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Apr. 24th, 2009 10:34 amAfter the last Cory Doctorow book that I read, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sandrylene announced that she was going to lend me Little Brother. Which she did! (Lending me books is a great way to make me push them up my List, because I know I'll forget to return them if I don't read them as soon as possible, and then I will be branded as a Thiever and Hoarder of Books and have to live in eternal shame. Even if only in my head. Yes, I still do feel guilty about the Babysitter's Club books I never returned to my elementary school BFF, why do you ask?)
Anyway, the verdict: this one is a lot less bizarre and more coherent than Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, and the protagonist is a lot more likeable and less creepy - it didn't leave me as discomfited and thinky at the end, and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not. Little Brother is pretty explicitly 1984 Lite, the story of a US where counter-terrorism measures start to infringe pretty heavily on people's personal freedoms. One tech-savvy geeky LARPer decides to use his hacking skills to secretly FIGHT BACK. It is also very very very Cory Doctorow. Are geeks, free internet and social media going to save America? You bet your bottom dollar they will! It is kind of telling that while sympathetic characters sometimes disapprove of the protagonist's rebellious actions, there aren't any unsympathetic characters who approve of them - hacker-geeks are undeniably Good Guys here, and even the skeptics are mostly won over by the end. (Also, as a sidenote, something about the way Doctorow writes his female teen characters nags at me and I don't know what it is. Although maybe part of it is that the two main female characters of the book hate each other for never-explained reasons; I am pretty sure that it comprehensively fails the Bechdel Test. The lady journalist is pretty awesome, though.)
On the other hand, you don't read Cory Doctorow if you want a nuanced exploration of moral gray areas. You read Cory Doctorow if you want to know how geeks are going to save the world from fascist governments by hacking their XBoxes and organizing vampire LARPs, and that is certainly fun to read about.
In other news, in a few hours I am heading down to DC for the weekend. So some of you I will see tomorrow!
sandrylene announced that she was going to lend me Little Brother. Which she did! (Lending me books is a great way to make me push them up my List, because I know I'll forget to return them if I don't read them as soon as possible, and then I will be branded as a Thiever and Hoarder of Books and have to live in eternal shame. Even if only in my head. Yes, I still do feel guilty about the Babysitter's Club books I never returned to my elementary school BFF, why do you ask?)Anyway, the verdict: this one is a lot less bizarre and more coherent than Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town, and the protagonist is a lot more likeable and less creepy - it didn't leave me as discomfited and thinky at the end, and I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not. Little Brother is pretty explicitly 1984 Lite, the story of a US where counter-terrorism measures start to infringe pretty heavily on people's personal freedoms. One tech-savvy geeky LARPer decides to use his hacking skills to secretly FIGHT BACK. It is also very very very Cory Doctorow. Are geeks, free internet and social media going to save America? You bet your bottom dollar they will! It is kind of telling that while sympathetic characters sometimes disapprove of the protagonist's rebellious actions, there aren't any unsympathetic characters who approve of them - hacker-geeks are undeniably Good Guys here, and even the skeptics are mostly won over by the end. (Also, as a sidenote, something about the way Doctorow writes his female teen characters nags at me and I don't know what it is. Although maybe part of it is that the two main female characters of the book hate each other for never-explained reasons; I am pretty sure that it comprehensively fails the Bechdel Test. The lady journalist is pretty awesome, though.)
On the other hand, you don't read Cory Doctorow if you want a nuanced exploration of moral gray areas. You read Cory Doctorow if you want to know how geeks are going to save the world from fascist governments by hacking their XBoxes and organizing vampire LARPs, and that is certainly fun to read about.
In other news, in a few hours I am heading down to DC for the weekend. So some of you I will see tomorrow!
