Little Brother

Doctorow, C. (2008). Little Brother. New York: TOR Books. ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-1985-2

Why read this book

Imagine how your life might change if the government started using all the technology at its disposal to monitor your every move. When this happens to Marcus Yallow, he fights back, outsmarting the government at its own game. Until he gets caught.

Plot summary

Marcus Yallow is a tech-savvy student at a high school in the Mission district in San Francisco. He’s figured out how to get around the firewall the school has imposed to limit student access to the Internet, how to keep school officials from snooping in his online activities, and how to evade the surveillance network so he can ditch school without getting caught.

But one afternoon when he’s left school to hook up with some friends to play an alternative reality game out on the streets of San Francisco, terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge and the subway tunnel that connects San Francisco and Oakland. In the ensuing chaos, Marcus and his friends get swept up by national security forces and end up incarcerated in a secret prison. Marcus is treated harshly, but he gets out after a few days and returns home to a world where the intense security that he was accustomed to in high school has been extended to the whole Bay Area. Shaken at the prospect that he will spend the rest of his life in an authoritarian atmosphere, Marcus organizes an online, underground resistance to the pervasive government surveillance. To his surprise, a whole movement develops, and he’s able to mobilize public demonstrations despite the government crackdown. How far can he get before he ends up back in the secret prison? How far can the government go before citizens demand their freedom from surveillance?

Critical evaluation

Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother alerts readers to the dark side of the technological revolution. We are all vaguely aware that someone – our employer, the government, big corporations – is recording a ton of information on our personal lives, but so far it doesn’t seem to impinge on our privacy. Still, it’s all sitting there in storage somewhere, available to anyone with the power and desire to check us out. Writing in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Doctorow imagines what the world could be like if another terrorist attack motivates the government to deploy its massive surveillance capabilities to control the civilian population.

A number of Doctorow’s decisions about how to frame his story add to the intensity of its impact. For paranoid liberals in the Bay Area such as myself who suspect a right-wing government would love nothing more than to swoop in and clamp down on us, the San Francisco setting of Little Brother adds a sinister subtext to the government’s response to the terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge and the BART tunnel. Positioning the hero as a tech-savvy high school student reminds the reader that many students already think of school as the authoritarian nightmare that Homeland Security imposes on the rest of society after the terrorist attack. And the title Little Brother both champions the role of youth in challenging authority and connects the story to the landmark novel on the topic of government surveillance, George Orwell’s 1984, which gave us the term “Big Brother” to define the government’s overbearing role in the lives of citizens.

About the author

Cory Doctorow was born in 1971 in Toronto and since then has also lived in the United Kingdom and the United States. He has been a peace and social justice activist since his youth, and he currently defines himself “a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist” (Doctorow, 2009). He has published short stories (including Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present, 2007), novels (including Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003, and Makers, 2009), graphic fiction (Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now, 2008), and non-fiction (Content, 2008). Although his works are available for purchase in print, Doctorow also makes most of them available for free downloading from the Internet, an expression of his commitment to the free flow or information in a technological society (Cory Doctorow, 2009; Doctorow, 2009).

Genre: Adventure, Contemporary life

Curriculum ties

• Little Brother would be a good book for software or hardware technology courses. Students could research the various technologies referenced in the book and report on whether they are real or imagined.

• Little Brother could be used in a civics or government course to explore the relationship between national security and individual liberties.

Book-talking ideas

• Play the YouTube video where Cory Doctorow talks about Little Brother.

• To attract the attention of the techno crowd, read the section where Marcus converts his Xbox into an Internet access device whose activity can’t be monitored (p. 86-88).

Reading level/interest age

Little Brother will definitely appeal more to the tech-savvy reader than to others, although the action in the story and the political themes will pull in some readers who otherwise wouldn’t have much interest in the technology. Younger teens with an interest in technology could probably handle the book despite its high reading level. Of the seven San Francisco public school libraries that own copies of Little Brother, three are middle schools.

Challenge issues

Violence, sex, and profanity are not likely to be challenge issues for Little Brother, but the political content might be. Readers who value national security over individual liberties may challenge the book as unpatriotic.

Responses

• Remind the challenger of the policy (in the case of the San Francisco Public Library) to present “all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.”

Why I chose to read this book

This book was required reading for our young-adult literature course, but I would like to think it would have caught my attention even if it were not.

References

Cory Doctorow. (2009, November 22). Wikipedia. Retrieved Dec. 3, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow

Doctorow, C. (2009, September 21). About Cory Doctorow. Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com. Retrieved Dec. 3, 2009, from http://craphound.com/bio.php