Book Read: Little Brother

I know I'm at risk at coming off as some kind of anti-Doctorow nut here, with several back posts complaining about his complaining about DRM, a very recent panning of Someone Comes To Town and now a review of his latest. That's not really fair, as I truly enjoy his shorts and thought Magic Kingdom was quite good.

However, Little Brother doesn't really get added into that particular pile.

Spoilers contained herein.

There is, at least, a focused plot and a consistent theme - so that's a major improvement over Someone Comes To Town. Doctorow has managed to couch his preachings into a character where such dialogue makes sense. While there are times when the book reads as if the main character, Marcus, is suddenly overwhelmed with the need to speak to some kind of literary fourth wall - the themes are still relevant to the novel in general.

Whether you find the technical soliloqouies of value is another thing, however, and completely depends on your personal level and/or tolerance for such geek topics as basic cryptography and Live Action Role Playing (though Doctorow probably deserves credit for probably having the first character who LARPs get laid in a mainstream novel). The setting is modern and much of the technical topics are pretty lightweight - and remembering that this was published by Tor Teen, the book is something of a primer for being a technogeek for tweens.

Occasionally the technical aspects backfire completely, however. At one point it is indicated that Microsoft started giving away the next generation of Xbox, called the Xbox Universal, for free. In Cory's world, this is an evil corporate trick to sell DRM controlled software at high prices, which of course (because Cory controls Cory's world) backfires completely and everyone ends up playing free community developed games on unlocked Xboxen instead.

Yeah. Right. This particular technofantasy would be more innocent if it didn't become such a central aspect of the story. Still, unlike Someone Comes To Town's regression into WiFi - most of the Xnet subplot doesn't hijack the novel in general. An often repeated portion, sure, but can be somewhat sidetracked with applied suspension of disbelief.

No, the real problem of Little Brother is the lopsided support for the "rebellion" that becomes Marcus' prime motivator. First, it requires the reader to blindly accept the fact that the United States government turns into a brutal dictatorship willing to torture and disappear high school students in less time than it has taken to read this post so far. In other words, that the government is already capable of doing this and is just waiting for an excuse to start flying minors to Syria.

And while many of Marcus' attempts to fight the Department of Homeland Security work quite well narratively, the story just assumes you're onboard with the entirety of the argument from the first word.

A semi-major spoiler - but I think an important lynchpin to the book's central fault ... at one point Marcus launches a city wide plan which causes multiple traffic problems and is later reported to cost the city more than the original terrorist plot. Marcus takes this as a measure of success.

Let's examine that carefully. This plan doubles the cost of a city after a terrorist strike, changes nothing in DHS policy except that the DHS ends up getting stronger in the long run, in some ways could be seen as a terrorist attack itself ... and the reader is supposed to cheer on the main character?

In other words, Little Brother fails at creating any kind of discourse or dialogue on the potentially thorny questions about security, privacy and the use of technology in a post-9/11 world. It dives in with both feet with all of its assumptions on page one and ignores all contradictory evidence. Actually, in many ways Marcus' actions make matters worse for San Francisco, do not resolve any major issues with the DHS, and only by intervention of the media and some insanely convenient legal deus ex machina at the end does he emerge a hero. Not exactly a shining example of technical liberty.

In the end, Little Brother is an somewhat entertaining exercise in talking about modern topics which really do deserve discussion ... but not a particularly good one. Not highly recommended, though as usual Doctorow offers his book for free online if you want to check it out yourself.

Book Read: Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town

A friend of mine at an old job introduced me to Doctorow, chiefly Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom, which I thought was a fairly brainy transhumanistic tale>. Since then I've mostly grown accustomed to Doctorow's writings on Boing Boing, which sadly often show a lack of basic understanding about the things he loves to complain about, most notably DRM and copyright, even down to the completely absurd.

This review will contain some spoilers.

Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town is Doctorow's third book. There's a bit of all the above in this novel. Early in the book you are introduced to some unique fantasy elements, reminiscent of Gaiman in some ways - even in positive ways, and throughout the book there are several hints that a deeper mythology might be at work. The main character, Alan, is the son of a mountain and a washing machine. Alan responds to any name beginning with A, and his brothers likewise are named in alphabetical order and so will answer to Bart, Charlie, Darren, and so on.

At just about the time that this seems to have the structure for something interesting, Doctorow spends about a hundred pages talking about wi-fi and blanketing a large part of Kensington Market in Toronto with free access. This second topic completely murders the book. Not only is it relatively uninteresting, the fact that none of the seemingly technically proficient characters seem to understand the access points do in fact extend the range but do nothing to actually increase the amount of bandwidth available to said range - hence the promise of "free" Internet being in actuality the same problem facing many a municipal plan, is completely overlooked. It pretty much just translates into many pages talking about the Internet as free speech, the value of undervalued hardware, and a lot of wasting of the reader's time for an effort which is not only futile, but embarrassingly boring and inept.

Every section of the novel which is entertaining, about Alan's past and other magical beings such as himself, gets stabbed by anything related to the "ParasiteNet" subplot. Doctorow divides the book up oddly, so you'll get a little motion about Andy's schoolboy days - only to end up reading about recompiling a distribution for a computer made from dumpster parts.

Not only does it undercut the basic plot and premise, it makes several of the aspects feel silly and unrealistic. That Andrew will respond to any male name beginning with "A" leaves people with questions, Doctorow not only decides not to risk offering any explanation - but all of Andy's dumpster diving net nuts gladly alternate his name without any indication that it might be slightly odd.

It's as if the depth and potential of the fantasy elements were too overwhelming for the book, and instead you get a lot of crap about public Internet access. Ultimately, the story about Andy's family feels shallow, unresolved and disorderly. There's actually a twist in the end, which is allowed so little time to breath or room for discourse that you might just blink and miss it.

The wikipedia listing for this book notes its literary significance as being "anti-cyberpunk", for lacking any virtual reality or high tech goods. Honestly, I'd love to know who added that to the listing - as a search for the phrase comes up with only self-referential connections. It's like the guy who tries to give himself a nickname.

The book is, thanks to Doctorow's love for the Creative Commons, freely available online - so you can check it yourself. I'd say that's about the right price. I've enjoyed most everything else I've read of his about ten times more than this one.

Book Read: Anathem

We just finished Neal Stephenson's Anathem on audiobook last week. We've been fans since Snow Crash, and loved the audio adaptations for both that book and Diamond Age

First, a side note that I'm a bit of fan about audiobooks. It fits easily with the fact that I rarely have time to read for fun anymore and The Girl and I can share the book in tandem. It helps that production of audiobooks has gotten a thousand times better (we can probably thank a certain Jim Dale for that a bit).

Anathem is a fascinating book and a little hard to talk about without getting to far into spoilers. This is partially because one of the interesting things Anathem is a bit of a word game. Stephenson actually opens the book with a bit of a preface about that, but what follows is an interesting set of rules, some ruses and a lot of word play that fits neatly into the book's themes and manages to make some interesting twists and points on the genre in large.

Compared to his other books, the story starts off slow (OK, slower than Snow Crash and Diamond Age at least) with a lot of explanation - this is not just for exposition but also sets up foundation blocks for questions and mysteries that crop up in the second and third acts of the book. There's some work to stick with, but there is a great deal of payoff in the end.

Highly recommended.

Anathem Book Trailer

I didn't even know this kind of thing existed, but this was a promotional trailer released for Neal Stephenson's Anathem:


The World of Anathem

Diamond Age Miniseries

This is one of those bits of information that's so old, it's new to me. George Clooney's production company is working on several things with SciFi Channel, including a Diamond Age miniseries. Diamond Age being a novel from Neal "Snow Crash" Stephenson. That was announced in 2007, and apparently development got wrangled up in the writer's strike, but production continues.

We're about finished with the Anathem audiobook here at the Cathode Cave, so it couldn't come any quicker.