Cory Doctorow's Little Brother (Tor Teen, 384pp, ISBN 978-0765319852 ) is one of five novels on the Final Ballot for the 2009 Hugo Award, and as a Canadian – albeit expatriate – in London, Doctorow might have home advantage, as the convention is in Montreal.
It's singularly appropriate that on the 50th anniversary of the first Hugo Ballot, one of only a handful of YA novels to make the list should be a contender. There probably aren't many things that Heinlein (Have Spacesuit, Will Travel was the 1959 Hugo nominee) and Doctorow have in common, but that's one of them.
Marcus Yallow (or W1n5t0n to use his handle, in another nod to 1984) is seventeen years old, and spends much of his time in High School bucking the system – putting pebbles in his shoes to distort his walk so that the gait recognition system don't recognize him, ducking out through the staff coffee lounge; just being a typical teenager.
Terrorist Attack
But in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco, the Department of Homeland Security isn't prepared to distinguish teenage smart-mouths from terrorists, and when Marcus and his friends are rounded up and dispatched to a prison island, Marcus is held for several days incommunicado before being terrified into compliance.
It's only when they're released that Marcus learns that he's been singled out for special treatment, and realizes that his ordeal has been pure spite. Marcus begins to fight back, and realizes just how much post-9/11 America is prepared to suppress dissent. Marcus creates an alternate e-mail system using Xboxes and through it learns of a free concert which is attacked by the authorities using pepper gas.
The news media distort the concert into a subversive gathering and he finds himself at loggerheads with his own parents. It's only when Marcus learns that his friend Darryl -snatched at the same time as him, and never released – is still alive, does he change his tactics from sending clandestine messages to other teenagers to going public, regardless of the consequences.
Counterculture
It's at this point that Marcus, who originally started out as merely sympathetic attains a nobility, echoing the battles of his parent's generation against the Draft and in support of the Civil Rights Movement, despite the fact that he knows that it's only a matter of time before the authorities swoop.
Doctorow is excellent at conveying how it feels to be a teenager in twenty-first century America - alienated, disenfranchised. yet idealistic, exhilarated by the thought of a righteous cause as teenagers always have been. It's impossible not to root for Marcus as he battles the dead hand of a security service that's out of it's government's control, while arguing the futility of governments trying to create a climate of fear to ostensibly protect their citizens, and cultivating secrecy while the information the terrorists need is freely available in the public domain.
Also commendable is that as well as teaching kids about tunnelling, arphids and hacking the Xbox, Doctorow also references Allan Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and the Freedom Rides of the 1960s.
Little Brother is definitely one of the best novels of 2008, and in Marcus Yallow Doctorow has created one of the great YA heroes of the 2000s. Highly Recommended.
Colin Harvey - Author six novels, and editor of four anthologies; professional reviewer since 2003, including six years at Strange Horizons. Member of ...
