Friday Fiction: Little Brother (Review)

Rise up

Here’s a Friday Fiction post. Thank you to my lovely paying subscribers who make some of the posts open to all, as with this one. If you’d like to support me and join them, you get 50% off the annual subscription if you click the button below!

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Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow

I think this is an important book, like a modern reworking of 1984 but with a more positive outcome. The latter is possibly because it is written in a style accessible to teenagers – great, get them interested in questioning things, empower them to take action rather than bow down to oppressive regimes. As you can tell from my other site, I believe people need to be politicised!

It made me laugh out loud in a few places, e.g. “The web browser we used was supplied with the machine. It was a locked-down spyware version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft’s crashware turd that no one under the age of forty used voluntarily.” As a Linux user, this resonates with me even now.

It works as a story; it works as a warning; it works as a believable interpretation of many governments, since we learn more and more about how much they spy on us, how unclear the law is on the matter, and how they silence people who spread the truth with imprisonment and draconian laws. (When I first read the book, I remember this was taking place in the UK.)

The other thing about the story – it works at making you angry. Angry at the assumption by those in power that they are not our servants, but rather, that we are theirs. To be secretly spied on. And most countries have systems whereby your only vote options are between parties that will let this continue. Is it any wonder that people feel disenfranchised by the formal political systems? Politics is about how you live your life. Politics is about the right to express yourself free from interference. Legitimate concerns and dissatisfaction are interpreted as ‘terrorism’ by Governments, showing how out of touch they are with the people. And this book captures that zeitgeist.

This has never been more appropriate and relevant than today.

The book can be bought, but you can also download it for free from the author’s site.