Publishers Weekly has published an amazing feature on my forthcoming novel Little Brother, and all the buzz it’s gotten so far:
Little Brother offers more in the way of circuit boards than gears, and could almost be read with a laptop in hand. Marcus frequently makes reference to hacks (ways to reprogram computers and other devices to suit one’s needs), Internet history (such as the protocols that make email work) and privacy-protection programs (like The Onion Router, which allows users to access Web sites that might otherwise be blocked by censorware), all of which beg to be looked up on Google or Wikipedia. In addition, Doctorow makes use of Internet slang known as “leetspeak” (Marcus describes a female friend as “totally h4wt,” and notes that some of his attempts to interfere with the DHS surveillance might be considered “a little aggro,”as well as acronyms for activities that range from “ARGing” to “LARPing” (participating in Alternate Reality Games or Live Action Role Play).“One thing I admire is that everything he talked about in the book, he explained—at least to the extent you could get an idea of it,” says Jordan Gower, a bookseller at Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee, Wis. “But he didn’t do it in a way like he’s trying to teach a child. It was more like he was just spreading his information.” Nielsen Hayden believes that Doctorow “nailed” the book’s language (at least according to his nephews, he jokes), though he also admits that there’s always a danger of slang becoming outmoded. “The Internet speeds up the process by which kid language and slang evolve and change,” he says.
