I don't write book reviews. They require a writing style I never learned. But I'm writing one now. I don't want to write about this, but I got nothing else. Besides, I made lots of notes in the margins of the book for something; it might as well be for this.
I just finished Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, and this kid, the protagonist (if you can call him that), a computer hacker, is a huge dick. I wanted this little bastard to become desaparecido, to be disappeared. He's such an ass that he "nods with satisfaction" when his "jamming" (secretly, electronically scrambling and swapping ID cards) causes a hospital to basically shut down because of the ID confusion. A hospital!
I'm not sure what Cory wanted to say with this little schmuck, who terrorizes innocent people because the Homeland Security "black bags" him for five days after a terrorist attack in San Francisco, but when someone pushes me, I push back, I don't go home and punch my mom. But this kid uses all his anger and all his energy to punish strangers, people who just lost family and friends in twin bombings and NOT that government agency nor those agents who abused their powers. And he does it just so he can play online video games. Seriously.
I have so many issues with this book: how Marcus wasn't able to get a picture off of a phone because the phone didn't have email or Bluetooth or what, I didn't understand; how he's able to read encrypted email when using a stranger's Xbox when he didn't seem to have his key (that's why I don't use PGP, I don't understand it); all the needless hyperbole: it felt like a million years, a thousand times, etc.; how the DHS could break into his home to put a spy chip in his laptop, but didn't seem to care after that; how Marcus spots the DHS spy truck by accident and unplugs his Xbox which makes the truck drive away so he goes online again two minutes later; how his mom is called Louisa and Lillian on the same page; how many people could identify M1k3y by sight because Marcus handed out so many ParanoidLinux disks, but yet, the DHS let him run loose for so long. I understand they were tracking him, arresting more kids because of him, which brings me to my final nitpick: Marcus, the over-25-year-olds-hating little putz is ultimately saved by adults: his parents and a journalist. (I really thought the kid would use his friend's Pigspleen network to distribute his DHS evidence to all the subscribers, have the incriminating video pop up in 100,000 monitors all at once, but I guess that's the 1990's movie solution. Getting the evidence to a journalist is really Robert Redford old skool.)
I would think that Cory wants us to like Marcus. But maybe not. We don't have to like every hero. Some truly are dicks.
If I had read this before it was published, I would have suggested gutting every mention of jamming, which is what makes Marcus a terrorist, and trim the timeline down to 2-3 weeks instead of 3-4 months. I guess it's easier for me to accept that this 17-year-old kid neglected his imprisoned best friend for a couple of weeks than those three months. While he played online video games (again, not kidding). I'd seen the story before about kids who play games regardless of how many rain forests they destroy to get online, so I guess Cory was just being accurate. If that's the case, I'm voting to amend the Constitution to ban anyone under the age of 25 from using computers, unless you're drafted into the military. Take that, you little bastards.
I should have expected this kid to be the way he was, after all, how you put a positive spin on the term, Big Brother. Big Brother is watching, everywhere. Is that a good thing? So when I started reading Little Brother, I should probably have felt that this would be about a kid who doesn't give a shit about anyone's survival but his own.
If the author's intent is to create an asshole, he did a great job. Here's a kid who has three very close, lifetime friends, but gives up on all of them when he goes on his pointless revenge spree. So this kid really pissed me off. Until later in the book, when it becomes more like WarGames, when Marcus meets Ange ("She was pretty...with a long face and long jaw.") who is Ally Sheedy, and when they play their dorky vampire game. And especially when Marcus finally gets his deserved punishment (if short-lived). And so I don't doubt that one day I'll hear on some entertainment TV show, "...but is Zac Efron up to the task of playing Marcus Yallow?" because regardless of how much I hated this kid, the story would make a great movie.
