Well, and I’ve finished reading Little Brother. Gentle Readers will be aware that I was given an ARC by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, in return for a promise to talk about the book, or type about it, anyway, which I am doing now. I have sold your eyeballs, people, for a mess of pottage! Mmmmm, pottage.
Here’s the thing: it’s a good book. I enjoyed it. The plot went well, with some places where it didn’t exactly go in the most obvious place. It’s well-written, entertaining, readable. It’s hard for me to tell how informative it is, because two-thirds (at least) of the informative was stuff I already knew, but I would guess that for kids who were born in the nineties and are only now really looking at the world around them, there will be a lot of interesting information, without being too utterly boring. So, a good book. Many Gentle Readers would enjoy reading it, and I suspect almost all the rest of you would be pleased if any teenagers you hold dear would read the thing. I wasn’t amazed and giddy, and I didn’t consider rushing out and buying copies for my niece and nephew, or for the local libraries. If my niece reads it, fine, and I’ll enjoy chatting with her about it; if she doesn’t, fine, there are plenty of good books.
From here on out, though, it’s carping and complaining, griping and grousing, picking apart and picking on. Because that’s how I enjoy things, by ruining them for everyone else.
First, the main character is, at the beginning, a smug self-entitled little prick. This is, I assume, a deliberate choice by Cory Doctorow, but it made me less interested in him as a character. Yes, he improves, somewhat, but I never grew to actually like him. And he doesn’t seem to have any tastes. I mean, he likes things, but he doesn’t prefer them. He likes pizza, he likes Thai food, he likes burritos. He likes punk bands. He likes Jack Kerouac. He likes school, he likes cutting school, He likes LARPs, he likes video games, he likes mental puzzles. He likes programming, he likes writing. He likes to walk, he likes to dance. What doesn’t he like? I mean, he doesn’t like the surveillance state, and the mean bully kid in the class, and obnoxious grown-ups, and he doesn’t like being waterboarded, but there don’t seem to be any food, music, entertainment or literature choices that he doesn’t like, simply because different people like different things.
Next, I understand that Mr. Doctorow is on about the surveillance state and civil liberties, but the science fiction in this book is really, really narrow. There have been a bunch of changes in stuff that affects surveillance and security, and no changes in anything else of any significance. There’s an offhand comment about gasoline being seven dollars a gallon, but if people have different driving patterns, it doesn’t affect the book. Climate change is mentioned as a political issue, but it hasn’t affected what food is available, or what the ethnic makeup is of neighborhoods, or the political or social situation. The climate change thing niggled at me a lot, just because I have been thinking about it a lot. Mr. Doctorow’s choice to focus on what he wanted to do was probably the best choice available to him, but it bugged me.
In part, it bugged be because I couldn’t tell when the thing was supposed to be happening. There’s a sense in which it’s happening right now. The actual political figures are fictional ones; the Governor of California is unnamed but is clearly not Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Secretary of Homeland Security (or whoever he is) is someone we have never heard of. In addition, the BART system has (another) new fare system, and there are a handful of technological things that are not far off, but (I think) aren’t common now. All in all, it feels like we’re at least ten years off, probably more like fifteen. It’s a midterm election year. So, 2022? 2018? On the other hand, our hero is seventeen, and got a Sega Dreamscape when he was seven, which means, um, now.
Also a bit annoying? The book is, as Patrick Nielsen Hayden said in the note, “unabashedly didactic”, which could get right up a fourteen-year-old’s nose. It got up my nose a little, too.
Oh, and there’s a common theme throughout the book that they [the gummint] are dumb, and we’re smart. And I agree that much of the security apparatus is stupid although much of the security apparatus is not actually attempting to achieve security, so it’s hard to say what is stupidity and what isn’t. But if you ever take up the attitude that you are smart and the bad guys are stupid, well, you suck. And you lose. When it comes down to it, the DHS goons are not really stupid in this book; Mr. Doctorow resists the urge to make the bad guys buffoons. They are frightening, and they are plausible. Perhaps Mr. Doctorow deliberately made the teenagers’ attitudes obnoxious, because, you know, teenagers, but YHB found it annoying.
There. I’ve complained enough.
Since one goal of the book is to provoke discussion and debate, I asked a couple of undergraduate college students of my acquaintance whether the surveillance state ever came up in conversation with their buddies. Nuh-uh. There was a bit of discussion about it (go Little Brother!) but it was clear that (a) they assumed that if the government were spying on them, it wouldn’t really be interested because they weren’t going to protests and shit, and (2) having brought up the issue, the students were more concerned about the ease with which people they know can track down their movements, like a parent reading a kids debit card statement or pissed-off friends spreading ‘locked’ info from social network sites. To that extent, if teenagers read this book, it may well help to reframe the whole issue in people’s minds. This is a political issue, and even if Your Humble Blogger doesn’t happen to be all that het up about it, I would like people to be aware of it, and aware of it as a political issue.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.