Responding to Lindra in the previous thread:

Actually I agree with much of what you said, even though I liked the book. Like what DavidS (@ 14 in the previous thread) said about propaganda -- I'm also curious how this reads to somebody who's not already of that mindset. Possibly it does sound fanatical and unrealistic; it's hard for me to tell.

He gives advice on how to start learning and gives out springboards to start from on various topics but we don't see him learning anything himself other than getting a few 'oops, I overlooked that' moments (which aren't even internally consistent).

This is also a good point. I vaguely remember reading how-to-write advice that said the hero should start out completely unprepared for the world he was venturing into, and have to learn its ways, etc. But eventually I began to suspect and avoid most how-to-write advice because it interfered with my instincts, and now I'm not so sure it's as simple as that. Maybe it depends on personal preference and what's best for the story. Thinking about it in this case, I wonder if Marcus was allowed to start out with all the answers (tech-wise) so the reader could take on the learning role. Or something. I bailed out of my English major, so literary criticism may not be my thing.

If Marcus starts out with none of the answers, the story doesn't even happen, does it? He doesn't skip school to play the ARG, doesn't get caught up in the attack - and even if he does, he doesn't become a suspect because he doesn't have the locked-down phone, etc.

You could probably write around that problem, but I'm not sure I could believe a 17-year-old boy gaining enough 1337 hacker skills to go up against Homeland Security from scratch, in a matter of months.

Marcus is definitely an arrogant, cocky, know-it-all, and that can be annoying. Much like many 17-year-old boys of my acquaintance.

Emily @ 2: If Marcus starts out with none of the answers, the story doesn't even happen, does it?

You're probably absolutely right, and I didn't even THINK of that. This is why I can't lit-crit (and also probably why I can't lit-write).

I was a relatively low-level geek in high school, but if there had been ARGs and I'd known about them, I think I would've skipped school to play. And been caught.

I think Little Brother was great, and easily Cory's best book (so far). I didn't mind most of the infodumps - Cory's an especially good expository writer, and it's clear that he (and Marcus) have a huge enthusiasm for these things. Reading about topics about which the writer is that enthusiastic is always enjoyable. I think there was only one, near the end, that felt like it broke the pacing of the book. Things were coming up to a big climax and suddenly we're learning about LARP protocols or something, and I was impatient to get that part over with to find out what happened.

The one hugely missing piece for me was that for an intensely political book, there was almost no politics. The San Francisco school board didn't have anything to say about the new curriculum? The Mayor or City Council didn't have any complaints about Federal takeover? It's not at all beyond belief that Marcus wouldn't think of those things, but they would happen. In this sense I think the book buys into the Silicon Valley view that politics is essentially irrelevant. But I don't think Cory believes this, and it nagged at me that politics was so completely absent.

But that shouldn't at all take away from the sheer can't-put-it-downness of it, or Marcus's hugely appealing voice. I think YA is a good match for Cory's style and interests, and I hope the book does well.

One of the most appealing things about the book is Marcus' continuing recognition that this time, he's done something which could get kids disappeared, and his struggle with pushing forward anyway.

Goodnight Julia @ 1:

I'm not sure it's a learning role - it's more like a listening role. It occurred to me a few minutes ago that part of why Marcus is such an uncomfortable character for me is that he alternates between the hero (explodes things!) and the sage (knows things!) and the teacher (tells things!), and the shifting combinations between the beginning (the sage and the teacher) the interrogation scene (the hero and the sage) through to the end (hero and teacher and sage) come off as unbalanced.

It's not transition or development from one role to the other so much as what's most convenient when the action (explodes things!) can't quite be set aside for explanation (tells things!) or setting up further action (knows things!) so it gets slurried together and comes up as infodump and knowing-all, especially when placed against the parts where he does handle Marcus' double- or triple-duty well.

Emily H. @ 2:

I make distinctions between no answers/completely unprepared for the world the hero (explodes things!*) is entering, as per Julia's comment at #1, and competence. It's possible to be perfectly competent and know your stuff while making actual mistakes because you're guessing at the things you don't know but have stuff in related fields that you can cobble together to get pretty good estimates of what works and what doesn't.

There's a lot of planning in Marcus' internal narrative, but not a lot of conjecture, and when there's little conjecture and a whole lot of confidence (overconfidence at times) because the character just knows that much, it tips over into unrealistic.

*I just like typing 'explodes things!'

Emily H @ 2 -
You could probably write around that problem, but I'm not sure I could believe a 17-year-old boy gaining enough 1337 hacker skills to go up against Homeland Security from scratch, in a matter of months.

This is the more important part.

If, somehow Marcus had gotten caught up in a DHS dragnet, and things largely went the same way (somehow), and he did not have at least a baseline set of 1337 skillz to fall back on, he would have been clotheslined by DHS the first time he tried acquiring them (through his keylogged laptop), without some sort of Jedi mentor to take the young Padawan under his wing and teach him the black hat ropes, or he was really, really lucky.

(As it is, he does learn some new things - or needs to be reminded of them (public keys and setting up known circles, for instance), and he does get lucky a couple of times - like when he notices that his frankenzilla laptop is not exactly the way he left it).

One criticism that I saw that has a little validity is that the DHS folks are, to a degree, strawmen - but this can be excused, I think, due to the fact that, well, we're looking through the eyes of an angry (and scared - and angrier because he's scared) 17 year old - he's not inclined to be charitable to these people who scare the feces out of him. And we do see police/figures of authority behaving well - the two cops who let a bunch of jammers go, the SWAT and CHP officers that eventually break things down at little gitmo, etc.

Here's the brief review of the book I posted to my LJ yesterday:

I thought it was an interesting piece of writing, with young adult characters who are reasonably believable in the choices and mistakes they make. There's some interesting technological gimmickery in it, too, much of which is not too far from reality. Also, an interesting history lesson about the Yippie counterculture of the '60s and '70s.

Its one big flaw is the flaw common to much libertarian political SF: the bad guys (Homeland Security) are painted as universally, almost cartoonishly eeevil ratbastards rather than the ordinary folks with feet of clay they (probably) are in real life. It feels like the book is knocking down straw men in the service of its political thesis, especially since the DHS villains take some measures in the book that they have not (yet) done in real life. But I suppose you could say Doctorow is advising people on what to do when and if they do take those measures.

Anyway, I read it for free and don't feel like I got short-changed. So I guess that's something.

I burned through the HTML version last night. (And sent Cory a typo note which he responded to immediately; he should get away from the machine! But then, so should I.) The first few infodumps annoyed me a bit because I already knew much of the geekness. But I'm a 40yo nerd who once had dinner with Phil Zimmerman and a bunch of other crypto guys and heard the infamous lap dancing story. I quickly realised the exposition was very deft. It doesn't derail the story but provides more than enough information to allow anyone interested to start googling and learning. The only thing I found jarring was the Wolfenstein reference. Surely that is way too old for a 17 year old even one today?

I agree that the book doesn't isn't "about" politics. But it is politicsing. Maybe even radicalising for a few. I predict many banings!

Also, while I don't think it was at all cynical (really!), IF it was, dedicating each chapter to a *different* bookstore was brilliant marketing!

All in all, very good. I'm sendin one as a gift to a 13 year old niece. Who knows?

Alex @ 3: Re: the politics bit, my brain appears to have filed it as "any data about that from mainstream media would be entirely unreliable" - that's certainly the way a lot of the teens I work with (independent private school) tend to look at it, even without a crisis of that kind. I also wonder how much of it was just in abeyance, due to the DHS taking over. (Could just be my brain filling in the details.)

In general: it's a fantastic book, and I have been pushing it at people (both staff and students.)

The voice, to pick up on comments in the open thread, read to me the same way a lot of YA books do: this is not quite the voice of the kids I work with. There's more narrative coherence, for one thing (not a bad thing in a book, though.)

But if you took Marcus and dropped him into the school I'm in? He'd fit right in, and I can see exactly which groups he'd start hanging out with, even with some dialect and focus variances. That's a level of reality I don't always see in YA books. Yes, he's arrogant, and yes, there's stuff he utterly misses. But I've not only known people who sounded just like that, but been there myself.

One criticism I had with the book is that I thought the confrontations between DHS and Marcus' "movement" is that they are too bloodless.

I am too young to remember Kent State--but I can't help feeling that the tactics of Marcus (and those who emulate him) would lead to bloodshed. Of course, i think that would have led to a very different book--one where the DHS wins, and their boot stamps on the face of San Francisco forever.

I got the impression that DHS wasn't so much into 'finding terrorists' as into 'making an example out of a city', so people won't argue with them when they say that they need more powers. They might not have given the school board or the county supervisors any choices, either, just 'do this or you'll be locked up, too'.

RE JDC #9:
"The first few infodumps annoyed me a bit because I already knew much of the geekness."

Yes...there did seem to be a bit of "As you know Bob" as Marcus discusses technology a lot in the early going. I don't think it kills the momentum, at least it didn't kill my reading pleasure any.

This past Sunday, I sat down in a bookstore, read Little Brother cover-to-cover, and bought a copy. And then I immediately turned over my copy to my mother, a once-and-possibly-future grade school teacher.

I didn't find Marcus' voice jarring, at least no more so than many of the Heinlein juvies, or many of the other books I read and enjoyed as a YA. Yes, he's got a bit of Stereotypical SFnal Hero's Disease (super-competent, didactic, lantern-jawed... you know). But again, that's pretty common in this sort of literature.

As to the characterization of the DHS people -- I found it fairly believable. It could be my sense of paranoia, but I could easily buy a top-level discussion like the one in the DHS video Marcus gets from Masha.

Speaking of Masha: I like the way Cory played up the fact that the only difference between Masha and Marcus is that she's a little more self-centered, slightly more amoral. And made one bad decision, under extreme stress.

Regarding the question of whether Marcus is a plausible teenager: when I was 16 (I am now 27), I shared his interest in learning about technology and how to circumvent restrictions, but I had much more respect for existing authorities and was much more cautious. I had friends at my (very snooty) high school who did act like Marcus and, while I was eager to learn technical skills from them, I thought they were being somewhat immature and silly. There is probably some wish fulfillment in reading a character who shares my interests but not my restraint; I might not have liked it as much if I were still Marcus' age and hanging out with people like him.

This morning I was thinking about the racial and class politics of Little Brother. It seems to me that the most rebellious kids are from white upper middle class liberal families. (If I recall correctly, Marcus' mom is an ACLU member of unspecified profession and his Dad is a professor/consultant; Marcus lives in the East Bay but goes to school in SF, which I assume means he is at some sort of magnet school; and both his and Ange's parents permit their children to explore the city and date freely and, in his case, hang out at cons.) His non-white friends are much more aware of the risks they are taking, and object to his pranksterism. The only working class person we see in a resistance role, the Turkish coffeeman, resists in a nearly invisible manner and is reluctant to explain his actions to others. On the other hand, when we see the prisoners freed at the end of the novel, they are almost all minorities.

I think that is basically accurate. Our society codes white kids breaking rules as mischief and, while we monitor and restrict them, we almost never treat them as actual criminals. For this reason, white kids (including my younger self) get a lot more upset at the restrictions placed on us and feel a lot freer to try to circumvent them.

Was anyone else thinking of Heinlein's Between Planets while reading LB? But I guess that dates me ...

Who here is working on an annotated edition? Is someone is, and has a chunk of it to work through, I'd be happy to pitch in.

Davis @ #15 - This morning I was thinking about the racial and class politics of Little Brother. It seems to me that the most rebellious kids are from white upper middle class liberal families.

Cory took a stab at addressing the race and class issues. I think he did a good job of it overall, while writing a protagonist what didn't have him appropriating a culture for Marcus that wasn't his.

GoodnightJulia @ 1: The only other book I can remember actually had me noticing a propagandistic tone in the writing is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. And the prose in Atlas Shrugged did make me wince at times, and did make me utterly believe that I was reading a prolonged strawman attack.

This didn't give me that feeling.

Alex @ 4: One thing that impressed me about Little Brother was the sanity of the info dumps. It discusses many themes I am more or less familiar with (as I'm sure is the case with quite a few of the early readers), and it Didn't Make Me Wince. It really didn't!

DavidS @ 15: Marcus' mother is a Relocation Consultant, and while I didn't use a map while reading, and my SF/Bay area geography-fu is weak to say the least, I got the impression repeatedly that Marcus views East Bay as "over there", and hence the impression that he lives on the SF peninsula.

Huh, really? I'm too lazy to search right now, but when Marcus was lying to his parents about what happened after the bombing, I thought he said something about having to take some sort of ferry home. I also thought there was something about not being able to get into the city by BART because the tunnel was bombed.

Marcus's explanations didn't read like infodumps to me. They were entertaining for the most part, and I think I might finally get the dual-key crypto, thanks to him.

One of the few things that bugged me was Van being secretly in love with Marcus. It wasn't really necessary to the plot. I would rather have seen some proof that guys and girls can just be good friends without it being romantic.

I did like Ange, though, and how very strong and funky she was. It was cool that she got to be M1k3y sometimes, too, even if she didn't get the credit for it.

... My attempts at con-crit keep devolving into squee. Fortunately, this hasn't scared off the coworkers I've thrust the book upon.

It's pretty clear in there that Marcus lives in SF proper, though his Dad works on the other side, and $love_interests go to school/live over there as well.

Shay 20: I finally got dual-key crypto from this book too. I was completely confused by it before.

Not that I understand the MATH, mind you, but even the CONCEPT was stopping me dead before.

DavidS @ #19: I thought he said something about having to take some sort of ferry home.

You're right, he did. But he preceded that by saying that he and his friends were (if I recall properly -- I started reading the book around midnight, and finished it at 5:00 am the same "evening") in the East Bay area on some type of school field trip, thus requiring the ferry to get back home (to the SF area, rather than taking the ferry from SF to the East Bay.)

One thing that I liked about the tech was that, for the most part, nothing was really secure. Xnet had moles and people who could backtrace mikey from pretty much the initial drop of the disks.

I'm starting to get disturbed by Marcus holding the massive larp to get out, knowing that it was going to bring DHS down on many of the participants. It doesn't seem to match with the standing down of the arphid jamming.

Paul @ 11: Agreed, at least in part.

I've been in demonstrations much like the ones Marcus described, shut down in much the same manner as in the book. What Marcus tells about the results of police violence is accurate but undetailed and bloodless. On the other hand, dwelling on that possibility is part of why there aren't many demonstrations these days. I get the need for balance, but this was a bit off the mark.

DavidS @ 19: I believe he claimed to have been in the East Bay (class project? I think) and unable to get back. You are spot on about the BART tunnel being bombed.

A personal note: I flew out to the Bay Area in late September of 2001 (cheap flights! Yay! Um, wait...) and had Dylan's masterpiece Love and Theft playing in my rental car a lot.

(I bought it the day it came out, 9/11, and that's another story.)

Every time I drove across the Bay Bridge and "Mississippi" came on, as Dylan sang, "Things should start to get interesting right about now", I visualized the bridge collapsing under me. It continued, "My clothes are wet, tight on my skin, Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in." I still get that flash every now and then.

I read one of the ARCs, and my complete reaction was "Well, that was worth about what I paid for it."

I like Heinlein juveniles, I love the Young Wizards series, there was a time when I read almost nothing but YA stuff because it could be guaranteed to have plot. LB, however, left me cold.

I kept wanting to smack Marcus for being a frigging idiot. He was so smart he outsmarted himself, on numerous occasions, most notably in his obstinate refusal to figure out when the authority figures had stopped playing by the rules (something every teenager I've ever encountered is quite good at). He was simultaneously way too savvy and way too naive. I can totally sympathize with the desire to be able to get places people don't want you to be--I learned to pick locks in college--but that doesn't make me like him...

Infodumps. Oh, dear heaven the infodumps. Every couple of paragraphs, information I don't want yet can't proceed without reading and processing. If you want to write a treatise on stupid security theater and how to circumvent it, just do that! Or put it in an appendix or something.

Two words: sex scene. Why? (I feel much the same way about gratuitous sex in adult novels, I note.)

The whole book was preaching at me. It was slightly more elegant than Atlas Shrugged, I guess.

Perhaps the problem is that I am not the target audience?

Wow, I completely didn't get any AYKB feeling from the "infodumps" at all. They read, to me, like Marcus was just explaining something you needed to know to understand the next bit of his story.

And I'm not the target market either, being Ancient of Days.

One of the things I really appreciated about this book is that the San Francisco color read pretty accurately, although I would have staged the concert in Golden Gate park, not Dolores Park because it's too small. (It is, however, a gem, and fits with the long-walking-distance to Potrero bit.)

As far as the expository sections went, I read them at speed.

What Carrie said.

I'll have to add to that the ending: the Good Adults come in and make everything right. I didn't believe it and Doctorow didn't convince me that he believed it.

I think, now that I've calmed down from my initial sarcastic reaction and resolved to keep reading, I'm somewhere between Carrie S. and Shay.

I keep thinking up ways it could have been brilliant, and ways it's already disappointed me, and how it contradicted itself, and how it didn't, and Marcus being so irritating and informative and just a little robotic in his information-information-emotion tiem naow-information-information thinking, for all that his voice was on the bombastic side. It's not particularly awesome writing, and it's not a particularly awesome plot, but it could've been good, dangnabbit.

Jon 29: The Good Adults come in and TRY to make everything right, but as usual, they fail. They stop the worst abuses in the short term, yeah, but the monster goes free to terrorize innocents again. Unless they sent her to Fallujah, which would be fair. And Marcus points out their failure, and goes on from there.

I, of course, wanted the monster to die horribly, and preferably slowly, but that would have been unrealistic. Cory could have had the President give her a medal, and that would be perfectly in line with what we've seen happen in the past 7+ years.

Tangential to Larry@28 - I was surprised by how local Marcus's online friends seemed to be. Especially after he went missing, I would have expected him to have a bunch of email from friends all over the world asking about what happened (not just to him but to the city).

Maybe that's just because most of the people I've connected with online are not local.

Very accurate descriptions of the initial arrest/stress position/interrogation episode. Brrr.

I'll agree completely that Marcus was arrogant, bombastic, and very pleased with his own abilities. And that's what made his character believable to me. Revolutionaries, especially partially-successful revolutionaries, have to be supremely confident in their ability to win the day; much less confidence than that and they won't take action at all, knowing the cost of failing; a little less and they won't succeed because their strategies will be too careful.

Of course, this means that they need a lot of luck to succeed. And sure enough, the road to revolution is piled high with the corpses of supremely confident young people whose luck ran out. That doesn't make success unbelievable, just unlikely. And unlikely heroes are common in fiction.

One point that the infodumps made clear was that Marcus wasn't inventing his hacks on the spot, or pulling bold new technology out of his ass.* He was standing on the shoulders of giants, as we all do. And Cory made the same point about political movements, which delighted me. This is not the first time in the history of the US, let alone the world, that we the people have been faced with a government and power structure that wants us to shut up and go away while they destroy our freedom and rip off our livelihood. The only thing he didn't mention about the last time was that we** didn't finish the job, and the rot has come back even worse this time.

I've read some really skanky political propaganda masquerading as fiction: Communist, Socialist, Cold War Reactionary, and Libertarian. Little Brother was quite readable compared to almost all of that; in fact I found it quite readable in general. It was interesting though, to compare it to Matter, Iain M. Bank's new Culture novel, which I was finishing when my copy of Little Brother arrived.† Matter is a very well-written book by a writer who has as deep a concern about the morality and ethics of government as Cory does, but who chooses to express it more indirectly, and, in some senses, more generically. I won't try to compare the books point by point; I don't think that would be fair to either, but I will say that there is something to interest and excite me in both.

I don't think it's possible to judge a book like Little Brother outside the context of politics and revolutionary zeal that's brought so much attention to it. That's part of what it is. So while the characterization is not as deep or quite as realistic as it might be, because there are things that Cory needs Marcus to say, that's not the drawback it might be in a book that wasn't trying to promote a political viewpoint. But, as I said, compared to a lot of such books, Little Brother holds up pretty well, IMO.

* How many sf novels have ended with the hero reaching around and pulling out some überweapon based on brand-new physics and no engineering work at all, implemented with a bobby-pin (I can hear the chorus now, "What's a bobby pin?") and 20 cm of duct tape?

** I include myself in the 'we'; I was there and part of the movement, and I backed off for awhile to have kids and a life, and turned around to find we'd been suckered by a bunch of bozos who'd learned from what we did and were going to make damn sure it didn't work the next time.

† I missed out on the ARCs by not even noticing the thread for 12 hours or so; I ordered a copy from Amazon in part because I've been thinking about how to bring down DHS as an exercise, and was curious to see how Cory's techniques, which got reviewed early by experts like Bruce Schnier, related to my ideas. Turns out I'm much more indirect; my ideas don't involve sticking my finger in their eyes so much as breaking in and publishing incriminating memos.

I think there's something interesting about the way LB-as-fiction and LB-as-propaganda work at cross-purposes to each other. There are lots of points where I thought, "This is what we're supposed to listen to and learn from," and other points where I thought, "This is Marcus being a dumb kid, and we're not supposed to think he's right." And there are points where it could be either one.

That's not a bad thing, mind you! I think, without that tension, it wouldn't have worked for me.

Alex #4, Litter Brother seemed to me to be full of politics, just the parts of politics that exist outside of the formal democratic process.

Avram #37 Litter Brother?

Of course, Fragano. Litter Brother is Cory's new book about a kitteh who is savagely taken to the vet after fleas infest his peaceful yard, and fights back against his oppressors by peeing in their shoes.

Xopher #39: Of course. I was wrong to think that it might be on an entirely different thems and have a sequel entitled Palanquin Sister.

I'm notoriously bad at reading anything critically the first time. I have passionate, torrid affairs with new books and they can do no wrong until the second or third reading, unless they're really egregiously terrible. This is one of the ones that can do no wrong right now.

That said. I'm 25, which means you can trust me for a couple more months. The only instance of language use/character voice that tripped me was "dating or whatever we're doing now." I'd say that, but I was in probably the last cohort that didn't use "hooking up" as a catch-all for that weird early stage of getting together with a romantic partner. Otherwise, Marcus talks a lot like the kids I hung out with in high school.

Infodumps didn't lose me except for the Internet protocol one. I had no idea what was being said there.

But yeah. Right now, I love the hell out of this book.

I even felt like the sex scenes totally captured that teenage feeling, the one where you're realizing that yes, you can affect the world, you are an agent, and sex is part of that because you can see and feel how what you're doing is affecting someone else -- and you realize it's the same for them.

Bruce Cohen @ 34: You have pegged it exactly.

I have to come down a little more on Lindra's side, the more I think about it.
The voice, Marcus's voice, did not at all strike me as a HS kid--like I said in my review, it struck me as Cory Doctorow. It didn't help that the infodumps* were mostly related to things that the author very frequently discusses on BoingBoing. They often struck me as incoherent; as Lindra said in another thread, this Marcus was a vehicle for information that Doctorow wanted to give, and all too often the story and character suffered for that goal.

More and more, Little Brother feels like a textbook and not a story.

*And Xopher, #27-"Wow, I completely didn't get any AYKB feeling from the "infodumps" at all. They read, to me, like Marcus was just explaining something you needed to know to understand the next bit of his story." Isn't that EXACTLY what AYKB moments are, i.e. Ways of giving you necessary information without actually working them into the story?

JimR @ 43: I hear what you're saying, but I could also say it about pretty much every major Heinlein work from, oh, somewhere in the fifties on to the end, including the juveniles.

(Godwin 2.0: Get another point of reference besides Heinlein for these discussions.)

Right after I read LB (which I loved, by the way, infodumps and all), I read another book called After with a very similar setup. After has a much less interesting protagonist, a much less plausible plot, and no useful real-life information whatsoever. It also has the usual YA problem of no competent adults who aren't villains. As a result, I may be inclined to overpraise Little Brother, because, damn it, Doctorow got SO MANY THINGS RIGHT.

John #44: (Godwin 2.0: Get another point of reference besides Heinlein for these discussions.)

Not necessarily. The bedtime reading going on downstairs as I type is "Farmer in the Sky". The target is a 12-y.o. girl who likes Heinlein quite a bit -- though I believe he has a rather antique flair, what with the slide rules and all.

Xopher @ 39: I'm sure the vet was just following orders, and in real life is a very nice person. It was those nasty public health officials who made the vet do all those awful things.

I read an ARC so maybe this was addressed in the final book. The terrorist attack is described as having taken out both the bay bridge and the BART transbay tunnel.

Later in the book, there is repeated talk of people using BART to get to the east bay, and the protagonist actually goes to the east bay using BART with no explanation of how the transbay tunnel is back up and running.

Did anybody else notice this? Was this seeming discrepancy explained in the finished book?

Lila #45: Francine Prose's After? Huh. I really loved that book. I think that, while it covers similar ground, its goals and methods were very different from Little Brother's. Actually, I think it's a more direct companion piece to 1984, which also doesn't contain any actionable information, but deals more in metaphor and warning.

I love both books, in very, very different ways. One way they're similar, though, is that both are completely unashamed of how transparent their allegory is. I appreciate that.

I just this minute finished the book - and, as it happens, this is the very first book that I've read in its entirety on my computer. (Thanks, Cory!)

(And I feel like I now have a moral obligation to go out and buy a dead-tree copy.)

As I'm still not entirely comfortable with spoilers, so: V pna bayl ubcr gung jr pna ertnva bhe pbagel nf rnfvyl nf Znephf erpynvzf uvf.

Xopher 31: "The Good Adults come in and TRY to make everything right, but as usual, they fail" Yeah, but I think that even making things all right to the extent that they did is -- sadly -- wildly unrealistic, given the last eight years.

I mean, the Governor of a state overriding DHS and forcing a confrontation with the President on a National Security issue? I can't imagine it. I wish I could -- I'd like that country better -- but I can't.

To make this book realistic, take the first couple hundred pages right up until the torture scene which is interrupted over the Ch 20-21 break. But have the torture continue; have Marcus slowly go mad with pain and fear and isolation and hopelessness; and never have any contact with the outside world again, so that we never find out what happens to any of the dangling threads.

Of course I understand why Cory didn't write that book. And I really enjoyed LB a lot. But I find it hard to imagine any ending even as partially happy as the one we got that doesn't feel like an utterly unrealistic deus ex machina.

So like Jon #29, I didn't believe it; and the partial nature of the rescue, the ultimate failure (which was actually far less of a failure than Xopher portrayed... yeah, the Monster lived, but she got shipped to Iraq, where the odds of her dying rather than torturing someone else are depressingly high; and after all, the Guitmo by the bay was shut down, and the good teacher returned to the classroom, etc, etc.).

I liked the book. It made me hopeful. But I didn't believe it -- particularly the end. Given the Orwell-reference framework, I have to wonder what the dark ending would have looked like. (Although, yeah, it wouldn't help sell the book -- or the important political ideas that the book does, in fact, persuasively convey.)

Or maybe I'm just too bitter. I'm way over 25, so probably not to be trusted.

JimR #43: "The voice, Marcus's voice, did not at all strike me as a HS kid--like I said in my review, it struck me as Cory Doctorow. It didn't help that the infodumps* were mostly related to things that the author very frequently discusses on BoingBoing"

Yeah, I'd agree with that too. It didn't really bother me -- gripes aside, I really did like the book a lot, couldn't put it down, thought it's politics were both convincing and important, etc. -- but I have to agree that the voice sounded like Cory at BoingBoing, not a high school kid.

(Of course, I'm not in high school, and don't hang with high school kids -- I teach 18-19 yo students, but that year makes a difference, and even if they speak like that they probably wouldn't to me, etc etc.)

hi, lurker delurking here. I got one of the advance copies (as did at least one other person on my lj friends-list), read it immediately and with a certain amount of enjoyment, and then thought about it a while, and here's what I posted, fwiw and ymmv obviously:

So, I got an advance copy of Cory Doctorow's new novel Little Brother the other day, courtesy of Making Light - as if they didn't do me a big enough favor just by existing, now they're giving away books as well. It's as if Go Fug Yourself was also handing out donuts. Anyway, so, partly because of the publisher's brilliant marketing strategy of just giving it away, I'd been hearing good things about the book, and was all excited to read it, and - meh.

Little Brother definitely has its heart in the right place, being a young adult novel about post-9/11 restrictions on civil liberties and how much that sucks, but the story gets hijacked by gizmo-worship. It's all, hey kids! here's how to build your own surveillence-free internet on your X-Boxes! here's how to subvert the tracking functions on your bus pass! here's how to have fun with a flash mob! So it ends up being, basically, Wired Magazine Escapes from Guantanamo Bay. Also, the characters are pretty much unbelievable, though maybe they're unbelievable in ways that will appeal to teen readers? I mean, I would be delighted to hand this book to a teen reader this year (it's going to be outdated in approximately ten minutes) and I wasn't sorry I read it and I feel like a heel having snarfed the nice free copy and now complaining about it, but there it is.

Reading Little Brother did make me think that I want to read novels about the characters at its margins - the people stuck in off-shore prisons without habeus corpus rights, the teachers unable to figure out what to say to their students about the national-security state, the military recruiters ... I'm just not as interested in the technologically-empowered (white, male, young) activists. Maybe it's just that I feel like I know their story already.

Xopher #39 -- Mah seekrit XBox crypto network, let me show you it.

Haven't read it yet, but I was really tempted to buy a fingerprint reader yesterday so I could experiment on it.

I'm really not in tune with the complaints that the schools board rolls over when the DHS says play dead, or it's the grups that save the day at the end...

I think we can take it as read that a LOT of politics of all sorts is going on that is completely off Marcus' radar. Same goes for the behaviour of the DHS staff being "strawmen". Are we expecting a re-run of the infamous "Ah, mein freund fritz, vile ve are guarding ze prisoners on ziss verrrrrry qviet nacht, let me show you ein photo of mein sveetheart" scenes.

They may have "world's greatest mom" mugs and have only taken the job to pay for their dying mother's medical treatments, but, as far as Marcus is concerned, they're monsters.

Again on my hobby horse, have a look at www.lucifereffect.org, and how being in that kind of situation, whether it's in the basement of a university or a prison in occupied territory, can turn you into a cliche of authoritarian abuse. It's not unrealistic.

And with the grups save the day... what, are Xnet supposed to? If you're looking for Marcus' "hugging and learning" moment, it's when he realises that, hey, mobilizing the grups will do his cause more good than harm, that "trust no-one over 25" is a counter productive slogan. If he'd trusted his parents earlier, the hole he finds himself in would be a hell of a lot shallower.

I'm making the assumption that everything that happens during the narrative is more than everything that gets into the novel, here.

The book could do with more expansion online than a simple set of HOWTO's: I mean, given all this ,I'm itching to write an interview with Marcus from a source that brings all these niggles into focus ("Marcus, one of the most notorious slogans of Xnet was 'never trust anyone over 25'; yet you were removed from the DHS prison thanks to the efforts of a great number of people, of whom the vast majority were over that age. How do you square that?")

Jeremy Lassen @ 48: In the final version, Marcus takes a VTA bus (I think I have this right--it's the first leg of a trip I'd planned to take last month) over and connects to local service.

Stephen Frug @ 51:

I mean, the Governor of a state overriding DHS and forcing a confrontation with the President on a National Security issue? I can't imagine it.

I would not believe it of any state but California, the state that legalized medical marijuana and started negotiation of greenhouse gas policies with a foreign country.

That last under the Gropenator, even--put him up in this situation against President Clinton (who finally pushed me into choosing Obama with her "we don't need no steenkin experts" shitdickery this last week) and this is plausible. Add on that the Bay Area is volatile at the best of times--the perfect place to try to make an example if you're playing for all the marbles--and I buy it.

(When I was there last month, I stayed at the home of a friend help overturn and burn a police car during the White Night riots. He's gotten older, but I have no doubts he'd do it again tomorrow.)

If anything, I was surprised that it took Marcus and the XNetters to get things going. Possibly that could be because they came from a less expected angle.

As for the Monster--you know, I thought the only distinctly evil person in the book was the new teacher. Torture ain't nothin' compared to corrupting the youth under color of education. Anyway, she's obviously a valuable asset to DHS. They went to some trouble to preserve her, and I'm quite certain she's happily plying her trade in Abu Gharib 2.0. She's not dead, Jim. sql? kthxbai

Reaction after reading: Googling 'ParanoidLinux'.

To really understand some of it, you probably have to have lived in the Bay Area for a while. Taking out the Bay Bridge that way hits deep. Taking out BART, too, makes it 'OMGWTFBBQ!'
(I wouldn't put it past some parts of government to do that kind of double-whammy not-really-fake terrorist attack, especially if it's that bridge and that city.)

Oh yeah, the terrorist attack: anyone else massively relieved to get to the end of the book without a lame "TEH DHS BLOO UP TEH BRIDGE!!!!" plot line?

Xopher@22: Let me know if this helps with the math.

First of all, the specific type of public-key encryption Marcus mentioned in the book (RSA) relies on modular arithmetic, also known in grade school as "clock math" ("What's 8 o'clock plus 5 hours?" "1 o'clock." etc.).

In modular arithmetic, you can add, subtract, and multiply just like you would normally -- but at the end you divide by your "modulus" (12, for clocks) and take the remainder.

There is a major theorem regarding modular arithmetic, called "Fermat's Little Theorem", which says that if your modulus is a prime (P), and you take a number not divisible by the modulus and raise it to the appropriate power (P-1), you get 1.

That is, t^{P-1} = 1 (mod P) for t not divisible by P.

This can be generalized to non-prime moduli. Specifically, if your modulus is the product of two primes (N = P * Q), then you have
t^{(P-1) * (Q-1)} = 1 (mod N)
for t not divisible by P or Q.

Now, this also means that if you have two numbers (d and e), whose product is one more than a multiple of the special exponent above, you can get back to your original text (t), i.e.
if d * e = 1 + k * (P-1) * (Q-1)
then
t^{d * e} (mod N) = t^{1} * (t^{(P-1)*(Q-1)})^k (mod N)
= t * 1^k (mod N) = t (mod N).

This turns this whole arithmetic exercise into a good cryptosystem. Why? Because you pick one of the numbers (d). Since you know your two prime factors (P and Q), you can generate the other number (e). Then your public key is (d,N), your private is e, and to encrypt with your private key you raise your message to the e'th power mod N,
c = t^e (mod N)
and then anyone can verify that the message came from you with the public key:
c^d (mod N) = t^{d*e} (mod N) = t (mod N).

Let me know where you got lost, and I can try to elaborate.

I just finished it, and a few quick thoughts before I post a more detailed review on my blog and Amazon.

The 'info-dumps' didn't bug me. While I'm not a coder (beyond tweaking things here and there when I need to in basic 'monkey-see, monkey-do' fashion), I am a video encoder geek, so I loved reading the expositions.

The book also surprised me. For example, I was sure about halfway through, that Darryl was not only alive, but completely turned over to the other side and there was going to be a bloody confrontation at the end. (On the other hand, I was happy in the end he hadn't.)

AnywAY, just a few quick thoughts thus far....

John Farrell @ 61: I was afraid that Masha was going to turn out to be Darryl. Cory'd set that up by talking about males fronted by female personas, and I wouldn't be shocked if he'd considered the idea.

It took me a little while to get into it (70-odd pages) -- the Japanese references threw me at first since they weren't always on target. No official game is going to require that you download doujinshi to play (generally speaking, this is against Japanese fan culture) and if you know what a doujinshi is, you probably wouldn't use 'toon' to describe the characters in them. A friend suggested that this might be down to the tight first-person narration and I also considered that this might be due to it being set in the near-future when things have changed. Having said that, I was laughing to myself at the way Japan is a shortcut for cool in this book; I read about "Harajuku Fun Madness" as I was on the train to Harajuku.

A few typos and renaming errors, but I'm one of the lucky readers who got the ARC and it's probably nothing that won't be fixed in the final print run, I'm sure. To be honest, it added to the "I'm reading it FIRST mwahahaha" feeling. *ahem*

Marcus, the main character, was far too cocky at first. I really started to like it once he was not-arrested and he wasn't as smart as he thought he was. Then the book really started to pick up and I fell in love with it. The pacing and voice really come together to really make everything work. Doctorow has a great way of mixing what you know about recent events, retelling them, then throwing a little bit of his own world's history into it to make this near-future come alive. He references real tech and LB tech in the same sentence to great effect.

There are some great pieces of information in this book, and I hope they are true. I want to know if that spy camera detection light actually works and what DOES happen if you put a frozen grape in the microwave. The Google, it does nothing.

One thing I was wondering -- they're all worried about the arphid cards, but aren't their mobiles (cell phones) more traceable?

There are some moments I thought that a teenager would never say. For example, I don't think teens would actually describe what they do "teen culture" and I think there's too much emphaisis on teenagers. I can't believe that some of the events were only attended by teens and under-twenty-fives. I have to confess that it irritated me slightly when he described as LARP as something for teens only -- all the LARPers I know are adults. Perhaps I'm a bitter twenty-something. :)

I wasn't quite sure about one aspect of the ending... Van likes Marcus, but ends up with Daryl just because he liked her? The rest is good -- good doesn't entirely win out over evil and Marcus is still in trouble with the law.

So what does it say about freedom? It doesn't spend much time on 'The current situation is bad', because it assumes you already know this. If you don't, this book will do nothing for you. What it does do, is highlight specific areas of concern and methods of fighting back alongside some cool trivia.I should point out that I tend to pick books apart when I like them -- and I really liked this one.

Pete @ 59

But he doesn't say they didn't do it, either.

KP @ #63, try searching youtube.com for "grape microwave".

Caroline @ 41: "I even felt like the sex scenes totally captured that teenage feeling, the one where you're realizing that yes, you can affect the world, you are an agent, and sex is part of that because you can see and feel how what you're doing is affecting someone else -- and you realize it's the same for them."

I really liked the sex scenes. They were so authentically teenage and awksome*--full of inconvenient interruptions, tentative boundary-testing (it's so weird in novels when people just rip each other's clothes off without so much as flirting beforehand), and genuine excitement. But best of all: a teenage girl who is actively involved in her own sexuality! Squee.

I found the hem of her t-shirt and tugged. She put her hands over her head and pulled back a few inches. I knew that she'd do that. I'd known since the night in the park. Maybe that's why we hadn't gone farther -- I knew I couldn't rely on her to back off, which scared me a little.

Wonderful.

*Awksome (adj) - describing something that is simultaneously awkward and awesome.

II
I also liked the way that Marcus' emotions were so often beyond his control. He wasn't really the fearless bad-ass he thought he was at the beginning. The parts of the book where Marcus gets scared were so raw and humiliating that I got tears in my eyes. It really drives home the point--DHS is trying to control them with fear just as much as the terrorists are. They hack our savannah-monkey brain to control us.

His initial humiliation at the hands of DHS was, I think, also really well done from a plot standpoint. It provides a sort of secret motivation for the rest of his book. It's not really to rescue Darryl, as he admits a couple of times--he mostly just wants revenge.

There it was again. My vow. Not to get Darryl free, but to bring down the entire DHS. That was crazy, even I knew it. But it was what I planned to do. No question about it.

It's also why he doesn't tell his parents--it's too embarassing. It haunts him, forcing him to do a couple of really dumb things, and a couple of brave ones too. If Marcus hadn't been as genuinely terrified as he was, the book would have seemed flat.

III
The very best thing, though, was how Doctorow handled the question of whether to rebel or survive? It's a question that I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, and I think that he did a really good job of showing the complexities of it. It is something that Marcus waffles on a lot. He comes out of the gate all fiery, but he loses steam a couple of times, seriously doubting whether it's worth it. Everytime someone else gets hurt because of what he told them to do, he hesitates, and almost gives up a couple of times.

The reactions of the other main characters are also really good illustrations of the difficulty of this decision. Out of the three who walk out, Marcus is the only one who sticks with the fight all the way. Everyone else gets scared. Take Jolu:

"I can't do it forever," [Jolu] said at last. "Maybe not even for another month. I think I'm through. It's too much risk. The DHS, you can't go to war on them. It's crazy. Really actually crazy." .... He wanted me to say something. What I wanted to say was, Jesus Jolu, thanks so very much for abandoning me! Do you forget what it was like when they took us away? Do you forget what the country used to be like before they took it over? But that's not what he wanted me to say. What he wanted me to say was: "I understand, Jolu. I respect your choice."

That's it, right there. You can't mandate revolution. It's got to be a choice; no one can fight everything that needs fighting all the time. You burn out--you die. People have to be able to choose. (I also really like the "you can get away with this because you're white" bit right after that.)

If I had to pick one thing to point to to prove Little Brother isn't a polemic, this is it: Doctorow is painfully aware of the capacity of revolution to go haywire. He doesn't paint rebellion as a wonderful and good thing. It's genuinely risky, scary work, that should only be done when absolutely necessary, and only to the extent necessary.

heresiarch @ 229 in OT107:

You're right, both in your responses and in what you said about the mentality I was writing from.

It is much easier to make it seem as though there isn't a choice at all, true, and the question of "this pissed me off, what am I willing to risk to say or do something about it?" keeps me awake every few months thinking on what to do, what could be done and how it could be done, and I have always come down on the side of silence. It's been harder for me to do that lately and Little Brother touched a sore spot at a moment when I was having a particularly frustrating time of it wrangling between what I consider my duty as a citizen of a society with a framework that works against and disadvantages swathes of people within it, being in a position I am coming to realise is in itself powerful, and what I'm willing to put my name to when it comes to attempting change for the better. It's a thorny question and there's never a shortcut, and you're right that Doctorow does handle it well.

I also agree that Doctorow is trying to challenge the idea that not everyone can be a superhero. But this seems to be where we differ, as I don't think he does it effectively. To my mind the mix of superhero and everyman doesn't work in the way it's clearly intended to. I think it's a good attempt, a starter to another subgenre of Information Is Power, one specific to how things are right now and how they might be, which is necessary and important. It's a needed piece of literature in itself, whichever form it takes, and the fact of that brings up further questions: does it work? Does it work well enough to push past the list of but-but-buts? Does it succeed in proving its views such that it can be its own answer to those objections? Does it work well enough that it can challenge the inertia of taking the easy way out and allowing it to be yet another soporific story of an unachievable superhero?

I don't think so.

It tries, with explanations and information and trying to make it seem easy and accessible and give the impression that there is an entire world of awesome at one's fingertips, things with which you can be your own superhero too, and I can see how it's intended to work, how it could be made to succeed. There are places and passages within it where the idea and the character and the method of delivery work together to create a really solid, moving message and it's fantastic.

However, there's also the rest of the book where it doesn't, where for one reason or another Marcus seems unreachable and the technology feels inaccessible and the message feels personally irrelevant, like by dint of its own volume its being directed it over my head at someone else.

It could have been so good! I can see how it could work as something energising and powerful and amazing. I can see how it could be something to tie so many people together, working together and discovering things they didn't know they could do. I'm all for that. I can see its importance, now that I'm no longer working off those but-but-buts and had some time to prod at why I had such a strong negative reaction.

But for me, I think it comes down to that I love the concept, and I think it could be fantastic. In my opinion being fantastic requires careful balancing to make sure that its clear-eyed and clear-headed and truly persuasive, that it doesn't snarl on its own convictions and toss out enough rope to hang itself. Little Brother reads to me more torrential than considered, something inspired by a lot of conviction and belief that needed saying, and that comes across strongly enough that its own bluster drowns itself out. It throws so much rope that it doesn't just hang itself but the gallows-yard as well.

No doubt there will be later pieces of literature written with the same or similar concerns, influenced by Little Brother, that will pick up on the importance of its ideology and synthesise it until - to pick up my metaphor elsewhere - it's tapping on the wall and showing a different configuration, not hammering through it. I think those second and third generation stories will be more readable for my tastes and inertia of already having made the choice to keep my head down more than once and uncertainty of whether speaking is in fact a better choice. They will be books far better at encouragement and motivation, not bludgeoning.

Little Brother is a good forerunner, yes, for (as someone said earlier) finally saying all of this somewhere it can be read and disseminated and acted upon by people who would normally never visit Boing Boing or craphound or ML. As the be-all end-all 'send this to everyone you know'? No. I do think one or several like that will come. They're just not here yet.

JimR #43: "The voice, Marcus's voice, did not at all strike me as a HS kid--like I said in my review, it struck me as Cory Doctorow. It didn't help that the infodumps* were mostly related to things that the author very frequently discusses on BoingBoing"

Part of the "problem" might be that we know Cory's voice, in a way in which one doesn't typically know the author of the fiction one reads.

Normally, I wouldn't know that someone who wrote the book I was reading was actually used to writing nonfictionally about the subject they are including in their fiction.

Someone who has never read Making Light or BoingBoing wouldn't have this problem.

Stephen 51: the Monster lived, but she got shipped to Iraq, where the odds of her dying rather than torturing someone else are depressingly high;

Um...depressingly?!?! The only thing I find depressing about her dying is that it would probably be quick!

Avram 54: I iz ded. Ded kittehs don be wotterborded.

Craig 60: I'm at work, where thinking is forbidden, so I'll have to look at it later. Without concentrating too hard, I think I get lost at the non-prime moduli generalization, but I'll try again when I get home.

John 62: She was in Marcus' trust circle. I think that means she'd've had to be at that party, right? So if she'd been Darryl he would've noticed him being there, big time.

I was just reminded of one of the bits in the novel that got me infuriated on Marcus's behalf, a bit that shows Cory knows what Orwell was saying. It's the bit where the DHS agent tells Marcus she'll let him go if he tells her about the bombs.

She's lying. It's obvious to the reader (who probably isn't as scared and exhausted as Marcus is) that she has to be lying. The only way Marcus could know about the bombs is if he's really a terrorist, and if the DHS becomes convinced that he's really a terrorist they'll never let him go. So she's playing crude head games with him, asserting power for power's sake. She's hoping that Marcus will be so tired and frightened that he'll abandon reason and agree to whatever she wants, just like O'Brien asking Winston Smith what two plus two equals.

I was lucky enough to get a ARC. I've been promoting the book to everyone I talk to about such matters, and need to buy a copy for one cousin, and direct another cousin t0 the web site.

I'm not sure why, it may have something to do with not being as familiar with Cory's non-fiction, and it definitely has something to do with a fascination with the themes and the fact that I'm still under 25 (for another year, at least,) but I found the tone perfect, and hope that it impacts other people's lives the way I believe it would have impacted mine if I found it 10 years ago.

I laughed at some scenes, I almost cried at others; it was emotionally very powerful, and as someone who hates letting criticism get in the way of enjoying a good book, I didn't think about it in those terms until a week after reading it for the first time, when I re-read it.

And of course, the realism of the characters is beside the point if you are considering impact on adolescents, on some level. They will notice really hokey or inconsistent portrayals, but I don't think that's the problem here. What this will do is instill the level of skepticism and distrust of authority that most of us want children, (and, parenthetically*, adults) to have. It may even get them interested in coding and technology.

Definitely a great book for young adults, I just don't know how many children will read it. Maybe we'll all get lucky and someone in an authority position will decide to ban it. Anyone want to start a campaign using selective quotations from the book asking some schools boards to do so?

* I LOVE writing the word parenthetically in parentheses.

JimR @ 43-

One of the first things I thought when I started reading Little Brother was "Ohmigod, this kid talks like the boy version of me!" It was really when he said "teh suck" that did it for me; I say that all the time.

I've been out of high school two years. I don't read Boing Boing much, and mostly just read Making Light to internet-stalk my mother (she knows I read her comments here regularly and doesn't mind, so it's not really stalking), so I don't have the problem of knowing Cory's voice. And without that problem, Marcus' voice was fantastic.

I knew I had to read this when Patrick announced the review copies, and I'm glad Cory put up CC versions so I don't have to wait for the bookstore. I thought the book was very good, but maybe not as much of a paradigm shift as Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I guess you that's the price of present-day relevance.

I can't say DHS got off too hard. They had the politico and haircut woman who were pretty flat evil, but they also had Masha, who at least couldn't rationalize it forever. And you have to expect there were a bunch more who tried to come in from the cold and got caught. I'm more concerned that DHS was shown as too incompetent—I don't think a real-life Marcus could stay free. Realism would come out more like 1984, only with less wiggle room.

The only real groaner typo I saw was "proscribed" for "prescribed", though I might quibble about some of the hyphenated terms.

I got into this - sufficiently that I got to bed late last night and started work a bit late this morning in order to finish it. There were sections when my heart was thumping, when I felt anxious on behalf of Marcus, when I felt sick about what was being done in the name of "security" (the bit with the new teacher stating how the government should protect life first, and liberty coming a poor second to that certainly hit home to this Brit, with our ghastly new Mayor of London pledging to install airport-style security scanners ar railway stations).

Re. infodumps - if needed (and I think they are, in this), I much prefer having the character plainly talk to the audience (after all, the book is writen in first person, Marcus is the narrator) rather than having a cardboard-clueless character there to be explained to.

Marcus is smart in some ways, amazingly naive in others - not surprising, give his age. Cory lets us know (perhaps a bit later than ideal) that Marcus doesn't watch the news or read newspapers, and given his father's reactions, he can't really discuss what's happening with his parents - so yes, he's seeing what's happening only from his viewpoint. Learning to look at (real, everyday) things from different viewpoints, searching out those viewpoints, is generally a more adult way of doing things.

The range of character reactions - Marcus (with his determination alternating with uncertainties), Jolu, Van, poor Darryl, amoral Masha etc., even the range of reactions from the ordinary adults in the book, was realistic.

Overall: I certainly hope it will make some young (and not-so-young, perhaps) people think about what's going on at present - as well as maybe encouraging some exploration of computer progremming, cryptography etc. I'll certainly be recommending it to some teenagers I know.

Ursula #68: Part of the "problem" might be that we know Cory's voice, in a way in which one doesn't typically know the author of the fiction one reads.

That might be it. Although I didn't have that problem with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. But of course that was in a less familiar setting, hence less BoingBoing like. So definitely maybe.

Xopher #69: Um...depressingly?!?! The only thing I find depressing about her dying is that it would probably be quick!

Rather than once again get into the whole should-one-ever-celebrate-a-death thing that erupted after WFB's death, let me just say that I find it depressing that saying that an American soldier is being sent to our current conflict sounds like a death sentence. (Hell, anyone going to Iraq sounds like a death sentence.) So yeah: depressing.

re: 58

As a fourth generation native of the SF East Bay, this rings true for me. Cory's choice of that bridge and that tunnel is on the money. If terrorists wanted to frak the Bay Area over, that's what to target. The aftermath of Loma Prieta is nothing in comparison.

I don't have my copy at hand, but wasn't there also a nasty vibe about DHS's measures being justified because the Bay Area is somehow un-American?

The end of the book had me dreaming idly of a reborn Bear Flag Republic.

Stephen 75: Hmm, I see your point. It's depressing that being sent to Iraq is likely to result in death, yes. That the Monster was likely to die, no, not depressing—and she'd probably spend all her time in the Green Zone anyway. Unless...hmm.

It now occurs to me that this may be another way Marcus was naive. Where he perceived her as going unpunished, they were actually dropping the charges so they could send her to Iraq to stage her killing by "insurgents."

After all, she's an embarrassment at this point, and has to be made an example of; not to mention the fact that were she ever brought to trial she might name names, like this lady might have, had she not "committed suicide."

If so, my not noticing that right off was also naive!

My review. I'll have to come back and read the thread tomorrow.

I hadn't thought that they were planning to stage a killing, as much as put her in a place where she was likely to die at other's hands.

I suppose it's a plausible reading. But I'm not sure I see an arguments for it over the "just ship her somewhere really dangerous" theory.

Lindra @ 67: "It is much easier to make it seem as though there isn't a choice at all, true, and the question of "this pissed me off, what am I willing to risk to say or do something about it?" keeps me awake every few months thinking on what to do, what could be done and how it could be done, and I have always come down on the side of silence."

It's a really tough question, and it's hard to create any sort of guidelines. One of the things that I really like about Little Brother is that it shows that sometimes, silence is the right answer.

"I also agree that Doctorow is trying to challenge the idea that not everyone can be a superhero. But this seems to be where we differ, as I don't think he does it effectively. To my mind the mix of superhero and everyman doesn't work in the way it's clearly intended to."

That seems fair--while I think it does a good job, I'm not quite the target audience. I definitely see the dangers of well-meaning adults trying to force this book on unimpressed teens and getting bit of a backlash. We'll have to wait and see, won't we? I can agree to disagree on whether Little Brother accomplishes its goals, but I'm pretty certain that its goals are worth trying for. =)

(You might want to give Un Lun Dun, by China Mieville a try. It hits on some of the same themes, but in a very different way. It starts a bit cliched, but that's just because he's messing with your head.)

Ursula L @ 68: "Part of the "problem" might be that we know Cory's voice, in a way in which one doesn't typically know the author of the fiction one reads."

Knowing the author's natural voice can really ruin a fiction experience, if it is too close to the narrator's voice. I spent several months reading Neil Gaiman's blog before reading Anansi Boys, and it really ruined the first part of the book for me.

F'wudditswirth, the techno-expositive chunks in Little Brother didn't bug me, because that's exactly what geeks are like: they think their area of interest is so absolutely fascinating that everyone will naturally share their enthusiasm. It was completely plausible for Marcus to talk like that about technology, because he was the sort of person who created military-grade crypto with his best friend so they could talk about what to eat for lunch. The expositive chunks worked in character.

heresiarch @ 80:

F'wudditswirth, the techno-expositive chunks in Little Brother didn't bug me, because that's exactly what geeks are like...The expositive chunks worked in character.

I'm reminded of the long, dull passage, fifty pages or so, late in Anna Karenina describing the governmental meeting (I think--it's been years) many of the male characters attend. I got Tolstoy's point in making that passage a long, dull slog, and he put it late enough in the novel that the reader was invested enough to read, skim, or skip, but still.

Not that Cory's exposition was dull to me, but I'll be curious to see how it works with a general audience. I've already passed the recommendation on to my co-workers.

I wonder how quickly LB will start showing up on banned books lists?

"Don't Taze Me" -- L'il Bro

Just finished the book a few minutes ago. Sleep is for the weak. heh.

I've just finished the book, and will be buying a copy for my daughter. I loved it and found the exposition really interesting. I've never really understood how a lot of the privacy technology worked and feel I understand it, although I fear this is an illusion due to evaporate within a week - I had the same feeling about codes after finishing Cryptonomicon).

I'm troubled by the upbeat ending - I guess that it's necessary (polemically) and hopeful. I'd really enjoy* a 1984 ending. Here's hoping for a remix.

*appreciate? / be incredibly depressed by in a good way?

It now occurs to me that this may be another way Marcus was naive. Where he perceived her as going unpunished, they were actually dropping the charges so they could send her to Iraq to stage her killing by "insurgents."

This reminds me of Americans asking why German guards didn't ask for transfers away from concentration camps, since they weren't "punished."

But the transfer was inevitably to the Russian front, which was considered to be certain death - far more inevitable than even an assignment to Iraq would be for a US soldier. The surprising thing is not that many guards did not ask for transfers, but that many did, knowing they would likely die, and very often getting killed.

I think it may be typical of authoritarian societies, that there are a variety of things that can be done to you that are not officially punishment, and which may not scan as "punishment" to an outside eye, but which are, nevertheless, severe punishment, and used by the authorities to maintain control.

/delurk

While I enjoyed the book very much, reading it while in the middle of Paranoia Agent was unfortunate. I kept picturing Marcus as Shonen Bat.

/relurk

I really enjoyed it. Yes, I felt like it was preachy, in parts, but I also felt that the preachiness came at least as much from Marcus as from Cory Doctorow, and that he (Marcus) had earned the right to preach. It was scary, and almost nightmarish in places. (Wierdly, as well as "Nineteen Eighty-Four", the atmosphere strongly reminded me of "The Man Who Was Thursday", perhaps because of the 'who to trust' issues.) It was swift, and clever and I didn't know how it was going to end. I value that in a book.

And I love cocky main characters, especially if they're teens or children, because I think that one of the slowest parts of growing up is recognising your own limitations. And the more intelligent and pro-active a person is, compared to their local norm, the longer that takes. I also loved Marcus because he began to recognise his personal limitations, the fact that he wasn't the cleverest person in the whole wide world, without falling it to the trap of thinking that therefore his views and actions were irrelevant. That's a powerful, heady and explosive sort of mindset to reach whilst still a teen.

I read it yesterday, all the way through, and will seriously consider investing in a copy (for lending-out purposes) once its out in the UK. Which is high praise, considering that I'm poor. There were plenty of things I didn't like (I'm not a fan of sex scenes generally, and I felt like I needed to know more about WHY the DHS would end up with a policy that meant keeping certain people locked up indefinitely purely out of embarrassment), but it was a book well worth reading, even just as a story.

(BTW, I'm under 25, but not far under.)

PS- It hadn't occurred to me that the posting to Iraq could be a punishment of sorts, what you guys have said about that is really interesting. I guess whether or not you think it IS a punishment depends on whether you think she ever did anything her Big Bosses would think was wrong, or ill-advised, and if so, how rare and valuable her talents seem to them. I'm not sure.

Lindra @ 67
It is much easier to make it seem as though there isn't a choice at all, true, and the question of "this pissed me off, what am I willing to risk to say or do something about it?" keeps me awake every few months thinking on what to do, what could be done and how it could be done,

One point that Little Brother makes only in passing, and should have made stronger, is that it's easier to rebel if your friends are standing beside you at the barricades. It's much harder for the people who start a movement that those who join it later, once the momentum is going. Even the experience of being gassed or shot at by riot police can create a feeling of solidarity among the demonstrators, as long as there are enough of them, because any sufficiently large group will contain a loudmouth who'll say something defiant before (usually he) thinks through the consequences, and the rest will pick it up. That's just the way we monkeys are, braver in a troop than alone.

Often exactly when you hit a particular part of the growth of self that happens in adolescence determines whether you find a group of people who will egg each other on to action, or remain silent. I, for instance, was lucky, I was 3 or 4 years younger than the people who started what we used to call "The Movement" in the early '60s, and I went to school with some of them, and had been impelled in that direction by all the Socialists and Communists of my parents' generation. If I'd been a couple years older, I might have opted for silence instead, for lack of support of my peers. And as it was, I turned away from it in the seventies, rationalizing that the job had largely been done, the rest was cleanup work. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

And in real life the consequences of rebellion can be devastating for any given person, especially those who aren't white, male, and come from privileged backgrounds. Think of the Black Panthers, some of them systematically gunned down by police or put away in prison. Or Angela Davis, one of my idols, who cannot ever set foot in the United States again. I said upthread that successful revolutionaries had to be supremely (and unrealistically) confident of their abilities and the outcome; ask the unsuccessful ones (those that are still alive) whether it was worth it,