Little Brother | Hacker News Reader

Little Brother

craphound.com

81 pointsjlees26 comments

I read the book and while I enjoyed it, I must point out one thing that really drove me crazy, and that appear common to cory doctorow's YA fiction (e.g. also in "pirate cinema").

People have zero depth. All the good people are perfectly good and identify with an absolute shared good idea. E.g. if two people want free wifi for everyone they'll also share the same ethics, political views, aesthetic sense.

There is never disagreement in the book between two of the good guys that goes on more than a paragraph.

A YA demographic doesn't justify that and I deeply believe this is the wrong lesson to teach kids.

But still, they are good stories, and the world would probably be better if more people read them.

I agree with the lack of depth, but let's not take it too far. (Sorry, can't recall the names) The farther was definitely a "good person" who didn't share the views with or understand the protagonist. Their conflict goes on for many chapters, even if only in short bursts. The girl also left because she disagreed about the importance of resisting, even though she was also a "good person".

This is unfortunately common in sci-fi and related genres, where characterization and other aspects of literary craft take a back seat to nifty ideas and plot. Good characterization is a complex exercise that requires that the writer spend a lot of time dissecting the motives and mindset of each character, as well as an ability to exercise a kind of multiple personality disorder while writing and view each scene from each characters' perspective.

Lit-fic has the opposite problem: excellent characters, beautiful prose, but ho-hum ideas and/or plot.

VERY few works manage both craft and meaning.

I found this to be an astute observation about Little Brother, but it's not something I'd apply to the genre as a whole, or even Doctorow. I was highly impressed by the characterization in Makers, which was only published a year later. Little Brother was written in haste[1] with an explicit focus on the ideological, at the expense of more human characters. I would urge anyone who felt the characterization in LB to be lacking to check out Makers.

[1]:http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/GunnLecture/Cory_Doctorow-Little_...

Oh, man, this book. This book is literally the reason I am studying computers. I read out for the first time not long after it came out. I was in the eighth grade at the time, and it rocked my world. I took up programming and began exploring hacker culture shortly after. I can't even express how important this book was to me.

Yeah, it's not a mature fiction novel. The characters are a bit hollow and the story wasn't outstanding; all that criticism is justified. It did what it was meant to do though. It got me and who knows how many others to explore the world of technology.

I checked it out of my public library. While I've enjoyed Docktorow's Makers and more recently Rapture of the Nerds, I didn't feel I was quite the target audience.

However, I passed it to my nearly teenage son, who very much enjoyed it.

After he finished it, I took it back and Homeland - the sequel to Little Brother was on the new fiction cart. My son enjoyed that too.

It's a juvie, which is what Young Adult (YA) fiction was called back when Heinlein was writing for that market.

However, I called it a 'juvie' because the book fits the older style better: A young person Gets Into Trouble and uses Native Wit, Loyal Friends, and a few Helpful Adults to Solve The Problem. It not incidentally teaches Moral Lessons by example, like how important it is to stand up for yourself and so on. Modern YA stuff is more psychologically deep and less focused on Solving The Problem.

Anyway, the target audience is middle school to high school. The protagonist is in high school, but it's a rule in kid lit that kids will gladly read things meant for older kids but never stuff meant for younger kids.

Didn't we used to call those Bildungsroman?

A bildungsroman deals with the same sort of narrative arc, but doesn't necessarily have a moral or ethical lesson it's trying to teach.

I've read them both, though I'm not the target audience and believe they're perfect for the 12-15 year-old crowd. They're dystopias that we can all identify with - given the surveillance state we seem to be constructing and current compared to 1984, etc.

Guys, do you have recommendations on books in the same topic? (surveillance, hackers, NSA, etc) YA or not?

I've read Little Brother, liked a lot, even thought I'm not in the target audience. So I would like some 'grown up' recommendations.

I'd recommend _We, The Watched_ by Adam Bender[0]. It's available in ebook or print and the author has similarly licensed it under Creative Commons (NoDerivs as opposed to ShareAlike however).

- [0] http://www.wethewatched.com/

(edit: fixed CC license type)

Less surveillance and more hackers/cryptography/NSA origins: Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.

Kevin Mitnicks autobiography "Ghost in the Wires" is very good. Although it's non-fiction, it read like a cyberpunk spy novel.

Goes back quite a ways. There's John Brunner's 1975 classic Shockwave Rider. See also early cyberpunk stuff (Gibson, Sterling et al): http://project.cyberpunk.ru/lib/. More recently, Stephenson Snow Crash, Stross Halting State.

Also thoroughly enjoyed both Cory's works, esp. LB.

My favorite 'hacker' story (It's really a phreaker story, but for the most part about the more benign, cooler parts of that culture.) is Evan Doorbell's three hour long "How Evan became a phone phreak" which starts at a place that's very rare for a hacker story, the beginning. (Compare The Matrix, where when we first meet Neo he's already searching for Morpheus in the opening scene.)

Evan recorded all the old phone sounds. (This is the man who brought you The Sounds of Long Distance) He includes these in the program as he talks, so it's almost like you took a time machine back to the seventies and stood by him with a pay phone as he tells the story.

He also makes sure to explain things in the order that he figured them out, which is a subtle detail that makes the story a lot more interesting.

The only thing I don't like about this entire series is that he never finished it. You never actually get to the point where Evan figures out how to Bluebox.

Available here:

ftp://ftp.wideweb.com/GroupBell/

(It's the "howBPhreak" files)

You could read the sequel 'homeland'.

it was actually fairly prescient about the whole current nsa scandal. Well, more like it stated the obvious before we had conclusive evidence... but still

Homeland made me sad.

In the book, the DHS's surveillance is revealed .. and everyone goes apeshit and protests. In real life it seems 90% of the population just keep drinking the Cool Aid

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky.

It's far future space opera science fiction.. but Vinge is an ex-Computer Science professor, and it shows the impact of security vulnerabilities. Wait until you read the bit about the guy who comes out of hibernation only to find these far-future space ships are running a variety of Unix, with a backdoor he wrote in hundreds of thousands of years ago.

Or if that's a bit much, Vinge's 1981 True Names[1] or 2007 Rainbow's End address the issues more directly.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Names

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

Not quite about surveillance, but a great hacker book:

"The Eudaemonic Pie" is a 1985 book by American author Thomas A. Bass, about a group of University of California, Santa Cruz physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp,[1][2] that roulette wheels obey Newtonian physics, and that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos. (from Wikipedia)

You can try "Masters of Deception: The Gang that Ruled Cyberspace".

It's a fictionalized retelling of the stories of the two prominent BBS hacker/phreaker groups during the 80s and early 90s.

It's not really brain food or anything like that, but it's a quick and decent read if you have free time.

There is a series of events this fall in SF based on this book. Details at http://sfpl.org/index.php?pg=2000615601 (organized by the San Francisco Public Library, but involving many other orgs)

Everything from book discussions coupled with LED plushie making, to talks by security and policy people from Twitter and the EFF.

It's for the "One City One Book" program: "an annual citywide literary event that encourages members of the San Francisco community to read the same book at the same time and then discuss it in book groups and at events throughout the City."

I read this yesterday / today after doing a Little Brother-themed mastermind treasure hunt in SF. The themes really hit home after some of our recent surveillance related events. Thought it worth sharing with the HN crowd -- I personally find YA books enjoyable and wish books this technical and readable were available when I was that age!

Read this recently, followed by Homeland. While I'm a bit older than the target audience, I enjoyed the book and chewed through it in a day.

Homeland was good, but not great. I felt a bit let down. Both books made me think of Neal Stephenson, especially his Reamde book -- but that might just be because of the theme.

A professor of the Vienna University of Technology lets his students read this book as homework - mandatory. I hope more students in the world will read the book.

Good book. Aimed at the young adult audience, I only knew this because when I went to the store to buy a copy it was in the teen section.

I have enjoyed everything by Cory though.

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