I just read Little Brother
No spoilers ahead, just some impressions.
Cory Doctrow is an author with some fairly impressive talent. A number of years ago I had a chance to listen to him present a keynote. I don’t remember exactly when or where, and I don’t even remember if I attended the keynote! I was rather unimpressed by keynote speakers around that time because otherwise technical/hacker conferences were becoming too politically biased, lacking technical content, and losing sight of educating the public of anything other than their political angle. I now regret that I either didn’t attend, or if I was present, that instead of listening to the keynote, I was likely planning what talks I would be attending at that conference or what friends I’d be meeting up with nearby.
I knew he was a well-known author, but I hadn’t actually read anything he had written. Someone in the gemini channel irc/xmpp chat mentioned the book and dropped a link. I followed the link, grabbed the text, and it patiently waited for me in a terminal while I did other things. Then over the course of the next day and a half or so, I read the novel.
It’s a young-adult aimed novel that invents a few different means of pulling together different but very real technologies. Despite the fictional aspect, the technologies discussed are absolutely spot-on, 100% real things that are used or can be used as described. Some of the packaging (ParanoidXBox, for example), do not exist, but they’re made up of very real technologies that did exist at the time it was written, they just weren’t in the packaging they’re presented in in the novel.
Not only is he faithful to the technical aspects, but his story telling abilities are what you’d expect from a talented author. The story is coherent, the characters are unique in their expression and personality, and everything flows fairly naturally. The story itself could have taken a very dark turn and headed more towards an Orwellian dystopia, and it still would have been a very good work, but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. I wonder if this is because of the target audience (young adults) or if it was what the author had in mind regardless. It’s almost too neat of a finish, but I probably wouldn’t have bothered looking for the sequels if it had gone in a darker direction.
Apparently there are two more books in the series. I’m going to collect the links below so I can go read those as well.
I’m not sure if Attack Surface is available for free yet. It’s described as a “standalone adult Little Brother book” by the author. I’ll update the links below if I find it.
Little Brother:
Little Brother with download formats
Homeland:
- [Homeland with download formats]
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created: 2025-03-08
(re)generated: 2025-05-25
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