focus exclusively on the plight and reaction of middle-class white teenagers. There were two brief moments towards the end of the book acknowledging the deeper nature of the problem – one of systemic racism in choosing who is a “potential threat” – in a conversation with Marcus’ friend Jolu, and Marcus noting the predominant skin colour of his fellow prisoners.
I would, perhaps, have liked a more overt acknowledgement that the escalating cyber-revolution Marcus starts was, in fact, seeded by the very acts of aggressive suppression and incarceration perpetrated by DHS.

Marcus’ character is a dissident without being too obnoxious – this is a useful contrast to the rebellious character in Boneshaker [see my review]. In addition, Marcus regularly engages in self-reflection and matures through the arc of the book. He comes to realize that actions regularly have consequences that he cannot fully foresee. Therefore, he becomes more thoughtful and less reactionary in his responses and the form his activism takes.

In the Afterword, Andrew “bunnie” Huang (a noted crypoexpert) presents an interesting metaphor. When artists, hobbyists, and iconoclasts (however that is defined) can be so easily implicated as terrorists, what do we call this dysfunction? Huang writes, “...it is called an autoimmune disease, where an organism’s defense system goes into overdrive so much that it fails to recognize itself and attacks its own cells.”

The message is clear and repeated often: the terrorists win if we act scared. If we give up privacy for security, we don’t deserve either. In fact the repetitive “message” was beginning to bog the novel down about one-third of the way through. Fortunately, the plot picked up, took a turn, and kept moving.

This book is a call-to-arms to know what your rights are and to recognize when others are trying to take them away from you. It is a great talking tool for parents and their teens re: the limitations and boundaries of privacy, security, and personal versus government responsibility.

Subversive and hyper-geeky, I liked this book very much. Have the terrorists already won? Not as long as people like Cory Doctorow are sounding the alarm.
… (mais)

Cory Doctorow is nothing if not prolific, but unless you count "The Rapture of the Nerds," his collaboration with Charlie Stross (which I don't), I really haven't been interested in the sort of near-term polemical thrillers that are his bread and butter. However, when Doctorow decided to tackle future American political strife my thought was, okay, challenge accepted.

For one thing, this is kind of old-school speculative fiction in that it's very "ideas first," only the ideas that Doctorow is dealing with are of the sort that the people who wish for SF like it used to be written don't want to engage with. This is as the characters in this novel are well up to their waists in the "Long Emergency" of catastrophic climate change, where some people like protagonist Brooks Palazzo factor this into their future, and some, like his toxic grandfather, are stewing over what they see as the end times. Which is to say that while Doctorow's characterization is fine, they do sometimes seem mostly like the tools of a polemic; though since I expected to be polemicized this is more of a feature than a bug.

On the whole my experience with this novel was positive, but my biggest gripe is having Palazzo's grandfather conveniently die early in the book, with his place being taken by various surrogates; to me this seemed like a cop-out. To really engage with the conflicts in question would have meant Doctorow dealing with the inner life of the future MAGA "bitter ender." I know that's a tough task, but I think it would have resulted in a better novel; a lot of the time this felt like a survival-horror game where our plucky band of adventurers have to deal with an escalating series of "bosses" who are mostly inscrutable.… (mais)