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Little Brother
Thu Oct 1 21:52:54 BST 2009
As the title suggests, Cory Doctorow's most recent novel takes some of the themes of Orwell's 1984 and brings them into our near future, replacing Orwell's fascist dictatorship with a paranoid, security crazed US government. Similar to 1984, Little Brother roams the wilderness that exists between the realms of fiction and political polemic; and the transitions between the two are somewhat jagged, with the central the issues that Little Brother discusses - issues of personal privacy, security and trust - regularly subjugating the plot. To the extent that Little Brother is a call to arms for the teenagers that are its intended audience, that doesn't matter: the pages of description of things like public key cryptography are a good starting point for the interested reader to base further research on; but it does make for a somewhat unbalanced read. In the same vein, some of the characters in the novel are little more than one-dimensional placeholders whose sole purpose seems to be to espouse a particular ideology for Doctorow to discuss (the central protagonist's father, for example, seems especially prone to this effect when he is wheeled out to support the heavy-handed security efforts of the state with phrases like "they were just doing their jobs").
However, for all its faults, Little Brother does a fine job of forcing the reader to think critically about the motivations and limitations state security, and the plot, when it's not being sidelined for a technological discussion, provides enough pace and interest to keep the pages turning. Although it's not an especially great work of fiction, Little Brother is a very enjoyable read, and well worth seeking out, whether directly from Doctrow's website (the novel's text is freely available under a Creative Commons license), or as a hard copy from your local bookshop.