It’s about growing up in the near future where things have kept going on the way they’ve been going, and it’s about hacking as a habit of mind, but mostly it’s about growing up and changing and looking at the world and asking what you can do about that. The teenage voice is pitch-perfect. I couldn’t put it down, and I loved it.
The right book at the right time from the right author — and, not entirely coincidentally, Cory Doctorow’s best novel yet.
Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country’s best hope for the future.
Little Brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent Americans. A teenage hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic freedoms. This book is action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile’s civil protest.
A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane.
“I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political speculation or its brilliant uses of technology — each of which make this book a must-read — but, at the end of it all, I’m haunted by the universality of Marcus’s rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp: the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it.
I’d recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I’ve read this year, and I’d want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can.
Because I think it’ll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won’t be the same after they’ve read it. Maybe they’ll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it’ll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they’ll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they’ll want to open their computer and see what’s in there. I don’t know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It’s a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless.
Filled with sharp dialogue and
detailed descriptions of how to counteract gait-recognition cameras,
arphids (radio frequency ID tags), wireless Internet tracers and other
surveillance devices, this work makes its admittedly didactic point within
a tautly crafted fictional framework
Readers will delight in the details of how Marcus attempts to stage a techno-revolution … Buy multiple copies; this book will be h4wt (that’s ‘hot,’ for the nonhackers).
This book has a whole bunch to recommend it: It’s fast-paced, well-written, and the protagonist is engaging in a geeky way, if just a tiny little bit generic. The book is a bit didactic in places. However, since in some ways it’s a fictionalized manual for how to build an underground resistance to an evil government, that’s only to be expected. Really very good, and based on what I remember about my own teenage years,
