Little Brother (Cory Doctorow novel)

Author(s)	Cory Doctorow
Country	USA
Language	English
Subject(s)	Terrorism, cryptography, computer hackers, Department of Homeland Security, Libertarianism, privacy, police state
Genre(s)	Fiction / Cyberpunk
Publisher	Tor Teen
Publication date	April 29, 2008
Media type	Book
Pages	380
ISBN	9780765319852
OCLC Number	176972381
LC Classification	PZ7.D66237 Lit 2008

Little Brother is a novel by Cory Doctorow, published by Tor Books. It was released on April 19, 2008. The novel is about 4 teenagers in San Francisco who, in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge and BART system, defend themselves against the Department of Homeland Security's attacks on the Bill of Rights. The novel is also available free on the author's website under a Creative Commons license.

The book debuted at No. 9 on the New York Times Bestseller List, children's chapter book section, in May 2008. As of July 2, it had spent a total of six weeks on the list, rising to the No. 8 spot. Little Brother has also won the 2009 White Pine Award, the 2009 Prometheus Award. and the 2009 John W. Campbell Memorial Award

Little Brother was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Plot summary

Seventeen-year-old San Francisco native Marcus Yallow and his friends Darryl Glover, Vanessa "Van" Pak and Jose Luis "Jolu" Torrez are truant from school and playing an alternate reality game, when a terrorist attack destroys San Francisco Bay Bridge. Air raid sirens sound, and everyone in the area begins swarming toward a fallout shelter. Darryl is stabbed by someone in the crowd and the others try to find help for him, but since they didn't go into the shelter as expected, the foursome are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and held as enemy combatants.

After five days of interrogation at the hands of a woman that Marcus refers to as "Severe Haircut Lady", he is forced to sign papers that claim he was held voluntarily, and is released along with Van and Jolu. Darryl, however, is still being held prisoner.

Marcus returns home and lies to his parents about where he was, stating that the DHS had kept him under quarantine because they suspected that he had been exposed to a superbug. Heading up to his room, he discovers that the DHS has installed a bug on his laptop. Knowing that any attempt to disable or tamper with the bug will result in his arrest, he takes an Xbox and a heavily-encrypted version of the Linux operating system, and creates Xnet, an online network that is undetectable by the DHS.

The next day he discovers that the DHS is slowly turning the city into a police state, detaining and interrogating citizens on a whim. At school, he provides other students with the means to access Xnet. Those students begin spreading it to others, and it soon becomes an underground resistance movement opposing the DHS occupation of the city. Marcus, as its de facto leader, vows to use Xnet to bring the DHS to justice. Van and Jolu, fearing arrest, want no part in it. "Xnetters" as they are called, begin sabotaging the DHS's monitoring equipment, which causes embarrassment and mass confusion to the government organization.

However, while organizing resistance, he develops new friendships and a love interest, Ange (Angela Carvelli), that help support him during his doubts and fears over fighting the federal government. He helps develop a clandestine wireless network, Xnet, that avoids DHS monitoring using anonymity, encryption and peer-to-peer tactics. Using the Xnet as a secure communications medium, he organizes teenagers and twenty-somethings who are upset with the police state tactics imposed after the bombing. They develop innovative uses of existing technologies to foil DHS monitoring and cause mass confusion and embarrassment to law enforcement.

After learning that his best friend, Darryl, is not dead, but still being held in a secret prison on nearby Treasure Island Marcus starts a series of events that culminates in his final confrontation with the DHS. Starting with his confession, to his parents and Darryl's father, of what really happened the three days he was imprisoned, he gives all of his information to an investigative reporter friend. This leads to his being imprisoned and tortured (specifically with waterboarding) by the DHS, personified by the Severe Haircut Lady. He is rescued by the California Highway State Patrol (CHSP) after the governor of California acts on the information provided in the news article. He finds his friend Darryl alive, if severely traumatized by his treatment, as well as his girlfriend Ange in the Treasure Island secret prison.

The novel ends with Marcus' life going back to "normal" and the DHS's losing power even though no one from the DHS is actually punished despite video proof of DHS personnel torturing him. Marcus seems to be happy with his life and relationships with both his girlfriend and parents. However, he dedicates a lot of his time to campaigning against the established political party that let this happen to U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Characters

• Marcus Yallow - Main protagonist, a 17-year old high school student who enjoys understanding technology and building his own custom devices. He is the leader of his foursome of friends.
• Darryl Glover - Marcus' best friend who attends the same high school as Marcus and is the details man of the group. He has had a crush on Van for years.

Marcus on limited edition cover

• Vanessa Pak (Van) - 17 year old North Korean girl who attends a nearby all girls' Catholic school, she is the "ideas" person of the group. She has had a thing for Marcus for a long time, but doesn't admit it until the end of the book. Her parents managed to escape from North Korea.
• Jose Luis Torrez (Jolu) - A brilliant high school student at a nearby Catholic school, he is the technical member of the group. Even though everyone in the group is very tech savvy, he is the most technology-oriented, doing his own programming, and working for a local ISP. He is somewhat vain and seems to work at being cool.
• Charles Walker - Also a student at the same high school as Marcus and Darryl, he is the antithesis of Marcus. He is a bully, a brown noser and a narc for the authorities. He and Marcus have a long standing feud and detest each other.
• Carrie Johnstone - Main antagonist and in charge of the DHS that is monitoring San Francisco. She is a cold sadistic woman to whom the ends always justify the means and enjoys abusing her power. She is mainly known as "Severe Haircut Lady" throughout most of the novel.
• Fred Benson - One of the vice-principals at Cesar Chavez High School. He is an authority figure, clueless about technology, who has had it in for Marcus for years. He seems to be one of the primary reason for Marcus' distrust of authority figures.
• Angela Carvelli (Ange) - She attends the same high school as Van and develops into Marcus' love interest, when she first meets him at a party. She is an active member of the Xnet and is very strong-willed, independent, and sexual. She's known to use pepper spray as a condiment.
• Ms. Galvez - A social studies teacher at Cesar Chavez High School, she is seen as a dedicated teacher and an independent thinker. She seems to be the only teacher that Marcus respects at his school. She tends to agree with Marcus on topics of security and Marcus helps her with contacting her brother, who's an overseas soldier, via internet.
• Barbara Stratford - Investigative reporter for the Bay Guardian, who helps Marcus expose what the DHS has been doing.
• Lillian Yallow - Marcus' mother, British ex-national, who helps newly immigrated Britons integrate into American life. She and Marcus have a strong bond and seem to think alike. She is a strong woman and helps mediate Marcus and his father's fights.
• Masha - A small Asian girl, she is a DHS operative and attempts to help Marcus escape the city. Marcus meets her briefly in the beginning of the novel when she threatens to expose him for skipping school while ARGing.
• Zeb - A former detainee of DHS’s “Gitmo-by-the-Bay”, he manages to escape and attempts to disappear after contacting Marcus about Darryl and the current status of the prison.
• Drew Yallow - Marcus' father who has a stormy relationship with Marcus through most of the book. He was so scared by the thought of Marcus having died during the bombing, because Marcus was missing for three days, that he supports the tactics DHS employs. This leads to many arguments with Marcus despite his former mindset that was similar to Marcus'.

Dedications

Each chapter of the e-book edition of Little Brother is dedicated to a different bookstore: Bakka-Phoenix, Amazon.com, Borderlands Books, Barnes & Noble, Secret Headquarters, Powell's City of Books, Books of Wonder, Borders, Compass Books/Books Inc., Anderson's Bookshops, the university bookstore at the University of Washington, Forbidden Planet, Books-A-Million, Mysterious Galaxy, Chapters/Indigo Books, Booksmith, Waterstone's, Sophia Books, MIT Press Bookshop, The Tattered Cover, Pages Books, and Hudson Booksellers.

Cultural cross references

• Chapter 17 mentions Dan Bernstein and his contributions to an EFF lawsuit about strong cryptography.
• The title "Little Brother" is a play on Big Brother in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, mentioned in the author's bibliography. Marcus also uses the handle "w1n5t0n", a reference to the book's main character, Winston Smith.
• The later pseudonym of M1k3y is a reference to the computer "Mycroft" or "Mike" in Robert A. Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. That novel's plot also involved a computer-facilitated revolution.
• A real Paranoid Linux (now defunct) began development based on the version of Linux in the book (Which ParanoidXbox was based on.)
• Stealthiswiki.org, a wiki site inspired by Abbie Hoffman's Steal This Book that the main character uses, actually exists as a open source project that predates the novel.
• The film Office Space is referenced by the systematic destruction of a laptop computer and an offhand reference to a "pound-you-in-the-ass" prison.
• The way "Vista4Schools hides any program beginning with the letters $sys$" is a reference to the Sony Rootkit, which hid any file beginning with the same letters.
• The line "Guantanamo by the Bay was in the hands of its enemies" is a reference to the last line of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Pit and the Pendulum".
• The line "It was like running though a maze of twisty little passages, all alike," is a reference to Colossal Cave Adventure.

Reception

Cindy Dobrez in her review for Booklist said that "Doctorow’s novel blurs the lines between current and potential technologies, and readers will delight in the details of how Marcus attempts to stage a techno-revolution. Obvious parallels to Orwellian warnings and post-9/11 policies, such as the Patriot Act, will provide opportunity for classroom discussion and raise questions about our enthusiasm for technology, who monitors our school library collections, and how we contribute to our own lack of privacy."

Kirkus Reviews described it as an "unapologetically didactic tribute to 1984", and that it was a "terrifying glimpse of the future--or the present."

Publishers Weekly said that it was "filled with sharp dialogue and detailed descriptions of how to counteract gait-recognition cameras, RFID's (radio frequency ID tags), wireless Internet tracers and other surveillance devices, this work makes its admittedly didactic point within a tautly crafted fictional framework."

Major Themes

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother has major themes that according to some are too serious for a YA novel. In an interview, the Journal of Adolescent & Adult literacy asked Doctorow about his "potentially heavy themes, including paranoia, loyalty, sex, torture, [and] fear" and whether his editing staff asked to censor the themes. He replied, "Oh, no."

The Hollywood Reporter remarked, "The book tackles many themes, including civil liberties and social activism".

References

Doctorow, Cory. Little Brother. New York: Tor Teen, 2008

External links

• Official Book Page on Cory Doctorow's website
• All the images from the deluxe edition of Little Brother on Richard Wilkinson's Flickr page
• A Little Brother related article by Cory Doctorow: Security Literacy: teaching kids to think critically about security
• eMusic Q&A: Cory Doctorow about Little Brother
• w1n5t0n on Instructables.com
• Little Brother on Myspace
• Little Brother Facebook Page
• Little Brother related video playlist on YouTube
• Online Version of the book
• Audio review and discussion of Little Brother at The Science Fiction Book Review Podcast
• [1] The actual counterculture wiki site referenced in the novel.