Subscribe to RSS 2.0Little Brother Book Review
Time to air some of my preconceptions. I think of most SnowBlog readers as being more sophisticated about literature than I am. You listen to more Radio 4 (in the evenings sometimes!) and you like more classical music than I do; you probably have complex opinions about the Dutch School and the Arts & Crafts movement. You can reel off the names of the Bloomsbury set but struggle with the cast of Eastenders. You'd have plenty to say when comparing the merits of Eliot and Dickens, and there are Booker prize winners that you genuinely enjoyed reading, no pretense or lying required. And none of you can write a decent computer program or see why you'd want to. Silly and fanciful stereotypes I know, but if I'm right, then you probably won't like Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow. But I loved it.
It's set a year or two into the future, just to give it room to be fiction. It picks up a theme that we're all familiar with: how, over the last eight years, there's been more CCTV everywhere, more no-fly lists, extraordinary rendition, biometric passports, taking your shoes off and throwing away all liquids before you can fly, waterboarding, US scandals over domestic spying and illegal wiretaps, and constant calls for more security everywhere and less privacy anywhere - except if you're in charge, in which case everything you do seems to be classified. It's all about giving up our freedoms to protect them.
Little Brother takes all of that one small and believable step further. We've all got used to the idea that if we do something suspicious at the wrong moment we could be in serious trouble, even if we've committed no crime. Little Brother follows a rather wholesome San Francisco teenager, called Marcus, who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when something really, really bad happens. The line between suspicion and guilt having become so blurred, he finds himself being treated like a terrorist. And when the authorities have finished abusing and threatening him - at least for the time being - Marcus realises that whoever all these paranoid and invasive rules are protecting, it's clearly not him - or anyone he cares about. For the rest of the book, he uses his inventive geekiness and that of his much persecuted friends to resist the security clampdown and to carve out a little privacy in a world that wants to read his e-mail, monitor his travel patterns and lock him up if he complains.
Marcus is both more knowledgeable than most seventeen-year-olds and a little more wholesome - but not ridiculously so, and the story requires both of those traits. It needs to show that as a country flirts with the idea of becoming a police state, then sooner or later every type of person will get caught up in the security machine - not just angry young Arab men, but 'good kids' too, because tighter rules almost always tend to criminalise being a teenager. And Marcus needs to be wicked smart because the book is packed with fabulously subversive tips on how to beat security systems, locate surveillance cameras, communicate untraceably and figure out who to trust - which as one of the book's recurring themes suggests - should probably exclude anyone over twenty-five.
Clearly this book has an agenda and if you believe that only bad people have anything to fear from an incipient police state, you'll be annoyed by it. Personally, I thought it was marvellously entertaining: really interesting, really fun. Cory doesn't cheat too much: he has all the counter-arguments to his hero's views in there, some of which drive a wedge between him and his friends and family. And his hero, Marcus, finds time for other things besides intrigue: He meets a girl, and that relationship becomes just as much of a reason to read on as the threat that he'll be detained and perhaps 'disappeared' overseas.
The book is written with something of the YA (=Young Adult) audience in mind - though that didn't cause me any problems at all (draw your own conclusions over what that means). But I'd love to know what brainy mid-teens make of it - assuming you want to put anything so frankly seditious into their hands. Before handing it to them, you might wish to know that there's violence, some sex and lots of information which, if used to its full extent, could get you thrown in prison. But on the plus side, there's relatively little swearing, so buy a copy for a young person today. And then read it before handing it over.
The book's technology: [contains spoilers]
In the comments, Lee cites some critics who think the technology in the book is too convenient, or the bad guys too slow on the uptake, which amounts to weak plotting. There are nits I could pick with the book, but they don't really concern the technology.
For instance, in the book, a group of kids use a future version of the Xbox (the Xbox Universal) to communicate. They load a special version of Linux onto it, in place of the Microsoft-supplied software, and then use the ability of the boxes to link to each other wirelessly to form their own mini-internet which they call the Xnet. The Xnet also makes use of ordinary internet links, often links belonging to unsuspecting Xbox owners outside of the group. The Department of Homeland Security are slow to notice this. One criticism is that the DHS would surely notice an increase in encrypted traffic. This is actually a niggle brought up by the characters in the book, and their fix is to persuade a friend who runs a music site to encrypt downloads of songs as a way to create lots more encrypted traffic and thus hide the suspicious activity. First off, these are several thousand kids in a city of seven million. Secondly, lots of things use encryption already (banking, shopping, some e-mail). And thirdly, because they're often piggybacking off other people's internet connections it's going to spread out the evidence. It's not clear to me that the authorities would notice anything, but even if they did, the story deals with that problem promptly. And while its fix - happening to know someone who owns a music site - is convenient, there would have been lots of ways to achieve the same thing. If it hadn't been done with music it could have been done with file sharing or gaming, for instance. One could modify a BitTorrent network to hide a VPN for communicating. Or how about if they'd hosted their own MMORPG, hacked to hide communications within the game transfers? We're talking about two or three thousand techno-literate kids, on the edge of Silicon Valley. It's not a stretch that they would have useful contacts in a game, website or bittorrent network.
There's also the question that the machines running the Xnet are Xbox Universals given away for free. Surely this is just a cute idea, rather than an important plot point. Cory saw that Xbox 360s actually cost rather more to make than their retail price and posited a future where a box is given away for free and the revenue made entirely on the games. But if that idea doesn't appeal, you don't need special Xboxes for the plot to work. You could use a LiveCD of a Linux distro on any PC that's not physically bugged. Cory could have had his kids check their PCs very carefully for physical bugs and then, say, boot Knoppix off flash drives and then hide the drives when they're not in use. Any version of Linux would do, provided the kids in the novel wrote a few extra scripts and tunneling protocols; ParanoidLinux is just a cute idea: having a version of Linux already in existence that paranoid people can use. In fact it's such a cute idea that there's a group at work coding it right now. So by the time the novel takes places, there almost certainly will be something called ParanoidLinux that works exactly like it's supposed to.
Similarly, if you don't think that the Xnet is plausible, then there are already mesh networks in existence, in places like Seattle and MIT's roofnet. You take a cheap wireless router and load new software on it (freely available for download right now). The routers link to each other automatically and form their own network.
Another critic thinks the police would notice kids reprogramming the chips in people's toll passes and railcards. But in the novel, the kids use portable devices that reprogram nearby RFID chips automatically and from a distance (after all, the point of RFID is that it doesn't need physical contact). Doing so involves having the reprogrammer hidden in your bag and walking down the street; what's to spot? Whether the specific passes mentioned in the book really can be hacked with freely available equipment, I have no idea. But they could almost certainly be copied and cloned, as here (the link discusses a method for cloning Oyster cards).
The point is that if any one technical twist in the book - or even all of them - for some reason seem wrong or bad or silly - an assessment I don't really understand or agree with - there are plenty of ways to achieve the same thing. Cory is an ex-Sys Admin and he had computer security consultants (one of whom writes an afterword for the book) read early drafts of the book. If the feedback had been 'this would never work' it would have been simple to make a few changes and to keep exactly the same plot but alter some of the technical details. To me, that means there isn't a problem with the technical plot points or their convenience.
Comments: 12
I fear I'm going to disagree about LITTLE BROTHER. It was written in two months, and as far as I'm concerned, it
shows - convenient plot devices, cookie-cutter characterisation,
commonplace teen voice, bland writing style. And of course there's the
Message. I emphatically don't like books with overt messages, even
self-proclaimed ones.
But I do think a lot of teens will adore the novel. The feedback I'm getting from librarians and teachers is that 8th graders love it!
Rather than go into further detail, I'm going to point to a good review, which includes further links, and I particularly suggest you follow the second one, which has some excellent points about the plot failings, especially from a tech point of view:
Link 1 Link 2
Posted by: Lee on May 26, 2008 02:12 PM
I took a look at the plot holes link, Lee; none of the things that it claims are far-fetched seem in the least unlikely to me. A kind of Linux that helps you evade authority? It's being built. Ubiquitous Xboxes you can easily hack to run Linux? They're here now. I could build pretty much all the technology in the book - or come up with an equivalent (e.g. a wifi mesh network) - so I don't accept it's unbelievable. And to say that the authorities conveniently "don't notice" all the secret things going on is silly. They're not telepathic, but they move mountains to infiltrate the group. As for problems with characters, prose or propaganda, I'd say that was a matter of taste. It's not Jane Austen, but it's much better than, say, Dan Brown.
Posted by: Rob on May 26, 2008 04:38 PM
It's not that the tech is unlikely or nonexistent, just that the plot twists are implausible. And I tend to agree with Marilynne Robinson: implausibility is usually a problem of style.
I don't think it's silly at all to criticise that the authorities fail to notice the sudden upsurge in encrypted info, for example. That's exactly the sort of thing a security machine is going to be on the lookout for.
If you want to claim taste as the only arbiter of literary quality, you're of course not entirely wrong - but not entirely right either.
Posted by: Lee on May 26, 2008 05:05 PM
Rob, I'm not knowledgeable enough to argue tech with you, though I do find it awfully convenient that Marcus' friend is in exactly the right place at the right time, so to speak (music site). The point about such handy plot devices, for me, is that implausibilty is a failure of style and writing skill. In other words, we all know that the most improbable things happen in 'real life', but this is not what makes for good fiction - or how it works!
Your discussion about the tech reinforces my view that bad SF ignores exactly what should come first: the fiction, not the science. But I'm perfectly willing to grant you that there are tons of SF readers out there who read for the ideas, not the quality of the writing. I'm not one of them, and I bitterly lament that much - though not all, of course - SF lacks the depth and resonance I see as essential.
There are SF critics like Farah Mendelsohn who disagree with me, of course. She writes in her introduction to the Cambridge Companion to SF:
'For sf is perhaps the last real bastion of Romantic fiction: sf protagonists fall in love with the macrocosm. Where mainstream fiction writes of the intricacies
of inter-human relationships, the discourse of sf is about our relationship to the world and the universe. The great events (wars, moon landings, famines) or the great ideas (evolution, alien contact, immortality) are foregrounded.
In Schild’s Ladder, Tchicaya and Mariama are not conducting their affair
against the shaping force of a great discovery: they are conducting their discovery of the universe against the unwelcome distraction of unresolved emotions. It is this reversal of romance, the insistence that romance is out
there rather than internal, that frequently results in non-sf critics judging
sf deficient in characterization and emotion.'
I think her prespective on the latent romanticism in SF is interesting but ignores the centrality of self, and its transcendence - intercourse of the self with the universal, the infinite - which is so key to understanding the literature of the Romantic period; but primarily I agree with those non-SF critics who expect more subtlety and depth and richness in their fiction.
It's certainly worth considering whether someone like Mendesohn is striving for taxonomies which legitimise SF to mainstream literary pundits; or whether she is right that critics can only understand SF once they've understood its self-definitions.
Perhaps this means there ought to be more conversations between SF and non-SF critics - and readers of course.
Posted by: Lee on May 28, 2008 08:03 AM
One more comment about the style of LB: I also think the pacing of the novel is seriously hampered by the long-winded explanations and conversations about tech. The best SF has moved well beyond this crude info-dump approach.
Posted by: Lee on May 28, 2008 09:11 AM
Lee, I wasn't making any of the points you ascribe to me. You said certain plot points were 'convenient' or unlikely. I was just trying to show that they weren't. But if you think it's just too convenient that a bunch of geeky kids in Silicon Valley would know a website owner then I don't think I'm going to sway you on any of the other points. It was you who mentioned the improbability of hiding encrypted traffic. If that's not a criticism of a technical plot point then I haven't understood your words. It's a book that tries to make technology interesting. Either the technology serves the plot a little too conveniently (your first point) or the plot serves the technology a little too conveniently (your current point), but I feel redundant, sitting in the middle, while you argue both sides.
Posted by: Rob on May 28, 2008 10:37 AM
Hi, Lee sent me over there. I think she really misunderstands my comments in the Cambridge Companion but that's not what I wanted to write here.
Jack Cohen (a scientist at Warwick University, UK) says that coincidence proves that god doesn't exist. It is the *lack* of coincidence in supposedly "good" fiction that renders it implausible--take, just as an example--the fact that almost no authors give two characters the same name.
Re the plausibility of Doctorow's ideas--in the UK a young man has been imprisoned for helping a fellow student download a document on terrorism from a US government server, *for the student's coursework!*. He now faces deportation having committed no crime.
Re the time it takes to write a book: this is why Asimov never admitted how long he took to write a story (about an hour by all accounts). People write at very different speeds. I can think of one or two authors who are glacial. To make a dismissive comment about ".., and it shows" is just ignorant. I can write 1500 words in an hour anda half, but I can't write more than 1500 a day. So my output is fast, but my product accumulation is slow--does that make me a good or bad writer?
Farah
Posted by: Farah on May 28, 2008 01:18 PM
I'm not going to get tangled in the rumble above, but I will comment about YA: some of my favorite books are YA. Holes, Stargirl, and Feed - a terrifying, deeply disturbing book with a somewhat similar purpose to the one described above - can all stand up against Booker winners as far as I'm concerned.
I never listen to Radio Four. :)
Posted by: KatharineC on May 28, 2008 01:46 PM
Oh dear, I'm beginning to wonder if this is all becoming counterproductive!
Re convenient plot developments and implausibility: my point is that something becomes implausible in fiction if it's not handled well. I never meant to give the impression that Doctorow's ideas are implausible in reality - though they may be -only within the framework of the narrative he's created. Of course he tries to make the technology interesting, but this doesn't mean he succeeds.
In other words, you're exactly right: I'm criticisng a technical plot point, but on the basis of the way it's handled. A better writer would be able to use the exact same scenario but craft it in such a way that it becomes convincing. Because Doctorow's prose is merely serviceable and not interesting in itself, we fall back on examining whether the events are likely.
'It is the *lack* of coincidence in supposedly "good" fiction that renders it implausible', Farah says. This is exactly why I think we're talking about different things when we use the term plausibility. Plausibility in fiction is related to suspension of disbelief, not about whether fiction mirrors reality.
Rob, if I've made two opposing points or contradicted myself, then please explain it better, because I don't understand this: 'Either the technology serves the plot a little too conveniently (your first point) or the plot serves the technology a little too conveniently (your current point).' Perhaps I seem to have shifted position (or perhaps I have??) but I used 'convenient plot points' as a shorthand for what I later tried to elaborate about implausibility in fiction (which again, is not the same thing as implausibility in the real world).
@Farah: no, it's not ignorance that leads me to be suspicious of an author who writes a novel in such a short time, because I'm well aware of the claim, apparently only true in part, that Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks, or Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus in less than a month. There are always exceptions, and there is always something like genius - genius reinforced by years of hard work. But a novel, in my view, is a long and complex undertaking that requires living the narrative over time - coming back to it again and again, allowing it to mature.
Posted by: Lee on May 28, 2008 02:39 PM
Katharine - FEED is a particular favourite of mine. I really like how Anderson employs cliched and emptied language to underscore one of his concerns: what happens when we lose the facility to use language in a rich, nuanced way? Have you read his Octavian novel? Conmpletely different, beautifully written.
Posted by: Lee on May 28, 2008 02:49 PM
Lee - I thought the language was interesting in large part because Anderson was able to employ the ridiculous Slang of Tomorrow in order to (eventually) allow the characters to reveal, quite awkwardly, deep emotion. These emotions and emotional events, especially the teenage versions of them, never change - discomfort, epiphany, shame, unsurety. (I'm not sure if perhaps I've just said the opposite of what you think about the book.) Mostly it petrified me, because I'm only 26 and even I think these damn kids today are illiterate and self-absorbed. It seems to be accelerating, terribly, and I wouldn't be surprised if we came to live in a world like Feed's.
There was some inflammatory press about the Octavian novel when it came out, and I avoided it for that reason and for its subject matter. I might pick it up eventually, but I'm waiting to see what Anderson does next.
Posted by: KatharineC on May 28, 2008 07:49 PM
Hi Katharine (Sorry, Rob & Emma, to take over your blog like this!), but I think the 'dumbed-down' language is crucial to FEED - the President who can't put sentences together, for example. Anderson raises all sorts of interesting questions about what it means to be semi-inarticulate, for individuals, for a society. How well can the kids express those feelings you mention without the right tools? Are the feelings stifled or changed as a consequence?
Posted by: Lee on May 28, 2008 08:31 PM