Little Brother
Cory Doctorow
Tor
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1985-2
Fiction, Science Fiction, Young Adult
Reviewed by Chris Gerrib

I finished Cory Doctorow’s new novel Little-brother last night.  It’s a quick read, taking me three-and-a-half hours from start to the last of two Afterwords.  It is a smokingly good page-turner.  It’s billed as a Young Adult novel, but old adults will love it, and kids under 14 or so may find it a bit too intense.

The book’s narrator, Marcus Yallow, is a 17-year-old high school kid / hacker in San Francisco.  He’s into the usual stuff : games, girls and beating the school’s firewall and “locked-down” PCs.  Then our favorite terrorists, Al-Queda, swoop down and blow up both the Bay Bridge and the BART tunnel under the bay, killing thousands.  This is immediately followed by Homeland Security, which drags Marcus and an unknown number of others into a secret detention camp on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay for some Constitution-free interrogation.

As told in the book, it’s no more unrealistic then anything in a Tom Clancy novel.  For one thing, the emergency powers only extend to the Bay Area.  I’d also like to point out that, as made clear in the ending, Doctorow doesn’t think we’re all doomed to fall crushed under the heels of The Man. 

At any rate, Homeland Security releases Yallow with ill grace, following the same “dump them in the street” process followed by the CIA with some rendered detainees.  They’ve also set up quite a bit of additional “security” in the form of checkpoints and monitoring.  Marcus, generally cranked about the situation, puts his hacker skills to work.

His main tactic is to demonstrate via some creative hacking that a system which generates 1% false positives while looking for 0.1% bad guys leads to massive amounts of hassle.  1% of the Bay Area population is 200,000, a large number to sift through trying to find 10 or 20 people.  Things escalate on both sides until grownup (For Homeland Security, “grownup” is defined as “can read the Constitution”) supervision finally arrives. 

Doctorow is a very computer literate guy, and he’s paired up for some of the research with Bruce Schneier, a noted security expert, so all the computer “geek stuff” is real world.  Also, Doctorow does a very good job on his characterization.  Not all adults are bad, and Marcus, although rather skilled in things computer, isn’t perfect and is very much a teenager. 

Bottom line- buy this book.