Online adventures with Little Brother

Cory Doctorow has quasi-legendary status in the blogoshpere-progressive tech community, so it was beyond time for me to read one of his books. Little Brother didn’t disappoint.

As a book intended for teen readers, Little Brother is clean, straightforward and gets to the point without any unnecessary (and pretentious) waffle. This is one of the things I really appreciate about non-adult fiction – the recognition that kids don’t care about all that extraneous stuff and have super-short attention spans. And that they like fun adventure stories. Sometimes it’s good to step away from serious grown-up books and go on a bit of a light-hearted tangent.

The story is centred around teen hacker Marcus, whose wrong-time wrong-place appearance at a terrorist explosion lands him in jail and sparks an epic struggle between his decentralised network of teen hackers and punks and the big, bad government. This characterisation is simplistic and clear: authorities are monitoring kids in school, on the streets and online, and this is Bad. However, there’s a huge amount of refreshing ambiguity regarding the Good side. Marcus and his army of geek kids engage in a variety of social protest actions (many of them borderline illegal) and are challenged on this at every turn – not only by parents and authorities, but also by peers. The good guy is framed as an anti-hero, which is always much more interesting.

The narrative is pretty straightforward and the plot proceeds along expected lines. But really, the plot isn’t why one should read this book. Little Brother has a very rich and detailed near-future world full of quirky characters, increasing paranoia and cool ideas for upcoming technologies. It’s great to experience a coherent world that is both based on a real-world setting and is peppered with speculative fiction elements. Doctorow jumps right in and really thinks about how the world works as a whole, and especially how kids – who are getting increasingly tech and net-savvy – would manipulate, explore and create their own corners of it. There’s a lot of fascinating insight on technology in this book, and often it reads like a blog post or essay (in fact, many of these bits are from earlier blog posts). Doctorow delves into hacking techniques, cryptography, RFIDs, networking and more, all explained in a way that’s easy to follow but that doesn’t make the reader feel like an idiot. If fact, it’s a great slice-of-tech review of recent developments and near-future gadgets, and is worthwhile just for that.

It’s hard for me to say too much more about this book, most because it’s just good in all respects – good writing and language, pacing, characters, setting. It’s neither mediocre nor mindblowing, but it’s definitely entertaining. Its only fault, and this is merely because I’m a good few years out of the target age range, is that is tends to be simplistic at times and explains certain concepts in near-painful detail. I wouldn’t recommend it to my IT-type friends because they may find it frustrating, but I’d definitely suggest it to casual net-users who are interested in what ‘this crazy internet thing’ can really do.