2009 books

[peteryoung]

67) Cory Doctorow, Little Brother, 2008
I'm pleased that the plan to get this translated into four Burmese languages is now up and running – they received the necessary pledges with time to spare. This is Doctorow's "Orwell fan fiction", involving a small group of tech-savvy teenagers who, after a terrorist attack on San Francisco, fall foul of the Department of Homeland Security in a very bad way. Beyond the pervasive surveillance and counter-hacking it deliberately veers towards a believable extreme – at its most uncomfortable points it involves Americans torturing American children. A country's government using torture on its own youth in the name of state security isn't new, and in the light of the US's recent cultural nadir it's certainly fair play to line it up alongside countries like Burma, Iran and South Africa, at least in fiction. You also don't find many new genre books published these days with an Afterword, let alone the two that Little Brother has, including one from Bruce Schneier. This is pitched very well as counterculture teenage fiction, it feels right from cover to cover even though the protagonist Marcus is often talking with the hindsight of maturity. San Francisco has always been my favourite American city as a visitor but I doubt I'll be able to look at it the same way after reading this – Cory's to be congratulated, and it was a great way to round out a year's reading.