Review: Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

I hinted a bit about how today's pick was an author who didn't agree with the whole DRM thing. It's more than that. This book, like all of his books, was released under a Creative Commons license. Go look it up; it's a really interesting idea.

The author in question is Cory Doctorow, whom you might also know as the co-editor of Boing Boing.

I have so many things to say about his new YA book, Little Brother, that I'm not even sure where to begin. I suppose the best place is with a synopsis. So!

Marcus Yallow, a high school senior in San Fransciso, ditches school with three of his friends to play an Alternate Reality Game. While they're tracking down a clue, terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge. Marcus and his friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and find themselves taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security.

When they're released - after several days of cruel interrogation - Marcus realizes how many of the freedoms he'd taken for granted are now being taken away under the guise of "keeping America safe." He's a tech-savvy kid, and he's brave enough and angry enough to undermine the DHS and start a kind of electronic rebellion.

Rebellion, of course, comes with consequences.

The introduction alone makes for interesting reading. Doctorow talks about DRM and copyright in a very accessible way. The internet is changing how artists have to think about distribution, be that authors, musicians, photographers, anyone. As Doctorow says, quoting Tim O'Reilly: "For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." He makes the case that DRM is more a hurt than a help, hence why part of his deal with his publishers is that you can download Little Brother for free. (Ohyes. Go do it now.)

Every chapter is dedicated to a different bookstore, with a blurb about them or an anecdote of Doctorow's own experiences with the stores and their employees. Obviously, authors aren't going to leave the chains out - B&N, Borders, Amazon and a few others get their mentions, but the real gems are the shout-outs to Borderlands, Mysterious Galaxy, Tattered Cover, and the other indies.

And so, on to the story itself.

We meet Marcus just as he's getting ready to sneak out of school for the afternoon. The book is set in the near-future: the year isn't specified, but I'd guess it's around 2010 or so. The technology is a bit more advanced than present-day, but nothing is terribly far-fetched. They use school-issued laptops that log keystrokes and monitor the sites kids visit during classtime. Of course, Marcus has found his way around this, running a browser and an IM session that flies under the radar. You know right off the bat he's a damned smart kid.

His voice, to me, initially came off as cocky and a bit pretentious, but I had to remind myself that this is YA lit. It's not going to read the same way as other things I enjoy. (It's been suggested in the discussions at Making Light that the voice sounds almost like Doctorow's own. I am at best an infrequent visitor to his blogs, so I can't speak to that, myself.) However, once I let myself consider the audience a bit, and think of what I enjoyed reading 15 or so years ago, I was able to move past what bothered me. Younger-me would quite likely haved liked Marcus from page one.

There's a lot of talk about security and surveillance, and a third of the way in, I was chilled. Doctorow's not just making this stuf up. You can google plenty of the things mentioned throughout the book, and what makes it all the more terrifying is how plausible all of it is. What doesn't exist yet will soon, or already does, but just isn't available to the public yet. And here I am, all proud of myself for using Firefox as my browser with NoScript installed, and I've barely even scratched the surface when it comes to protecting my privacy online.

While Marcus can be a bit of a smartass, standing up and mouthing off a bit to the vice principal and later, the DHS agents, his bravado very quickly disappears when the fear kicks in. It's refreshing, when so many times in YA - in fan fiction and in published novels both - the main character snots all over the place and gets away with it. When Marcus tries, he learns that it doesn't work that way.

When he begins his rebellion, he also learns (several times) that his actions have consequences. Sure, it's fun tying up all of San Francisco by messing with RFIDs and screwing up tracking patterns. But when other kids get detained (not, mind you arrested - very few people are actually arrested and charged over the course of the book), Marcus realizes that his calls for civil disobedience may very well get other people tortured. At a concert-turned-protest, kids get gassed when they don't disperse. It scares the hell out of him - I did this. I started it. He doubts himself. He gets scared as much for his own safety as he is for others'. When it looks like the DHS will be actively going after the kids caught jamming, he sends out a plea for people to stop.

In times like those, when he's ready to give up and lay low, to try living a life as close to normal as he can, it's his friends' passion and commitment to winning back their freedom that keeps him going. It's never easy to do these things alone.

Of course, when your main character is seventeen, chances are there's going to be a bit of romance. There's a girl named Ange, and she and Marcus fall for each other. Ange is a good character, as much a leader as Marcus is. She's strong and not afraid to say what she wants. There's a lot of talk about the chances of Little Brother making its way onto banned books lists. I certainly think it will, though not because it encourages kids to look for holes and flaws in security systems. I have a feeling that all the technology and the idea of speaking out for your rights will be overlooked in place of "Oh my god, two kids have sex." It's honestly not graphic, and doesn't take up all that much of the story. It's told in a voice that's a bit awkward and a bit breathless and completely taken up by this new love, and then we fade to black (but not before we are informed that they'll be using a condom.)

Marcus gets a bit melodramatic every once in a while when he talks about Ange ("Ange, my Ange, my angel...") but most of the time, it's just a kid in a relationship, feeling all those Big New Love things.

I'm torn about my feelings on the end of the book. For the first half, Marcus feels like they can't possibly tell any adults what happened to them in the days after the bombings - no one's going to buy their story. It's believable enough, when you consider how afraid they were made to be. Even if they did talk to their parents, they were scared that it would only land them right back where they'd been.

By the end, though, he goes and tells his parents, and they are supportive, as is the journalist they go and talk to. There's a deus ex machina moment at the end, where he's been taken into custody once again, and just as it's getting really bad, in comes the cavalry. I'm not quite sure it works. On the one hand, it's a situation you very much don't want Marcus to be in. On the other, it feels a bit contrived.

There's a debate about the amount of exposition happening over at Making Light as well. I felt it was mostly seamless. Marcus occasionally went into detailed explanation about the things his readers might not know. How many kids actually know what LARPing is? What do you know about cryptography, internet protocols, and Alan Turing? He explains it and manages to make it all accessible. He doesn't veer into jargon without defining it. He doesn't talk down to the reader.

The place where the exposition bogs down, actually is where Marcus isn't the one As-You-Know-Bobbing. His teacher, Ms. Galvez, tells the class about the hippie movement, and that gets clunky, like he didn't quite have the right rhythm for the dialogue. The history itself was interesting, but the presentation could have been better.

I worry a bit that the swiftness with which the DHS steps in (and how quick they are to resort to stress positions and other forms of torture) is hard to accept, though I think this is more my own personal trouble with suspension of disbelief than it is Doctorow's writing. It's set so close to our own present that I'm looking at it more as 2008 than a few years from now. But when I think back to Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale, those are also books set in future versions of our own society, and I was able to settle in to them quite easily - likely because they were vastly different realities, where Little Brother is very close to our own time and situation.

There are afterwords from Bruce Schneier and "Bunnie" Huang, encouraging kids to look for weaknesses, to be creative and clever and unafraid. Doctorow's own closing acknowledgements offer some great links and reading suggestions. He is, as he admits, standing on the shoulders of giants, and names his influences.

So, I can happily recommend Little Brother. Being one of those over-25s that Marcus and his friends decide can't be trusted, I still really enjoyed it. I'm guessing its true YA audience will love it. If you do download it and read it and find it worthy of passing on to a teen in your life (or if you think it would be a good book to get into schools), I'd suggest following the links to the donate-a-book program linked in the introduction.

It definitely should open up some excellent classroom dialogues on the meaning of free speech, security, and privacy.