Doting on Doctorow: Why I am enamored with Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother"

I enjoy cyberpunk novels and films, and just sometimes a game passes by that really hits the spot in the quirky, poorly defined sub-genre. If you are unfamiliar, cyberpunk is loosely known as a science-fiction category which depicts a fast-paced, information-technology intensive, and mildly to extremely dystopic near future scenario. Protagonists often draw from the private eyes and anti-heroes of film noir. The pioneering novel of cyberpunk is usually recognized to be William Gibson's Neuromancer in which a computer hacker is recruited by a mysterious, private entity to satisfy a complex series of jobs for unknown ends. One can think of cyberpunk as sci-fi in the context of the late Cold War: paranoia about government and corporate interests (i.e. post-Watergate), loss of control over human control of technology (as in, nuclear proliferation and Mutually Assured Destruction-minded state security), and the ubiquity of surveillance and information technology (more government paranoia as well as the birth and development of the Internet). Anyway, Doctorow generally writes stories in this vein, though clever protagonists often overcome feelings of impending doom and make a rosier novel than, say, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash.

Little Brother takes advantage of older "schools" of sci-fi, too, by dropping the fortune-telling pretense and makes the future palpably familiar, and putting the story in San Francisco--a city I do not know personally, but definitely have a feel for already. So, if you think sci-fi is all about aliens and rocket ships, fantastic battles between cosmic forces, or giant robots, then Little Brother is something else entirely. The main characters are high school kids (the narrator is Marcus, though he has two other handles throughout), well-versed in their digital folkways--programming, hacking school computers, blogging anonymously, sharing music, etc.--and are getting by. The schools and increasingly the city of San Francisco are surveiled for "your own good," supposedly protecting the bystanders/good townsfolk/students from the malice of terrorists. This obviously draws on the Bush era wiretapping and the birth of Homeland Security--which is named specifically--as well as more than a nod to the detainment of supposed terrorists over the last decade. It is very easy to feel proximity with the characters, the setting, and their issues.

This, though, isn't why I love the novel. It is, on the surface, intended for a high school-aged audience, with the characters hovering around seventeen and doing things like skipping school, guzzling coffee through long nights, and navigating the mysterious terrain of adolescent romance. All of this is accomplished quite well. What gets me, though, is that if that is the intended audience, Little Brother is also a handbook for contemporary intellectual property rights issues, challenges to personal privacy, and modern civil disobedience. Doctorow knows this material very well because he is an activist in it; the future he wants to foster, the future he generally writes about, is a creative one in which individuals succeed and overcome the bad guy through not just outwitting them, but doing so with definitive style.

Not only that, but for the characters to hold up their arguments to--in the case of Little Brother--teachers, parents, schoolmates, and the government, he draws on the real court cases, citizen organizations, and historical documents that are part of making that future a possibility. To dig through the mixture of classic information theory and cryptography, prognosticated technology and programming, and the clever creations of teenage hacker geniuses, you book gets quite a bit of exposition, which in no way hampers the read. Not only does it illuminate the depth of Marcus/W1n5t0n/M1k3y's knowledge, but it educates the reader on real issues and movements presently afoot. And the best thing? A high schooler knows it!

In a way, it all sounds a little absurd. I didn't really attend high school thinking all that much about the activism of the Nineties, and the civil rights movements of the Seventies were all the more vague. I certainly could not refer to activists and attorneys by name. Then again, I do not doubt that some of my peers could and would if they thought it pertinent. What Marcus is though, is the type of kid who takes his education into his own hands and explores his passions. For anyone who has spent a few hours on TVtropes.org or Wikipedia can attest to the infection that is information in hyperlinked databases. Marcus and his friends have grown up on, were raised by a world immersed in information. Whereas some people tend to become parrots of what they here on news or on the computer, Marcus and his friends are sharp, articulate, and critical in ways that happily surprise me.

I am halfway through and I heartily recommend Little Brother to anyone the least bit interested.