The Author: Cory Doctorow

Cory (Efram) Doctorow (Born July 17, 1971) is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, science fiction author, and co-editor of the weblog "Boing Boing". Doctorow is an activist for liberalizing copyright laws and supports the Creative Commons organization. He began selling fictional stories since his first story "CrapHound", which he wrote at age 17. Doctorow's first novel, "Down and out in the magic kingdom", was published in january, 2003. His latest publication is "Homeland", a sequel to "Little Brother", and was published in February, 2013.

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The Dystopian Society

The Dystopian society described in this book is a government that uses information to control everybody that it governs over. The government in this book uses advanced information technology to keep track of what every citizen is looking at online, where they go every day, and who they talk to about what. They also ignore the bill of rights and treat people as criminals without any solid proof, detaining high school students as terrorists on a mere whim. They denied rights to fair judgement and used unnecessary violence against people who were not proven guilty, and oppressed the people with fear. Furthermore, the people who disagreed with the government were labeled 'terrorists', and were therefore hated by the rest of the citizens, when they actually did nothing wrong. The Author's message is that the government should not control absolutely everything, and should listen to the citizens instead of deciding everything themselves, and more importantly, that this could potentially happen to our society. The Author sends this message by walking the reader through the life of one of the people being treated unfairly, and showing us firsthand, how it feels to live in such a society. The book also includes information on how technology works, and how it might be used in a negative way. I think that the book conveyed the message and the feelings of the characters in the book very effectively, and gives a very interesting point of view on the Dystopian society.

A Brief Summary of the Book

Sometime in the near future, America has gone over board with security, the government controls every bit of everyone's lives with security cameras, tracking devices, and other little bugs. Most people have simply accepted what has happened and lived under the fact that the government was watching their every move. But Marcus Yallow, a 17 year old student who goes to Cesar Chavez high school in San Francisco  has figured out how to constantly slip through these security systems. Although he only uses this knowledge to escape his school and play games with his friends, he and his pals end up in the wrong place at the wrong time and are detained by the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) as suspected terrorists.  Marcus tries to explain what actually happened, but the DHS doesn't back down that easily. Marcus and his friends are interrogated for days and even when let go, are told they will be even more closely monitored. No one wants to live like this, and more events lead Marcus to hate the DHS. After consulting with his friends, he decides that he has no choice, he must go to war.

Little Brother: Book Review

Little Brother is a Speculative Fictional novel written by Corey Doctorow. It was published by Tor Books and released in April 23, 2007. The book first appeared on the New York Best Seller list at no. 9 in May 2008. It then moved up to no.8 on July 2. In 2009, "Little Brother" won the White Pine Award, the Prometheus Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, also being a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel. Little Brother is a very inspiring book for teens that are interested in technology, and provides accurate technological facts along the story, explaining all kinds of security systems and programming devices. The main plot of this book revolves around and unfair government that 'in order to protect the citizens', installs 'security' to spy on every aspect of everyone in their daily lives. The main character, a high school student Marcus Yallow, has managed to avoid these means of security and is fairing very well. But after a terrorist attack, he is falsely accused of being a terrorist and is forced to fight the government that is supposed to protect his freedom, in order to regain his freedom. I would recommend this book for anyone over 12, as it does contain mild sexual content.

Comments on the Book

"A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion-as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on an air plane." - Scott Westerfeld, author of Uglies, Pretties, and Specials

"It made me want to be thirteen again right now and reading it for the first time."
- Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman and American Gods

"A tale of struggle familiar to any teenager, about those moments when you choose what your life is going to mean." - Steven Gould, author of Jumper

"Scarily realistic... Action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile's civil protest." - Andrew Huang, author of hacking the Xbox

"The right book at the right time from the right author-and, not entirely coincidentally, Cory Doctorow's best novel yet" - John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War

"Read this book. You'll learn a great deal about computer security, surrveillence, and how to counter it, and the risk of trading off freedom for 'security'. And you'll have fun doing it"
-Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media