Little Brother

Moving along through the Hugo nominees, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (Tor, 2008; editor: Patrick Nielsen Hayden) is absolutely top-notch very-near-future speculative fiction that should scare and anger everyone as much as it did me.

In a Bay Area high school only a few years in our future, post-9/11 security theater has gone crazy.  The students are subject to constant tracking via their school-issued laptops, their library books, and even their movement style, with "gait recognition" software.  Needless to say, many of the smarter teenagers are busy coming up with hacks and ways to evade this surveillance as fast as the authorities can implement it.  Cutting out of school means starting by frying the surveillance chip in a physics textbook so it won't set off alarms.

But when Marcus and his friends sneak out of school one day to engage in a sort of complex real-world scavenger hunt run as part of a massive online game, they have the bad luck to do so on the same day that a massive terrorist attack hits San Francisco and Department of Homeland Security troops round up anyone behaving suspiciously, which includes Marcus and his friends.  Imprisoned and interrogated, Marcus is eventually released only to find that restrictions on personal freedom and even on speech and thought are slowly being tightened in the name of "keeping people safe."  Sound familiar?  His idealistic defense of personal liberty via the Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence does not go over well with either school authorities or his own father.

With few sympathetic adults to turn to, Marcus and his friends use simple tricks, social networks, cryptography, and their programming skills to technologically circumvent and undermine the crackdown while fighting to find a way to get their story heard and listened to.  Marcus' clear-eyed analysis of the uselessness of security theater and the price paid by innocent people due to the high failure rate of such precautions is familiar ground to anyone who's kept track of progressive political blogs over the past several years; Doctorow is clearly writing with utter personal passion.

I whipped through Little Brother in one excited, angry sitting.  I could hardly put it down.  Rarely have political polemic and tight storytelling been so effectively woven together.

This novel is barely science fiction.  In fact, it's barely fiction.  U.S. citizens held incommunicado and tortured?  We're already there.  Electronic spying and recording of our movements?  I don't use EasyPass to pay my tolls partly because I don't care to have my travel recorded in a government database.  Idiotic security theater?  Look at the lines of barefoot air travelers being carefully protected from dangerous shampoo at a TSA checkpoint.  I wish I could say I thought this story was too speculative.  It's not.  It's already happening here.  Even last fall's election hasn't dramatically changed the fact that the terrorists have won: they've terrorized us into doing this to ourselves.

Ballot placement is an easy decision: Little Brother easily tops the other three novels I've read so far.  My current Best Novel ballot:

1. Little Brother
2. Zoe's Tale
3. The Graveyard Book
4.
5. No Award
6. Saturn's Children

with the gigantic Anathem yet to go.

I highly recommend reading this one yourself.  Since it's being distributed under a Creative Commons license, if you're feeling cheap or broke, I can email you a PDF.  Just ask.  But I urge you to buy a copy instead, to support the author:

Comments

[Marilee J. Layman]

I not only read this one myself, I sent an electronic copy of it on a 4G thumbdrive to my nephew as his high school graduation present. It's entirely possible my brother won't let him read it, though.

I think this is Cory's best novel so far, although I still have some problems with the probability of a lot of stuff.

[Kip W]

I certainly enjoyed the book. The sense that things happened too easily, with a well-oiled snik-snik-snik of dominoes falling prearranged patterns was less noticeable than it has been in a lot of books aimed at adults. I appreciate also the how-to nature of the book, which is well done.

[Serge]

Security theater... A couple of years ago, the airport in Albuquerque set up booths thru which some of us would stand while high-pressure jet airs were quickly shot at us. The idea was that it'd loosen off dangerous substances we might be carrying. I guess the people who bought that bill of goods never heard of ziploc bags.

[Serge]

Marilee... It's entirely possible my brother won't let him read it

Some of today's parents grew up in the 1960s and I'd like to ask them how THEY would have felt if their parents had done a fraction of what they do to keep their kids 'safe'.

[Serge]

the lines of barefoot air travelers being carefully protected from dangerous shampoo at a TSA checkpoint. (...) Even last fall's election hasn't dramatically changed the fact that the terrorists have won: they've terrorized us into doing this to ourselves

I'll be happy with Obama if/when he tells the TSA to stop just the shoe-removal. Not that I feel embarassed by the odor that emanates when I take them off, of course.

In spite of all that...

A happy Fourth to my fellow Americans!