Little Brother

Rating T+ Genre sci-fi Author Cory Doctorow Publisher Tor

Dystopias are common fare in science fiction – from George Orwell’s 1984 to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We – but few have hit quite so close to home as Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Little Brother.  

Marcus Yallow (a.k.a. w1n5t0n), is a high school student in San Francisco who knows computers inside out and backwards.  He hacks his school-issued laptop, puts gravel in his shoes to trick the motion sensors in the hallways, and microwaves library books to fry the tracking arphids.  Bored in class one day, Marcus decides to round up his friends and ditch school to follow the clues in his favorite Alternate Reality Game, Harajuku Fun Madness.  While they scour the area near the Bay Bridge for a hidden wi-fi signal that hides the next clue in the game, the bridge is destroyed by terrorists, and everyone nearby is rounded up and detained as suspects.  Marcus is tortured and eventually released, but he is threatened against revealing anything that was done to him or his friends.  And not all of his friends leave; Darryl, Marcus’s best friend, was injured in the attack, and is presumed dead.

Back home, Marcus watches security become a higher priority than freedom to the adults around him, and, overwhelmed with anger at what was done to him and his inability to speak out, he begins rallying his fellow students online.  Since the Internet is monitored and his laptop bugged, Marcus uses a hacked Xbox (in the novel’s near future, the machines are free – Microsoft makes all its money on the games) to leech wi-fi signals and create an untraceable network: Xnet.  From here, now known as m1k3y, Marcus becomes the reluctant leader of a guerilla group that tries to create chaos with technology.  Think Fight Club’s Project Mayhem, but with more acne.  If people are being randomly searched for having “unusual” travel logs on their train passes, then what would happen if people’s logs were randomly switched?  Want to plan an unauthorized concert in the park?  Xnet’s the way to go.  But how trustworthy is everyone on Xnet?  And how long before the Department of Homeland Security tracks m1k3y back to Marcus?

Doctorow knows exactly how to play in this “the future is here” world, where things are just slightly tweaked to create a setting that could be years or months from today.  The title is an obvious play on 1984’s Big Brother; while one oppressively glowers down on the system, the other subverts the system from below and within.  But this vision of the future is simultaneously more and less depressing than Orwell’s.  Things aren’t as bleak in Little Brother as they are in 1984, but the future Orwell paints never felt as likely – as “there but for the grace of God” – as Doctorow’s.  It’s tempting to dismiss, or at least distance oneself from, the book’s message by seeing it as over-the-top propaganda, but anyone who remembers the events of September 11, 2001, and the national fear and willingness to give up rights and freedoms that followed just for a little security, will recognize Doctorow’s San Francisco all too well.  Combined with the spot-on characterization of Marcus, who feels exactly like a 17-year-old boy, Doctorow creates a compelling young adult novel, with a perfect mix of angst, frustration, romance, and disillusionment with the world adults have created.  No matter your age, it’s hard not to join in with the chants of “Don’t Trust Anyone Over 25.”