Little Brother
My advance copy of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother arrived this afternoon, and I've just finished it--it was a quick read, which is not a criticism.
Perhaps it's been too long since I've read much in the way of young adult fiction (which LB certainly is; the first-person narrator is 17), but I was not blown away. Perhaps it's the way the narrative keeps breaking off for little two-paragraph blurbs on the latest bit of silly "security" technology and how to do an end-run around it; this is very useful information, sure, but I am not so much of a science fiction geek as to enjoy being as-you-know-Bobbed into oblivion. Seeing as this seems to be one of the things that many of the other people who've read the book really liked about it, I suspect that I am not the target audience. Which is odd, because usually I'm fascinated by things like how to pick locks (really, really easy with some practice) and the password-logging hack that nearly got one guy expelled from CMU before he could convince the admins he just did it to see if it would work1. So I'm not clear why, every time Marcus (the narrator) starts going on about RFID tags, I just totally zoned out.
Also, I didn't like Marcus very much. Maybe it's just too hard for me to empathize with a teenage boy, maybe it's because he does so many, many things that I was wincing over even as I was reading about him planning them, I don't know. But I wanted to smack some damn sense into him. No, knuckling under and pretending that it's only going to happen to "other people" is not the right tack, but the way Marcus goes about the whole thing is so spectacularly a case of the forebrain not having integrated yet that I'm still muttering about it. Then again, I'm over 25 and thus not to be trusted...or so the book says. Because teenagers need more reason to believe that they're so much smarter than anyone who can, you know, actually think.
I never felt as if there was any danger, either--even as Our Hero is being waterboarded, I was pretty much looking at my watch going, OK, rescue in 5...4...3... And honestly, the big victory at the end of the book is anything but; getting more specific would be pretty spoilery, but Marcus wins on a small scale and has pretty much no effect whatsoever on a larger one. It's frustrating.
I guess my biggest problem is that the book reads a lot more like a polemic than a novel. Even the sex scenes felt tacked on. I think that a lot of the spectacularly good reviews I'm reading (from people like Neil Gaiman, no less) are reacting a lot more to the message than the actual book, and while a message is a good thing it doesn't make for great literature. On the whole, I give Little Brother a rather low B-.
1: It did, spectacularly well. What he did was write a little script. When he logged out of a machine in one of the clusters, the script did not actually log him out; it just pretended to, and put up a screen that looked like the normal login. The next person to sit down at the machine would enter their usename and password; the script would email that to him and then really log him out, and the person would think their fingers had slipped in typing in their password, log in as normal and proceed.