Little Brother
2008
- fiction
- computer hackers
- civil rights
- terrorism
- juvenile fiction
- united states
- counterculture
- united states. dept. of homeland security
- young adult fiction
- united states. dept. of homeland and security
The story
Seventeen year old Marcus and his friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time during a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. They are held by the Department of Homeland Security for days before being released only to discover that their city has turned into surveillance society police state. They decide to resist in the only way they know how by taking on the DHS. This book is distributed freely under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license from the author's website.
What it’s like
Brisk, urgent and very present, with the texture of a near-future San Francisco rendered in Bay Area fog, BART platforms, bike lanes, and the glow of laptop screens in dim bedrooms and cramped basements. Doctorow's prose is plain, conversational and full of technical detail: a first-person teenage voice that explains packet sniffing, encryption and RFID cards with the enthusiasm of someone who has just figured them out, and that reads like a long hacker's manifesto broken into short, punchy chapters. The mood swings between jittery paranoia, when checkpoints and camera-lined streets close in, and warm, communal elation in the friendships and the late-night build-it-ourselves energy of the resistance. Violence is offstage and brief, mostly the aftermath of a bombing and the sting of detention, with some interrogation and frightening intimidation but no gore and no sexual content. Best for readers who love a fast, idea-driven page-turner, the feel of a long night spent debugging something that matters, and young-adult stories about civic courage, privacy, and teenagers who know more about the machines than the adults do.
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