This is the third in a series of notes in which Your Humble Blogger, as explained earlier, sucks up to Tor and Patrick Nielsen Hayden in gratitude for a free ARC of Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother. There could be no possible ethical concerns about this practice; professional reviewers get paid by megacorporations for less.
Anyway, I am up to p. 203, and the smooching has begun. And I have a thing to say that I will attempt to say delicately and precisely, because it is wrongheaded and bad, and I feel I should say it anyway.
Do y’all know about The Turner Diaries? It’s a disgusting American Nazi novel that came out in the late 70s as a sort of underground hit amongst white supremacists. It seems to have been intended to inspire and instruct its readers in insurrection against the government. There are two important things that people know about The Turner Diaries: (a) it’s very poorly written, and (2) it’s disgustingly racist.
Now, Little Brother is (1) quite well written, and (b) not racist at all, so clearly any comparison between Little Brother and The Turner Diaries would not only be wrong but insulting and verging on libelous. Have I emphasized that?
Little Brother does, however, seem to have been intended to inspire and instruct its readers in insurrection against the government.
Now, I have only read the first chapter or two of The Turner Diaries before deciding that I really didn’t need to know about it badly enough to read that shit. And I’m only 202 pages into Little Brother. And I really don’t want to overstate the extent to which I am beginning to feel creeped out. It’s really mild creep. Very, very mild indeed. But it’s there.
There’s an exchange on page 179 where a bad guy student says “It’s easy to tell who’s us and who’s them: if you support America, you’re us. If you support the people who are shooting at Americans, you’re them.” This is supposed to (a) show that the student is a bully, wrong and stupid, and (2) stick into the back of the reader’s mind that if the people who are shooting at Americans are DHS goons, then it’s the government who are them. Fine. Only, you know, I’ve had the feeling all along, in this book, that the government are them, and they are bad, bad, bad.
A couple of years ago, I wrote that Robert Heinlein, in The Puppet Masters seemed to be “just itching to violate our deeply held principles of proper government behavior. He’s really digging the impunity with which his protagonist lays waste to the Bill of Rights. Oh, if only horrific aliens would invade, I imagine him saying to himself whilst typing, then we’d see some action.” I have a very faint whiff of the same thing from Little Brother, albeit in the opposite direction, of course. There’s a kind of glee in the depiction of how those teenagers are morally released to do their rebellious business.
Let me repeat: I am not saying that Little Brother is just a technolibertarian version of The Turner Diaries. Not. And if you, Gentle Reader, were to say that it is, I would take the time to disagree with you, because such a statement is morally odious. What I am saying is that Little Brother in some places struck me as being faintly reminiscent of one aspect of The Turner Diaries, enough to bring that excrescence to mind, and I think it’s worth mentioning that fact.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Have you ever read You Bright and Risen Angels, by William Vollman? The man gives all appearances in his writings, interviews, and otherwise of being in some ways an odious turd (and aren’t we all, interesting, fun, all that), and I doubt that this book would dissuade you from that notion. However, he is hella writer, and YBaRA has an interesting perspective on bullies, rebels, their relationships, and according to the table of contents, some subset of the characters eventually have a war on Mars, but the book never gets to that part of the ToC, ’cause Vollman’s odd.
It also might not be easy to read, if you look for that in a book.
peace
Matt