Cory Doctorow, Source: Wiki
Cory Doctorow, is a Canadian-British journalist, blogger and science fiction author. He is an activist in favor of liberalizing the copyright laws and a supporter of the Creative Commons organization, and uses the majority of their licenses for his books. Doctorow’s common theme of his work includes: digital right management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics. Doctorow, has written a series of books from: Little Brother, Pirate Cinema, The Rapture of the Nords, The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow, A Little Help, and many more.
Offical cover of Little Brother, Source: YAL
Little Brother is the story of 4 teenaged students living in San Francisco. Marcus Yallow (w1n5ton) is a seventeen-year-old boy who is the main character in the story. Marcus is the leader of his friends and appreciates technology and has a dream of constructing his own custom devices. Darryl Glover is Marcus’s best friend, who is best known as the “detail man” of the group. When the group gets interned, Darryl suddenly vanishes, and never resurfaces after they are released. Vanessa Pak (Van) is known as the “ideas” person in the group, and lastly Jose Luis Torrez (Jolu) is known as the “technical” member of the group, and is the most technological savvy, knowing and having experience in computer programming.
Marcus Yallow withheld, Source: E-books
In the novel, Marcus and his friends ditch school and take part in Harajuku Fun Madness (ARG), and find themselves caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and trapped in a huge aftermath of a major terrorist attacks on San Francisco. Confused and shocked Darryl is stabbed and Marcus and his friends, become suddenly detained by the Department of Homeland Security, and are taken away to an underground imprisonment where they are harshly cross-examined for days. After the 3 days of cross-examination, they are released, and forced to sign documents saying that they are freely held and questioned. By this time, Darryl is still missing, and Marcus is still confused, irritated, but motivated to fight back against the DHS. He then begins using encoded Wi-Fi connections through his X-BOX and creates an underground network with his friends to fight against the DHS.
I find this book, extremely interesting but very long. Doctorow wrote this book very clear, and what I appreciated was that it was up to date in the technological world. I understood some of the technologies he was talking about such as XBOX. Also the story was taken place in SF, so I knew, and have been to many of the places he was talking about. But in the end, this book raised a lot of awareness and question about the meaning of “security,” and we as individual’s sacrifice for our freedom of security. How do you personally feel about this issue of security?
But overall, I am thrilled to finish reading the rest of the book, and find out what exactly happens.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8CRwGAzNOk[/youtube]
Here’s an Interview with Cory Doctorow, about his novel Little Brother