Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow

Little Brother is Cory Doctorow's bid for a place on this year's list of banned books. It's a book that not only encourages kids to hack computers, commit vandalism, and thwart law enforcement, it gives them detailed instructions on the best ways to do those things. It even comes with two afterwords and a bibliography pointing them to even more resources on how best to subvert the political order.

If-- oh, who am I kidding, when Little Brother is challenged and banned from school libraries, it will richly deserve it.

And when that happens, you should go buy five copies and hand them out to teenagers on the street.

(Or just point them to Cory's web site, where he'll probably be giving it away for free...)

Little Brother is the story of Marcus Yallow, a 17-year old in San Francisco who's exactly the sort of protagonist you would expect to find in a YA book by Cory Doctorow. He's an inveterate tinkerer, a talented hacker, someone who knows the ins and outs of computers and the Internet, and he has a strong anti-authoritarian streak. He knows how to subvert the security on the school's computer network, and how to evade the surveillance systems they put in to keep kids from sneaking out. Which he does, anyway, with a few of his friends, to play an Alternate Reality Game called Harajuku Fun Madness.

They're searching for a clue in downtown San Francisco at the exact moment when terrorists blow up the Bay Bridge. In the panic and chaos after the attack, Marcus and his friends are picked up by the Department of Homeland Security and taken to a secret prison. Marcus is tortured into giving up the passwords to his personal electronic systems, and they read his email and all his secrets. They let him go, after dire threats of what will happen if he tells anyone where he was or what they did.

He returns home to find that one of his friends is missing, presumed dead, and the city is under the control of a surveillance state run wild. But when he discovers that they've bugged his personal laptop, he declares war on the DHS, and launches a campaign to bring them to their knees with XBoxes, hacked electronics, cryptography, flash mobs, and a whole armory of geek obsessions.

This is not a subtle book, even by the standards of YA novels with an Important Message. The bad guys-- the cops, the DHS, the obligatory smarmy Vice Principal-- are creepily authoritarian in a way that's a little over the top at times. The good guys-- an array of teenage hacker types, plus the obligatory Heroic Teacher-- are noble and honest and true to their principles in an absolutist way that really only works in fiction. The plot also doesn't quite play fair-- Marcus just happens to have access to an array of resources rather beyond those of a typical teenager, and there's a deus ex machina ending to the main story that comes close to breaking suspension of disbelief.

The weaknesses of the book, though, are things that are so common to YA books that they're almost intrinsic to the genre. And the book does sidestep the worst pitfalls of YA books-- there are adults who are on the right side, and the plot is resolved largely because Marcus finally talks to them. There's a deus ex machina ending, but the eventual resolution is set in motion through a mix of sensible adult action and wild teenage improvisation, rather than relying entirely on the teens themselves, with the adults only showing up to clean up the mess.

The diciest point of the book is the Important Message. Not because I disagree with it-- I agree with pretty much everything that Doctorow is pushing here, and really wouldn't want to associate with anyone who didn't. The potential problem is that there is not a subtle sentence in the entire book-- the Important Message is hammered home as hard as any message has ever been hammered home. I think the only thing missing is crashingly obvious satirical names-- "Vice Principal Goering" or some such.

This is the sort of thing that's usually enough to put me off a book, but Doctorow gets away with it because even at the darkest and heaviest parts of the story-- and there are some seriously dark and heavy points in the story-- the writing is saturated with the sort of geeky exuberance that characterizes his online writing. There isn't a subtle sentence in the book, but there isn't a dull one, either. There's a momentum to the story that kept me up late, and the narrative voice is terrific. Doctorow doesn't nail the teen-geek voice quite as perfectly as Scott Westerfeld or Frank Portman, but Marcus has personality. And personality, as the man said, goes a long way.

Tor is clearly hoping that this will be a major book-- check out the cover and blurbs they've put together-- and I think it has potential in that area. It's the sort of book that could really click with a lot of kids, and serve as a wake-up call for a lot more. I hope it succeeds, because the message-- Truth, Justice, and what we used to call the American Way-- is one that deserves the widest possible audience. This is an excellent read, and has the potential to be an Important Book.

And no beloved pets die at the end. We like that in a YA novel.