Books

[dsrtao]

_Little Brother_, Cory Doctorow

Is it possible you haven't heard of _Little Brother_?

No, it is not possible. But I am a student of the impossible, so I will scrunch up my eyes very hard and pretend that you have not. Ah! It is difficult. Especially, it is difficult to type with my eyes scrunched. So...

The place is San Francisco, the time is the near future -- next year perhaps, or the year after that. Almost now. Our hero is a 17 year old high school student: bored, gifted, geeky, but not socially inept. In the first few pages, we watch him skip school with some friends to play a bit of an Augmented Reality Game, a little like a LARP, a little like goecaching, a lot like a global scavenger hunt. Then somebody blows up a bridge -- not the Golden Gate, for some reason, but the Bay Bridge. Is it terrorists? Maybe. Doctorow doesn't hint at it much, but it is entirely plausible that the Bad Guys did it. The Bad Guys, in this book, are the Department of Homeland Security, and to a lesser extent, the entire Federal government. Somehow, the DHS thugs are on the scene seconds after the blast...

The rest of the book is, let's say, intensely involving. And a good story. And morally inspiring. So go buy a copy.

Comments

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

And if you can't afford it, or if for some reason you don't know about Doctorow to begin with, you can download a CC-licensed electronic version of it

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I second the recommendation heartily.

Two quibbles:
* I would put the date at 2010-1011. There's been time to have 1.5 new Xbox iterations, and there doesn't seem to be a presidential election campaign in immediate progress.
* I don't recall any evidence that the DHS were "on the scene seconds after the blast". They were on the streets and active within minutes (no more than half an hour at the outside), but not so few that I found it suspicious. (Well, not suspicious that they *caused* it; it is eminently clear that they were poised to take quick advantage of any such event.) Did I miss something?

[dsrtao]

Both of these are reasonable points. With regard to the timing, I thought Doctorow was leaving it open as to whether the bombs were state-sponsored internal terrorism: every time I looked for evidence one way or another, there was none.

[dsrtao]

I had a conversation last night in which I immodestly asked whether someone read my blog: "I do," she said, "but the strangest thing is that you've never reviewed a book I've heard of."

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

For such a polemical book, it has a surprising (and refreshing) lack of pat answers.

Maybe I will, then

[metageek.livejournal.com]

The only Doctorow I've read is Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom, which I found dull and implausible. I'm willing to spend $0 to give him another chance, though. :-)

Re: Maybe I will, then

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

I'm 4 chapters in - I'm enjoying it, though it's a little assumptive that you-the-reader don't know technology very well (which, given his market, might not be the wisest assumption, but what do I know - I work with ubercomputergeeks, so my assumption of what the average person knows is somewhat skewed)