A New Take on an Old Classic

We all know about Big Brother from 1984, but in Little Brother, Cory Doctorow gives us a new twist on this classic.

This book is technically young adult, but it's one that can really hit home for adults, too.

Basically, the premise is the same as Big Brother. Just take it and put it in San Francisco in a post-9/11 era. The plot quickly starts off with an attack on the city's bay bridge, and then the DHS comes in and basically takes away all the freedoms of the residents. Marcus, a 17-year-old geek, hacker, gamer, takes it upon himself to try to show the government what's what and take back his city. He feels he's got more  of a stake in the matter because he, along with three of his friends, were arrested and interrogated for days right after the attack. The DHS tightens their hold on the city as the story progresses - traffic patterns are monitored, Internet usage is watched, etc. All of this eggs Marcus on as he continues to undermine the government on his X-net.

This was a very thought provoking book, and one that's very fitting for our times. I thought the writing drug on at times (I didn't need a lot of details on how Marcus programmed/worked his hacking magic), but that doesn't detract from the message Doctorow is trying to get across. Plus, there's the added bonus of him being cool enough that he's released a lot of his writing under Creative Commons - so it's free. All because he thinks  words/books should be easy to access!