Little Brother (Audible Audio Edition) Kirby Heyborne Cory Doctorow Listening Library Books
Download As PDF : Little Brother (Audible Audio Edition) Kirby Heyborne Cory Doctorow Listening Library Books
Marcus, aka "w1n5t0n", is only 17 years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works - and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school's intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they're mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option to take down the DHS himself.
Little Brother (Audible Audio Edition) Kirby Heyborne Cory Doctorow Listening Library Books
OK, so I admit I’m late to this particular book party. Better late than never. I see in many reviews mentions of the book “1984,” but what I thought it most resembled is a novel most haven’t read: THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER by John Brunner, a book that predicted the Internet and viruses, and how the State would use them as control mechanisms, long before there were such critters. NECROMANCER is another influence on this. But other books, from Kerouac to Thoreau to Abbie Hoffman’s STEAL THIS BOOK, pop up in the novel.It very brilliantly portrays the power of the State to destroy all we have in order to “make us safe.” How readily people give up their rights and freedoms to people who promise to keep the wolves from the door. All you have to do is watch a Trump rally to see how that works.
It also shows that, yes, we all can take a stand, and even one person can matter. But you do have to realize that it may come at great personal cost.
I could probably go on at length on the perfection of this book. Many have already. I’d like to address two glaring areas that needed work, however.
The first failure: The protagonist is as much a 17 year old as I am (*cough* NOT). Nor does this child exist in any reality in America. Marcus is so very clearly a construct of an adult. I’ve read other books that more accurately capture a smart young person. Doctorow tries to jam this character into the cultural zeitgeist too hard. Yes, a lot of kids are into role-play, cosplay, cons, and online stuff. But every single solitary movement of his time? No. It just tries too hard and misses a lot of nuance. However, the “love scenes” ring truer than most of the rest. (I also get why adults are almost the “talking horns” of a Charlie Brown cartoon. But it was often depressing that every adult was 2 dimensional).
No Millennial is allowed to roam around without their parents checking in with them on their cell phone every few hours. Even in San Francisco, kids (especially well-heeled kids) aren’t allowed to run around low-rent areas by themselves, and certainly not at night. Then the parents allow Marcus to travel the same routes by himself after he’s held up? I found that part hilarious.
This doesn’t invalidate that the book is readable by a teen… or an adult.
The developmental editing fell short (I’m a developmental editor, so stuff like this rattles my cage). I realize that famous authors get away with stuff that regular authors don’t, but this really should have been flagged. Marcus goes on for pages describing the intellectual or authorial sources for the thing he’s about to think (or in the process of thinking). I am married to a geek. Yes, they think deeply about stuff most don’t. And they can absolutely recite pages of information to you about any subject. But they don’t “think” about that. They think thoughts around that. Had I edited this, I would have made these “asides” into website information pages at the start of a chapter. Or hypertext, or links, or something. It just wasn’t realistic, and slipped into didacticism that distracted the reader from the story.
But those are quibbles, really. This is an important book for our times. I’m glad this is being taught in schools (or at least, some schools). Kids need to understand that they are as much a part of the American experiment as anyone else. A powerful, forceful argument for personal liberty.
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Little Brother (Audible Audio Edition) Kirby Heyborne Cory Doctorow Listening Library Books Reviews
Welcome to dystopia. In Little Brother, the Department of Homeland Security runs amok in San Francisco after terrorist bombings take out the Bay Bridge and the cross-bay BART tunnel with the loss of more than 4,000 lives. The city is flooded with heavily armored agents who seize anyone who looks suspicious to them. This seems to mean mostly teenagers and people of color. 15-year-old Marcus Yallow, a talented programmer and gamer, is out on a walk with his three best friends when they are all roughly apprehended by DHS agents, trussed up and tossed into the back of a huge truck, and moved to a secret jail ten minutes away from the city. There, Marcus is subjected to abusive questioning that verges on torture before he is released, days later, shaken and furious.
This, we soon learn, was all a big mistake. DHS has taken on the wrong 15-year-old.
Using his advanced programming skills and intimate knowledge of online security and encryption, Marcus sets out to organize a teenage rebellion to take back the city. Drawing his friends into his net, along with their friends and their friends' friends, Marcus soon becomes the coordinator of hundreds of teenagers. This is a force that proves formidable even against the massed might of the Department of Homeland Security—and the resources of the White House, which unsurprisingly has instigated the DHS coup. With civil liberties suspended and the government's goons acting more and more brutally as resistance mounts, the rebellion predictably spreads to the more thoughtful adults in the city. We can all guess where things are going—but we'll still be surprised by the ending.
Cory Doctorow is widely viewed as one of the leading lights of the new generation of science fiction writers. As of mid-2017, he has written ten novels and at least seven works of nonfiction. He's also a prolific blogger on copyright law, digital rights management, file-sharing, and post-scarcity economics. Little Brother was Doctorow's fourth novel.
In his review for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Austin Grossman treated Little Brother as a young adult novel—a natural instinct given the teenage protagonist and the peripheral roles of adults. Like so many contemporary YA novels, however, Little Brother can be rewarding for readers of any age. Grossman wrote, "An entertaining thriller and a thoughtful polemic on Internet-era civil rights, “Little Brother” is also a practical handbook of digital self-defense. Marcus’s guided tour through RFID cloners, cryptography and Bayesian math is one of the book’s principal delights. . . . This is territory the author knows well . . . His grasp of the implications of present-day information technology is authoritative. . ."
OK, so I admit I’m late to this particular book party. Better late than never. I see in many reviews mentions of the book “1984,” but what I thought it most resembled is a novel most haven’t read THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER by John Brunner, a book that predicted the Internet and viruses, and how the State would use them as control mechanisms, long before there were such critters. NECROMANCER is another influence on this. But other books, from Kerouac to Thoreau to Abbie Hoffman’s STEAL THIS BOOK, pop up in the novel.
It very brilliantly portrays the power of the State to destroy all we have in order to “make us safe.” How readily people give up their rights and freedoms to people who promise to keep the wolves from the door. All you have to do is watch a Trump rally to see how that works.
It also shows that, yes, we all can take a stand, and even one person can matter. But you do have to realize that it may come at great personal cost.
I could probably go on at length on the perfection of this book. Many have already. I’d like to address two glaring areas that needed work, however.
The first failure The protagonist is as much a 17 year old as I am (*cough* NOT). Nor does this child exist in any reality in America. Marcus is so very clearly a construct of an adult. I’ve read other books that more accurately capture a smart young person. Doctorow tries to jam this character into the cultural zeitgeist too hard. Yes, a lot of kids are into role-play, cosplay, cons, and online stuff. But every single solitary movement of his time? No. It just tries too hard and misses a lot of nuance. However, the “love scenes” ring truer than most of the rest. (I also get why adults are almost the “talking horns” of a Charlie Brown cartoon. But it was often depressing that every adult was 2 dimensional).
No Millennial is allowed to roam around without their parents checking in with them on their cell phone every few hours. Even in San Francisco, kids (especially well-heeled kids) aren’t allowed to run around low-rent areas by themselves, and certainly not at night. Then the parents allow Marcus to travel the same routes by himself after he’s held up? I found that part hilarious.
This doesn’t invalidate that the book is readable by a teen… or an adult.
The developmental editing fell short (I’m a developmental editor, so stuff like this rattles my cage). I realize that famous authors get away with stuff that regular authors don’t, but this really should have been flagged. Marcus goes on for pages describing the intellectual or authorial sources for the thing he’s about to think (or in the process of thinking). I am married to a geek. Yes, they think deeply about stuff most don’t. And they can absolutely recite pages of information to you about any subject. But they don’t “think” about that. They think thoughts around that. Had I edited this, I would have made these “asides” into website information pages at the start of a chapter. Or hypertext, or links, or something. It just wasn’t realistic, and slipped into didacticism that distracted the reader from the story.
But those are quibbles, really. This is an important book for our times. I’m glad this is being taught in schools (or at least, some schools). Kids need to understand that they are as much a part of the American experiment as anyone else. A powerful, forceful argument for personal liberty.
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