My name is Marcus Yallow, but back when this story starts, I was going by w1n5t0n. Pronounced “Winston.”
Not pronounced “Doubleyouoneennfiveteezeroenn” unless you’re a clueless disciplinary officer who’s far enough behind the curve that you still call the Internet “the information superhighway.”
Journalist, blogger, and science fiction author Cody Doctorow‘s freely distributed novel, Little Brother, tells the story of tech-savvy 17 year-old Marcus Yallow in a quasi-futuristic San Francisco. The first ten chapters detail a rapid succession of events in which Marcus and his Harajuku Fun Madness team are accosted by the Department of Homeland Security following a terrorist attack, and continuously surveiled by the San Francisco Police Department thereafter.
Cody Doctorow. Source: St. Louis Country Library Foundation
Marcus, for (legitimate) fear of his online activity being traced, establishes an underground network of devices called Xnet, that permits secure web traffic. After distributing Xnet discs amongst his peer group, Marcus quickly learns that the network has grown exponentially, more swiftly than anticipated — and worse, spies have infiltrated Xnet, and are seeking out real-life user identities.
Doctorow’s writing style is highly informal, making extensive use of Internet slang and leet-speak. While this meshes with the subject material on which Doctorow explicates, it is slightly confounding and interspersed artificially. Furthermore, his discussions of privacy are ultra-thinly veiled, even so much as to be…clunky? Primarily on this account do I assume this novel targets young adults.
The quasi-philosophical issues surrounding privacy and surveillance that are raised by Doctorow are maybe a little tired and explored. His brand of pseudo-dystopia is made shallow by the fact that his characters are all 12, but apparently brighter than everybody else. He mishandles an attempt to portray public fear and groupthink in action by making it too unbelievable, and too transparent. Which is, of course, not to strip all of his work of it’s merit — it’s easy to be a critic. I just think that, against all the odds, Tom Clancy’s Net Force manages to balance technological explication and authorship more effectively than Doctorow in this effort. I’d like to read some of his other material before I pass judgment on his style of writing too hastily. And further, I think he has an argument to make, just based on the TED video below — he just needs some help making it.
httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGjNe1YhMA
Interesting critique; it is typical of young adult novels that they hit you over the head with the points they are trying to make. As for the young characters just happening to be smarter than all the authority figures, that is also typical of young adult novels (see Harry Potter), but this is a special group of technologically-savvy teenagers and they are 17, not 12.