Little Brother

Title: Little Brother

Author: Cory Doctorow

ISBN: 9780765319852

Publisher: Tor Teen

Copyright: 2008

Genre: Fiction/Cyber Punk

Age Range: 15+

Reader’s Annotation: Marcus Yallow is a teen hacker who gets caught up in a terrorist attack and is mistreated by the DHS making him hell-bent on revenge.

Plot Summary: Marcus Yallow is a seventeen year old computer whiz who is constantly being dragged into vice principal Frederick Benson’s office and accused of any and all cybercrimes regardless if it really was him. Later that day, Marcus and his friend Darryl ditch school to meet up with Vanessa and Jolu to play Harajuku Fun Madness, a game that involves online clues and a physical component. While searching for a signal, a series of explosions go off in the city that is accounted as a terrorist attack. In the chaos, they make their way down through insane crowds to a shelter only to have to get out of the shelter because Darryl has been stabbed. When they find help, they are grabbed and bagged and held at an unknown location by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as suspects of the attack. Because of Marcus’ defiance against the DHS, he is interrogated for six days whereby he, Vanessa, and Jolu are released. No one knows what happened to Darryl. All three of them are threatened by the DHS that they will be watched.

            Marcus vows revenge. He uses a computer program that outsmarts security breakthroughs to create a whole new surveillance free internet called the X Net. Marcus is able to create a wave of new supporters. Through the X Net a protest concert is coordinated. The DHS promptly crashes it and pepper sprays the entire crowd from a helicopter. This creates a huge controversy and media attention. The DHS tries to tighten its grip on the Bay City. Marcus reacts by telling his parents who gets an investigative reporter involved. All the while the DHS is trying to infiltrate the X Net and bring Marcus down. Marcus coordinates a huge live action role play event in a busy area so that he can make a break for it, but is drawn back to the city. Will Marcus be arrested again? Will he ever see Darrly? Will the DHS get away with violating citizens’ rights?

Critical Evaluation: Little Brother has received many positive reviews from publishing outlets. It is praised for showing a technological superiority and a future that is just as astute as Orwell, Bradbury, or Burgess. Doctorow uses current technology in the hands of a government that is no longer watching out for the privacy and rights of its people and has become hyper focused on the security and surveillance of its own state. It is a very realistic world where the PATRIOT Act has gone wrong and given too many powers away to people who would rather abuse it. This novel is a high adventure read and is a good way to get teens who are interested in higher technology also interested in reading. The book also has a male main character as the protagonist that might also draw more boys into reading it. If a teen wants to investigate further on the internet, they can find M1k3y and Harajuku Fun Madness out there. Doctorow has a fun and relatable style of writing that draws teens into his book.

Author Information: Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to The Guardian, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wired, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. He holds an honorary doctorate in computer science from the Open University (UK), where he is a Visiting Professor; in 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

His novels have been translated into dozens of languages and are published by Tor Books, Titan Books (UK) and HarperCollins (UK) and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. His latest young adult novel is HOMELAND, the bestselling sequel to 2008's LITTLE BROTHER. His latest novel for adults is RAPTURE OF THE NERDS, written with Charles Stross and published in 2012. His New York Times Bestseller LITTLE BROTHER was published in 2008. His latest short story collection is WITH A LITTLE HELP, available in paperback, ebook, audiobook and limited edition hardcover. In 2011, Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays, called CONTEXT: FURTHER SELECTED ESSAYS ON PRODUCTIVITY, CREATIVITY, PARENTING, AND POLITICS IN THE 21ST CENTURY (with an introduction by Tim O'Reilly) and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called CORY DOCTOROW'S FUTURISTIC TALES OF THE HERE AND NOW. THE GREAT BIG BEAUTIFUL TOMORROW, a PM Press Outspoken Authors chapbook, was also published in 2011. Source - http://craphound.com/?page_id=1638

Curriculum Ties:

Challenge Issues: Curse Words; Violence; Disobedience; Anti-Government; Sex

Booktalk Ideas: Tech – Talk about RFID chips and how they can be used to tag someone. Talk about how to defeat them as a lead in to the book.