Your Humble Blogger, as explained in last week’s episode, is writing more than the usual Book Report about Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, as a sort of advertising payment in return for a free ARC from Tor and Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Searching ethical questions about this practice should be asked loudly and clearly, because I’m a trifle deaf in that ear.
Well, and the next bit had three different instances of the infodump, Explanation Specialized, subtype scientific, but it survived. Actually, this is a slightly different thing than an infodump, a thing that used to happen a lot in Juvenile Skiffy but I haven’t seen a lot recently, the Educational Bit. The old Tom Swift books were all about these. I haven’t actually read the new ones, alas, or even that many of the old ones. I was more into Danny Dunn, who also used those Educational Bits with a liberal hand. That’s the bit where the author tries to interest us in the actual science behind the outlandish plot, or at least fills us in on some basic background info that we probably wouldn’t have paid attention to in the physics text.
Mr. Doctorow gives us a working knowledge of Bayesian statistics, cryptography (and its history), and the paradox of the false positive, all between page 96, where I last wrote, and page 150, where I am now. Now, I know about all those things, in far more detail than Mr. Doctorow presents them here, because (a) I am thirty-glob years old, and (2) I majored in mathematics, for my sins, and retained some slight interest in matters mathematical. So it’s a bit hard for me to judge how a Young Adult would respond to these lessons. On the other hand, I loved the Danny Dunn books. So there you are. Of course, a Gentle Reader could then draw a line between a misspent youth reading about anti-gravity machines and a misspent college experience majoring in mathematics, and extrapolate to a misspent adulthood writing this Tohu Bohu. So there you are.
On an entirely unrelated note, it occurred to me that I would probably find a different take on these incidents more fascinating. It’s not a criticism of Little Brother, because Mr. Doctorow wrote the book he wrote, and is in no way responsible for not writing the book that YHB is imagining, and which might have stunk anyway, but here’s the idea. Instead of writing about the whiz-kid who fights the system, the story is through the eyes of a DHS investigator, fairly clever and technologically savvy, but inclined to presuppose that each new regulation and security measure that comes down is a Good Thing. Not a wild-eyed idealist, but just someone who as part of his job sees all the frustrations and limitations that our civil liberties and privacy protections impose on law enforcement. He would also be inclined to dismiss individual instances of abuse as aberrations, although he would be worried about them, and increasingly worried as the pattern of increased abuses (and increasingly severe abuses) emerges. The crackdown progresses, to the point that the new laws (we haven’t got to them yet, in any detail, in the real book) seem extreme even to him. His increasing dissatisfaction is counterpointed, though, with the progress on his investigation that the new tools provide, which (and this is imaginarily very nicely written indeed) is slowly revealing that the network attacking the DHS measures is not connected at all with foreign terrorist groups, or with anybody who has committed any violent crimes, but to a group of rebellious teenagers seeking to (a) escape the surveillance state and its constant low-level harassment, in order to play games, drink and get laid and (2) get revenge for the vicious murder of one of their own by a DHS ‘bad apple’. About three-quarters of the way through the book, our Hero meets the teenage techno-whiz leader of the pack, and then the rest of the imaginary book is also really good, but totally surprising to the point where YHB’s expectations are blown up, but in a good way. How does that sound?
Not that any of that has anything to do with Little Brother. It would be a different book entirely, and not a YA book, either, I think. I don’t even think Cory Doctorow would like that book very much; it certainly would be making different points about politics, society and technology than he wants to make. But that’s what I was thinking.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.