Book: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Little Brother is a novel about a group of teenager friends and school mates in San Francisco who, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge and BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system, defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) and the new rules of the police state, an oppressive regime bent on discovering national threats at the expense of the freedom and privacy of the people.

The main character Marcus and three of his friends Van, Jolu and Darryl are playing truant from high school and find themselves near a terrorist bombing of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, where they are apprehended by the DHS and held as enemy combatants because of their suspicious behavior. As for the protagonist Marcus, he's a likable if undeniably cocky hero – he hacks cellphones, sasses clueless authority figures and quotes the Declaration of Independence from memory.

Marcus' best friend Darryl, who was stabbed after the bombing, is the only one of the foursome not released after the torturing and humiliating 5-day interrogation, and provides Marcus' main motivation to fight back against the DHS. Although the book focuses mainly on security-privacy aspects and technology, it is also an affectionate story of braveness and strong friendship, where even a little love triangle is not missing. While organizing resistance, Marcus develops new friendships and a love interest, Ange, that support him during his doubts and fears over fighting the federal government. To do that, Marcus develops a clandestine wireless network, Xnet, that avoids DHS monitoring using anonymity and encryption.

Doctorow's enthusiasm shines through the whole book and is contagious and amusing to follow. It's quite remarkable that he wrote the story in no more or less than exactly eight weeks from the day he thought it up to the day he finished it. "Alice, to whom this book is dedicated, had to put up with me clacking out the final chapter at 5 AM in our hotel in Rome, where we were celebrating our anniversary," he laughs off. His recalls two periods from his own life: when he was 17 and the world seemed like it was just going to get more free, and now, 17 years later when things are different. "The computers I love are being co-opted, used to spy on us, control us, snitch on us," he says in the introduction. With parallels to post-9/11 policies, such as the Patriot Act, Doctorow brings in a good amount of criticism towards government's control over the internet.

Motivated and inspired by the fight for freedom, Doctorow develops his protagonist Marcus, a young and rebellious character who makes Little Brother an enjoyable reading both for the contemporary as well as somewhat older audience who still feel young at heart. However, while Marcus is the protagonist and well displayed throughout the whole book, Doctorow could have put some more emphasis and gone into a little more detail with the other characters as well. Unfortunately, any character that wasn't Marcus got rather short-changed in the story. Ange and Marcus' mother Lillian, with whom he has a very strong relationship, were perhaps the best developed characters beside himself.

Although I'm personally not the biggest fan of sci-fi books or movies and sometimes frightened away by writings with too much technical detail, Little Brother kind of won my heart. Perhaps I was also positively disposed due to earlier contact with Doctorow's blog Boing Boing and his activist statements. Little Brother draws our attention, once again, to the human-computer (human-technology) relationship, its current and future potential, and raises questions about our enthusiasm for technology and how we contribute to our own lack of privacy. Doctorow brings the question of the right use and balance between security and privacy and makes a didactic point within a well crafted fictional framework.

The moral of Little Brother is that unless you're passably technically literate, you're not fully in command of the given freedoms. Doctorow writes: "Even if you only write code for one day, one afternoon, you have to do it. Computers can control you or they can lighten your work – if you want to be in charge of your machines, you have to learn to write code."

Some interesting facts and findings

The title "Little Brother" is a play on Big Brother in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Marcus also uses the handle "w1n5t0n", a reference to the book's main character, Winston Smith, in leetspeak (an alternative alphabet for the English language that is used primarily on the Internet, it uses various combinations of ASCII characters to replace Latinate letters).

Each chapter of the e-book edition of Little Brother is dedicated to a different bookstore: Bakka-Phoenix, Amazon.com, Borderlands Books, Barnes & Noble, Books of Wonder, Borders, Forbidden Planet, Books-A-Million, MIT Press Bookshop, Hudson Booksellers, and so on.

The author of the book, Cory Doctorow, is a Canadian writer, blogger (co-editor of Boing Boing), journalist as well as an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books.

Little Brother is downloadable for free and made available in quite a number of different formats: plain text, HTML, PDF, iPhone, Kindle, LaTeX, PalmDoc, etc. In other words, anyone who's interested in this fast-paced and well-written masterpiece, finds it online here.