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| Little Brother | 
 enlarge | Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Teen
Category: Book
List Price: $17.95
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $7.96 (44%)
New (37) Used (21) Collectible (3) from $9.08
Avg. Customer Rating:  77 reviews
Sales Rank: 813
Media: Hardcover
Reading Level: Young Adult
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 384
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.4 x 1.5
ISBN: 0765319853
EAN: 9780765319852
ASIN: 0765319853
Publication Date: April 29, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: New 2008 BCE hardcover. Ships fast with free delivery confirmation.
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Product Description
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 72 more reviews...
 the epitome of l'esprit de l'escalier July 4, 2008
77 out of 122 found this review helpful
It's ironic that Marcus, the main character of this novel, is so painfully aware of his own l'esprit de l'escalier (literally, "stairway wit" -- the witty comeback you think of after it's too late to use it). "Little Brother" is one big example of Doctorow's own l'esprit de l'escalier. If only we lived in a world where the people who work for the Department of Homeland Security were transparently one-dimensional and evil, if only DHS were massively more invasive into every facet of our lives instead of just having useless airport security checks, and if only Doctorow were a hacker who was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time during a terrorist attack. If only all of those would come true, then Doctorow would save the day. By the time you reach the conclusion, wherein Marcus somehow ends up as a blogger on a site not entirely unlike Doctorow's own BoingBoing, the sense of l'esprit de l'escalier is so palpable that you could cut it with a knife. Unsurprising, since you've been wading through it for the past 350 pages.
I entered into this book as an entirely sympathetic audience. Several of the authors who offered up enthusiastic reviews are ones whose work I admire and whose recommendations are usually spot-on. I've donated to both the ACLU and the EFF; I even own packing tape with the Fourth Amendment printed on it that I use on my checked luggage when I fly. I believe that the so-called security that we see at the airport is nothing more than a waste of time, money, and energy for all involved. I like my civil liberties, and seeing them eroded sparks a letter-writing campaign to my representatives. Oh, yes, and I'm a geek. I cracked open this book fully expecting to love every single word on the page, expecting to identify with the characters and the story.
It took me until page 20 to realise that I hated it. The pages upon pages of useless exposition on everything from Mission-style burritos to a rather flawed discussion of network tunneling bog the book down. Worse, so does the propaganda that Marcus spews at every opportunity about liberty and freedom. I agree with pretty much all of the politics expressed herein, but reading it like this made me want to backhand Marcus and tell him to just move on already.
Even worse is the painfully simplistic storyline. For all that Marcus claims to be a hacker, he doesn't actually accomplish any hacks (and certainly not by coding). His single biggest hack is that he copies a particularly secure Linux distribution, burns CDs, and hands them out to people. If burning CDs makes one a hacker, then my mom just earned her 1337 merit badge. Burning CDs and blogging is apparently enough to bring down the DHS. Of course, the DHS here is portrayed as single-minded, one-dimensional, and singularly evil; and anyone who in the days after a terrorist attack is freaked out and thus supportive of additional security is also mindless and evil. So bringing down the DHS with an alternate Internet and poorly-written privacy rants on a blog isn't actually a big deal. My mom, hacker extraordinaire that she now apparently is, could've done it.
It's not that I disagree with any of the ideas put forth in this novel. For the most part, I strongly agree with them. It's that the package in which they are wrapped is poorly considered, poorly argued, and poorly written. The ideas herein are important and absolutely must be discussed, but the execution of those ideas is so heavyhanded as to make the book near-unreadable.
 Security and Freedom May 27, 2008
39 out of 43 found this review helpful
In some ways, this book harks back to the juveniles of fifties as written by some of the great masters of sf, most especially Heinlein. Like those earlier books, it portrays teenagers that are intelligent, resourceful, game-loving, and confrontational, but are still at times prone to making stupid mistakes in the name of peer-group status. In other words, they are real teenagers.
The setting is the near future, when some ill-defined terrorist group decides to blow up the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Marcus, our hero, and several of his friends are picked up in a rather wide sweep by Homeland Security forces as possible suspects. And therein lies the tale, as the actions of the security forces clash violently with Marcus's idea of what is right and proper in the supposed land-of-the-free America. What Marcus decides to do about this situation is an instructional manual to the reader in just how personal freedom and privacy have been restricted and what can be done about it in today's very high-tech world of security cameras, RFIDs, cryptography, computer databases, and the insidious insinuation of propaganda both at our schools and into everything we see and hear on the internet and our TVs and from the mouths of our political leaders.
The story bubbles with suspense, and the actions that Marcus takes are very believable as something a seventeen-year old could actually do. It is very easy to identify with Marcus and become very sympathetic to his cause, while the situation itself is stark enough to frighten the daylights out of the reader as being all too possible. The info-dumps along the way not only impart some very necessary information to the reader, but are handled very much the way Heinlein did it, as things that are necessary for the hero to either know or learn about to accomplish his desires, making them easy to swallow. The techniques and technology presented are real, as some of the afterword material to this book details.
The other characters of this book, while not presented with the detail that Marcus is (almost a given in any first-person narration), are both intriguing and in some cases frightening. Marcus's father is a major case in point, as a man with liberal leanings who nevertheless finds himself driven to support the majority view out of fear for his son, and Marcus's social studies teacher, who is very reminiscent of some of the `mentors' of Heinlein's books, as her willingness to engage her students in free-wheeling debate and attempts to get them to think for themselves leads to a very plausible and ugly fate. It is just such touches that make the whole situation ring with that touch of reality that marks excellent science fiction.
The politics of this book are decidedly left-wing. The Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security come in for some merciless beatings, but the reasoning behind such depictions is carefully laid out and form a clarion call to all Americans to look carefully at just what we are giving up in the name of `security'. Perhaps it should be compared and contrasted (as one of those infamous school assignments I don't fondly remember) with something like Tom Clancy's Executive Orders, which presents the right-wing rationale of why and when the government should be allowed to exceed the boundaries of the Constitution and its amendments.
Unlike the YA material of the fifties, this book does not ignore an item of great concern to almost every teenager, namely sex. I found the presentation of this material both appropriate to the characters and handled realistically without being too graphic. However, it might make this book inappropriate for pre-teens.
Teenagers should find this book a riveting read, with characters they can identify with, and like all really good YA books, adults should find this book just as riveting, with concepts and philosophies presented that require thought and contemplation. This is the best book I've read out of the 2008 crop so far, and I'd be very much surprised if it doesn't at least make the 2009 Hugo nomination list, if not take the award itself.
--- Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
 A plausible near future tale of techno-geek rebellion May 2, 2008
28 out of 33 found this review helpful
Scott Westerfeld gives Doctorow's latest novel a blurb of "A rousing tales of techno-geek rebellion."
I was kindly given an Advance Reader's Copy by the unparalleled force known as Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and now in return, its time for me to talk about the novel.
Doctorow is more known these days for his often controversial and definitely iconcolastic positions on matters technological. Editor at Boing Boing, crusader against the excesses of Digital Rights Management...Doctorow definitely doesn't keep his head down.
I haven't actually read any novel-length fiction of his until now, and I am glad that I did, even if I am not the intended demographic of the novel.
Little Brother is set around 2010, in a US which has had a Republican return to the White House in the 2008 elections. The story centers around Marcus Yallow, whose original screenname of w1inst0n and the title of the book gave me immediate "spidey senses" of where this novel was going. We get a primer on Marcus' carefree life, and a lot of infodumping on technology--enough that the novel felt a bit like a throwback to SF novels of yore which would do the "as you know, bob" approach to science fiction.
Marcus' SF becomes the target of a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, and as he and his friends are cutting school as part of an alternate reality game, they are caught in the DHS dragnet. His anarchic and rebellious attitude do him no good, and he spends a short period in a "Gitmo by the Bay".
Once released (and tellingly, one of his friends is *not*), Marcus becomes even more radicalized by the experience, enough that he is willing to challenge the DHS when San Francisco is put into a lockdown that would be the wet masturbatory dream of authoritarians everywhere.
And therein lies the tale.
Little Brother is written in first person, and so we get everything filtered through Marcus' perceptions, prejudices, attitudes and experience. While I suspect that Marcus' opinions may be very close to Doctorow's (although that's not guaranteed; I wouldn't make the assumption that authorial voice always equals protagonist voice), my meta-knowledge of Doctorow suggests that Marcus' radicalization and voice came very naturally to the author.
Too, aside from the infodumps which slow down the book here and there, the novel sounds like a YA novel. The teenage protagonists sounded, to my ear, like teenagers. They are real characters in a near future world that readers in the same age group can identify with.
I think Doctorow softpedals the confrontations between the teenagers and the security forces a little bit, having them result in mostly non violent confrontations. I suppose Doctorow did load the dice a little bit--a couple of shooting deaths at the hands of the DHS would have destroyed Marcus' movement, and would have turned the book into a parallel, rather than a counterpoint, to 1984. This book doesn't end completely happily...but Marcus makes a difference.
It's a very good book, whatever you think of its politics and opinions, and it fits well as a gateway book. This is the sort of YA science fiction that could, and should, and must bring new readers into the graying genre of SF. And for the rest of us, too, its an indictment of the dangers of security theater, and security which does not make us any safer.
I enjoyed it and commend it to the rest of you.
 Marred by one-dimensional villains May 9, 2008
27 out of 51 found this review helpful
Little Brother starts off well, describing a near future world where online gaming overlaps into the real world, with the young computer-hacker hero using his skillz to outwit his teachers and other authorities. But it takes a shocking turn into ugly, sickening terror when he and his friends are unfairly targeted by Homeland Security in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. This is the big weakness of the book, that the HS agents are depicted as evil, one-dimensional thugs, seemingly interested only in mistreating and even torturing their captives even after it is clear that they have no relevant or helpful information.
We next see society deteriorating into a totalitarian despotism, with all movements monitored, and citizens pulled over for questioning merely because their driving patterns depart from normal. All this in a U.S. city only a few years in the future!
No doubt this is author Doctorow's interpretation of the American response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks as well as government prisons such as Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He is entitled to his views on these matters, but when he turns them into vivid story lines as in this book, the results are just not credible and require (among other lapses) painting government agents as pure villains motivated only by their evil hearts.
The story is further hampered by the 17 year old protagonist mouthing speeches that would sound more natural coming from the 35 year old author than a high school boy, quoting extensively from the Declaration of Independence and seemingly armed with a wide knowledge of books discussing liberty and freedom.
Once we get past the first few pages, any sense of fun and excitement is lost, replaced throughout the rest of the story by a pervasive miasma of fear and horror that underlies all the action and ultimately detracts from the story. In the end I can't recommend this book for its target audience of teens. It is too polemical and works too hard in deadly seriousness to sell the notion that our national government is pure evil. In the end, Doctorow's political views overwhelm and kill the germ of an exciting story that he started with.
I enjoyed it immensely April 29, 2008
21 out of 22 found this review helpful
I enjoyed this novel immensely. I want to make that clear from the start. There are many reviews that are going to talk only about how important and topical Little Brother is. They're going to talk about how this novel needed to be written. They're all right, but I think everybody should know how much FUN it is to read (even while you're being outraged by how possible it all is). I started reading it and didn't put it down until I was finished.
Little Brother is the first-person narrative of Marcus, a 17 year-old with a talent for technology. Doctorow gets Marcus' voice just right. He alternates between street-swagger and vulnerability, between naivete and expertise. I found him to be an entirely believable contradiction, which is a pretty good definition of a teenager. At first, I found Marcus' love of explaining technology a little irritating, but I couldn't figure out why. Then I realized that it reminded me of my own poorly restrained tendency to try to explain computers to anyone who would listen (35 years ago). Nothing reaches you quite like seeing your own flaws in the hero.
Marcus finds himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. Without revealing any plot details, suffice it to say that he comes to the attention of a law-enforcement agency with a broad remit and limited oversight. Deceit and mistrust test his family and friendships as he comes face to face with the conflict between personal safety and the responsibilities of a citizen.
Cory Doctorow has managed to create a wonderful fusion of science fiction, action novel, political thriller, and whimsical romp. It's very hard to bring those elements together, but he has succeeded admirably. I haven't seen anyone pull this off since "The Long Run" by Daniel Keys Moran.
Buy it. Read it. Buy copies for your kids. Once they start reading it, they'll finish it.
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