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Little Brother

by Cory Doctorow

Review by Adicus Ryan Garton

     Cory Doctorow's latest novel for young adults offers up a heaping plate of fascism, computer hacking and underground revolution. Oh, and the most bad-ass fictional distro of Linux ever. Little Brother revolves around the aftermath of a terrorist attack in San Francisco that the Department of Homeland security then uses as an excuse to exercise a fascist hold on the good people of that city. Specifically, we follow a 16-year-old boy and his friends as they fight a quiet war against the massive invasion of privacy that the DHS institutes.

     This book is pretty fantastic. So I'm not going to be very upset if you just jump to the bottom of the page and go straight to the website where you can download it for free. When I first heard about this, I was apprehensive. I mean, how good can a book that you can download for free be, right?

     Pretty damned good. That's how good.

     This book, although targeted at young adults, is like a 1984 that's relevant again. Communism is out; nobody's worried about Big Brother, and the 90s was a fun-filled romp for Americans as we celebrated the fall of the Wall. But when 9/11 happened, and then the Patriot Act was instituted, words like “fascist” and “paranoia” started coming back into fashion. And while Orwell's classic is just that—classic—it's not very exciting for your average 14-year-old American kid.

     So enter Marcus (whose screen name just happens to be double-you-one-en-five-tee-zero-en) who uses his crappy school-issued laptop and a handful of clever tricks to get himself into and out of trouble. And then enter the terrorist attack which justifies tracking and spying on every citizen of San Francisco by the DHS, and you've got the recipe for a pretty fantastic read.

     The book explores the classic themes of oppression, paranoia, rebellion and teenage hormones. There's sex (although it's done tastefully and mostly off the page), there's torture, there's playing hooky to run around the city and play some ridiculous Japanese alternate reality game. And Mr. Doctorow explains to us (the old ones to whom this information was never taught and the kiddies who will be hacking crappy Microsoft products before middle school) how things like the Internet, cryptography, arphids (radio frequency identifiers, or RFIDs) and the hippie movement of the 60s actually work. (And even if I didn't quite understand the cryptography part, it was still pretty interesting.)

     As an adult, I see a lot of influences in this book in classic literature that hopefully kids will read one day, but there's no guarantee that even if a book remains relevant for 10 or 100 years, it will still be relevant tomorrow. So it's refreshing to know that stories that confront and rebel against a fascist establishment are being written to interest and enlighten the next generation, and if that gets them to pick up Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 or Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, great. If not, they'll at least know how to build a hidden camera detector out of a toilet paper roll, a few LEDs and a 9-volt battery.

More information and the free download of Little Brother can be found here. You can also purchase a hard copy of the book at Barnes & Noble.