Day 22

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

My review
rating: 3 of 5 stars
I read this book over the weekend. It started because of a Lifehacker post about Cory Doctorow. I had no idea who he was, although after reading a little about him, I realized that I had seen his name before in a webcomic called xkcd. As it turns out, he is a rather famous blogger on BoingBoing. Who knew?


At the same time, I was trying to see if I could get an RSS feed of the Book of Mormon. Let's say I'm lazy, and I want to read the good word. Why not? It could happen. And happen it did. I found a neat little website called DailyLit.com which does just that, turn books into RSS feeds. I was searching around their other titles, and saw some novels by Cory Doctorow. I figured why not, I'd just heard about this guy, let's try it out. So I subscribed to Little Brother. It was free because he had released the eBook under the Creative Commons license.

Unfortunately, the bits from DailyLit were too short for me. So I increased my subscription from 1 chunk of Little Brother per day to 4 per day, and then requested multiple feed refreshes. Finally, I just figured that I should see if there was a full version on line somewhere. I found it right here on the author's website.

This is probably the first book that I read entirely online, and I'm not so sure that it was a good decision. Fortunately it was a quick read.

Like much of speculative fiction, it takes an idea and stretches it to its limit. Marcus, our hero, finds himself on the wrong side of an increasingly paranoid Department of Homeland Security. The government in this story begins to over-surveille the city in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, and Marcus gets himself in trouble because he's in the wrong place at the wrong time. The surveillance of the city grows by leaps and bounds, and the DHS seems to disregard the Constitution and the rule of law. (This is the speculative fiction part that gets stretched to the limit.)

Because he is 17, and a hacker, Marcus (or w1n5t0n or m1k3y or whatever his 1337 name is at the time) decides to fight back against the man, because, of course, only he is the only one brave enough to say anything. Except, he's 17, and doesn't think all the way through his plans. He's just determined to not sell out to the man. He doesn't really consider the effects of his actions on others, and causes many of his friends and family serious emotional pain. But it's ok, because he's a hacker, and he's fighting against the man.

Now don't get me wrong, this is a book that needed to be written, and a book that needs to be read. I worry that some might forget that it is a work of speculative fiction, meant as a warning of what would happen if certain trends were carried to an extreme. Some might take it as fact, as a pre-set course from which there is no turning. This is false, clearly. It plays to many Libertarian fears and is probably very very popular among the Ron Paul crowd. Don't get me wrong, I have my own Libertarian tendencies. Live and let live and all. But this work, while raising the alarm, could also be considered alarmist, especially by those who don't want to actually understand multiple sides of an argument.

The pacing is excellent (much better as a whole, than as a series of chunks!), the characters are believable for the most part, the setting familiar and scary. There are some heavy handed explanations of LARPing, ARGing, cryptography, RFIDs, and so on. If you don't already know what they are, you're in for some serious lectures. If you're like me and knew most of it anyway, you can mostly just skim those parts. (I didn't know much about LARPing, but I was familiar with the rest.) The conclusion was anticlimactic, and the resolution somewhat underwhelming.

It's a book that demands to be read, but it's not a book that I'd keep on my shelf. Fortunately, it was free, short, and an easy read.

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