This book should be required reading for all Americans. If only to spark more lively debates about the nature of government and the implicit responsibilities of citizens.

Like many others, I could not put this book down once I started. This book reminded me a lot of V for Vendetta which is one of my all time favorite movies.

I enjoyed the book for the most part. It features a clever plot and fairly engaging characters. I also appreciate Cory licensing this under CC.

Nonetheless, I was somewhat disappointed. The bad guys are one-dimensional caricatures, and even some of the characters who experience reversals along the way just shift from one extreme to another. Neither are the good guys immune to engaging in awkward, expository debate as the cliches bounce back and forth. These contrivances may be aimed at a different audience, but I found myself somewhat annoyed. And I realize it's a nit-pick, but it's also puts me off to see kids supposedly derived from California using words like "piccies" and ducking into the "toilet."

Overall, a fun read, but I honestly just couldn't get into it the way I had hoped.

"There's something really liberating about having some corner of your life that's yours, that no one gets to see except you. It's a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked every once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There's nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you went to evacuate some solid waste, you'd have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you'd be buck naked?
"Even if you've got nothing wrong or weird with your body -- and how many of us can say that? -- you'd have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded.
"It's not about doing something shameful. It's about doing something private. It's about your life belonging to you.
"They were taking that from me, piece by piece. As I walked back to my cell, that feeling of deserving it came back to me. I'd broken a lot of rules all my life and I'd gotten away with it, by and large. Maybe this was justice. Maybe this was my past coming back to me. After all, I had been where I was because I'd snuck out of school."

San Francisco techno-geek teen Marcus Yallow (aka "w1n5t0n") and his three friends find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Having all snuck out of their respective schools to get a head start on tracking down the latest clue in their favorite Alternative Reality Game -- Harajuku Fun Madness -- for which they are teammates, they are picked up by the Department of Homeland Security in the immediate aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, transported to a secret prison, and kept in isolation:

"'Am I under arrest?'
"'You're going to have to be more cooperative, Marcus, starting right now.' She didn't say, 'or else,' but it was implied.
"'I would like to contact an attorney,' I said. 'I would like to know what I've been charged with. I'd like to see some form of identification from both of you.'
"The two agents exchanged looks.
"I think you should really reconsider your approach to this situation,' severe haircut lady said. 'I think you should do that right now. We found a number of suspicious devices on your person. We found you and your confederates near the site of the worst terrorist attack this country has ever seen. Put those two facts together and things don't look very good for you, Marcus. You can cooperate, or you can be very, very sorry. Now what is this for?'
"'You think I'm a terrorist? I'm seventeen years old!'
"'Just the right age -- Al Qaeda loves recruiting impressionable, idealistic kids. We googled you, you know. You've posted a lot of very ugly stuff on the public Internet.
"'I would like to speak to an attorney,' I said.
"Severe haircut lady looked at me like I was a bug. 'You're under the mistaken impression that you've been picked up by the police for a crime. You need to get past that. You are being detained as a potential enemy combatant by the government of the United States. If I were you. I'd be thinking very hard about how to convince us that you are not an enemy combatant. Very hard. Because there are dark holes that enemy combatants can disappear into, very deep dark holes, holes where you can just vanish. Forever. Are you listening to me young man? I want you to unlock this phone and then decrypt the files in its memory. I want you to account for yourself: why were you out on the street? What do you know about the attack on this city?'
"'I'm not going to unlock my phone for you,' I said, indignant. My phone's memory has all kinds of private stuff on it: photos, emails, little hacks and mods I'd installed. 'That's private stuff.'
"'What have you got to hide?'
"'I've got the right to my privacy,' I said. 'And I want to speak to an attorney.'
"'This i

Scott Westerfeld gives Doctorow's latest novel a blurb of "A rousing tales of techno-geek rebellion."

I was kindly given an Advance Reader's Copy by the unparalleled force known as Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and now in return, its time for me to talk about the novel.

Doctorow is more known these days for his often controversial and definitely iconcolastic positions on matters technological. Editor at Boing Boing, crusader against the excesses of Digital Rights Management...Doctorow definitely doesn't keep his head down.

I haven't actually read any novel-length fiction of his until now, and I am glad that I did, even if I am not the intended demographic of the novel.

Little Brother is set around 2010, in a US which has had a Republican return to the White House in the 2008 elections. The story centers around Marcus Yallow, whose original screenname of w1inst0n and the title of the book gave me immediate "spidey senses" of where this novel was going. We get a primer on Marcus' carefree life, and a lot of infodumping on technology--enough that the novel felt a bit like a throwback to SF novels of yore which would do the "as you know, bob" approach to science fiction.

Marcus' SF becomes the target of a terrorist attack on the scale of 9/11, and as he and his friends are cutting school as part of an alternate reality game, they are caught in the DHS dragnet. His anarchic and rebellious attitude do him no good, and he spends a short period in a "Gitmo by the Bay".

Once released (and tellingly, one of his friends is *not*), Marcus becomes even more radicalized by the experience, enough that he is willing to challenge the DHS when San Francisco is put into a lockdown that would be the wet masturbatory dream of authoritarians everywhere.

And therein lies the tale.

Little Brother is written in first person, and so we get everything filtered through Marcus' perceptions, prejudices, attitudes and experience. While I suspect that Marcus' opinions may be very close to Doctorow's (although that's not guaranteed; I wouldn't make the assumption that authorial voice always equals protagonist voice), my meta-knowledge of Doctorow suggests that Marcus' radicalization and voice came very naturally to the author.

Too, aside from the infodumps which slow down the book here and there, the novel sounds like a YA novel. The teenage protagonists sounded, to my ear, like teenagers. They are real characters in a near future world that readers in the same age group can identify with.

I think Doctorow softpedals the confrontations between the teenagers and the security forces a little bit, having them result in mostly non violent confrontations. I suppose Doctorow did load the dice a little bit--a couple of shooting deaths at the hands of the DHS would have destroyed Marcus' movement, and would have turned the book into a parallel, rather than a counterpoint, to 1984. This book doesn't end completely happily...but Marcus makes a difference.

It's a very good book, whatever you think of its politics and opinions, and it fits well as a gateway book. This is the sort of YA science fiction that could, and should, and must bring new readers into the graying genre of SF. And for the rest of us, too, its an indictment of the dangers of security theater, and security which does not make us any safer.

I enjoyed it and commend it to the rest of you.

"Little Brother" takes Orwell's "1984", and updates it ala Stephenson's "Cryptomomicon", while taking me back to the young adult stories I remember and loved like "The Three Investigators".

The near-future plot revolves around a group of high school students and the massive security and civil liberties crackdown that lands on San Francisco after a new "9/11" style attack occurs there. It begins with the teens being mistakenly held for military-style interrogation by the DHS, and does a good job (at a YA appropriate level - explicit, but not violently graphic) of describing the mind manipulation and power games that can be played in these situations.

When they're freed, they discover that the Department of Homeland Security has used the event as an excuse for a massive surveillance crackdown in the Bay area, and they chronicle the resultant affect on civil liberties and free speech. Then they fight back, with all the powers next-gen l33t hacker kids can muster.

It's fun, insightful, timely, and it's Doctorow's best work yet. It's sold as "Young Adult" fiction, so don't look in the SF section, but it's well worth reading by everyone.