Publishers Weekly review snippet:
Little Brother' Comes Out Fighting
By John Sellers, Children's Bookshelf
“We’re living in a world in which it’s instantly assumed that anybody with a security badge is authorized to demand government ID from you. It fuels the desire for stories like this.” So says Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor Books, who edited Little Brother (Tor Teen, May), the first YA novel from author/blogger/activist Cory Doctorow.
Months ahead of its pub date, Little Brother and its author have been attracting attention—particularly on the Web. Neil Gaiman posted a lengthy, praise-filled entry about the book on his blog, and Gawker Media’s science fiction blog included the book in a round-up of 10 anticipated books for 2008. And for the second year in a row, Forbes magazine included Doctorow (no relation to author E.L. Doctorow) on its Web Celeb 25 list, which gathers the Internet’s most influential figures in a given year.
Doctorow’s book, while immersed in hacker and tech culture, is largely politically driven. This is not unexpected from someone who has been active in the Internet for many years, and someone who has a history of activism (Doctorow was twice arrested for civil disobedience before he turned 18).
Nielsen Hayden, senior editor and manager of SF at Tor, knows Doctorow from science fiction chat circles in the 1990s; since then, the author has been an advocate for digital rights, having served as European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, and he currently co-edits Boing Boing, the fifth most popular blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a blog search engine.
In Doctorow’s book, set in San Francisco in the near future, teenage hacker Marcus Yallow is detained and interrogated by the Department of Homeland Security at an offshore location (“Gitmo-by-the-Bay”) in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack in the city. The DHS suspects his involvement because of the heavily modified electronic equipment he has with him, but they eventually release him—though not his best friend, Darryl, and numerous other detainees. With San Francisco overrun by cameras and surveillance, Marcus won’t accept sacrificing personal liberty as the price of “security,” so he and a legion of underground hackers (motto: “Don’t trust anyone over 25”) decide to fight back.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6525084.htmlYou need to read Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother
Posted by Rick Klau
July 1, 2008
A couple weeks back, my friend Mike Marusin from Naperville updated Twitter that Cory Doctorow would be appearing at Andersen’s Bookstore in my old hometown, Naperville, IL, for a book signing. He’d just published Little Brother, and I was jealous that Mike got to meet Cory. I’ve long been an admirer of Cory’s, and a few days later I stopped by Cory’s site to check it out.
Imagine my shock to find that I could download all of Cory’s books and short stories for free, pre-formatted for ebook readers. That meant I was able to grab a copy and throw it on my Kindle… which I did, but was in the middle of reading White House Ghosts (yes, I’m a junkie) so I forgot about it. I had some time on Sunday afternoon, so I pulled out the Kindle and started Little Brother. I finished it last night, and it was spectacular.
I’ve seen other reviews peg it as a young adult novel, which I think is a load of crap. It’s a good story, pure and simple. That its protagonist happens to be a 17 year-old is immaterial, I think, to the target audience. Anyone who wants to know more about the technology shaping our society should read the book – and Cory does a great job of explaining complex issues (cryptography, hacking, open source software, tunneling, to name a few) in ways that non-techies will be able to appreciate. (I’ve seen a couple reviews knock him for these explications, suggesting it drags the narrative down… I disagree. If you’ve ever hung out with an obsessive, talented geek who is spectacularly good at this stuff, you’ll know they can spend hours explaining what they’re working on. The only difference with Cory is that his explanations often make sense to the uninitiated.)
The book is a fast read, and it’s a great ride. Cory nails the technology, the politics are spot on, and the implications about our growing surveillance society are laid out in an uncomfortable progression that you’ll want to give thought to. I told Robin last night that if I’d read this book as a teenager, it would have changed my life: Marcus (the main character) is a remarkable kid, and I have no doubt that I would have aspired to his blend of political commitment and technical mastery.
If you spend any time thinking about politics and technology (and if you don’t, what in God’s name are you doing hanging out at this blog?!), you’ll want to get yourself a copy of Little Brother.
http://www.rklau.com/tins/archives/2008/07/01/you-need-to-read-cory-doctorows-little-brother.phpFree downloads of the book, from the author:
http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/
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