Little Brother
I finished reading Little Brother by Cory Doctorow last week, and it's taken me a little while to process it to decide how I feel about it.
On the one hand, the writing is... good. Not great, but perfectly serviceable. The characters are reasonably believable, the pacing is good, the plot makes sense and is entertaining... It checks off all the little boxes you need to check off to have a good story. But it really doesn't go much farther than that for me, which is a little odd for a Hugo-nominated novel, especially a best-seller.
I should qualify that a little: I really do mean good. Not "OK", not "adequate", but actually good. Nicely settled into the top quarter of published fiction. Just not in the top 1%, like Scalzi and Pratchett.
But the point of the book isn't the writing. Like Starship Troopers, Little Brother is really a handful of essays wrapped around a plot. Unlike Starship Troopers, this book actually works as just an interesting story, which means the essays are a lot more powerful.
There are two main things the book harps on. The more obvious one is modern security systems and the myriad ways they suck. Like airport security that hassles people about hair gel but forget to lock the side doors, modern security systems do essentially nothing to curb crime while greatly inconveniencing ordinary people. Doctorow covers security systems and related technologies, ranging from histograms to encryption, in a way that non-nerds should be able to understand.
The real underlying theme of the book, though, is liberty. The premise of the book is that a major terrorist attack hits San Francisco, and the city's essentially placed under martial law. Patriot Act II is passed, and suddenly citizens find themselves kidnapped and illegally detained by their own government. One of them, after being released, decides to fight back, and the rest of the book follows his struggles to take down the Department of Homeland Security. To me, the book was chillingly realistic -- there were no moments where I thought, "No, I can't imagine the Bush Administration doing something like that if they had the opportunity."* And, realistically, none of it is that far out from where an Obama administration could find itself in a few years. The price of freedom really is eternal vigilance, and Little Brother makes that very clear and very personal.
So now the question is, between this and Zoe's Tale, which would I prefer to see win the Hugo?** Hard to say. They're both very deserving, and I would be quite happy to see either of them win. Zoe's Tale was better written, but Little Brother is more informative. Little Brother is a potentially society-changing book with broad social ramifications that might help redefine the public's relationship with their governments, but Zoe's Tale is a story of profound personal growth with depth that Little Brother just doesn't match.
In other words: holy crap this is a banner year for science fiction. And then some. And that's only the first two books out of the nominees!
* Yes, I realise Bush is gone. But most of the folks who really ran the show are still around and will still be there in three years... and another four years past that...
** Yes, there are other contenders. But I haven't read them yet.
On the one hand, the writing is... good. Not great, but perfectly serviceable. The characters are reasonably believable, the pacing is good, the plot makes sense and is entertaining... It checks off all the little boxes you need to check off to have a good story. But it really doesn't go much farther than that for me, which is a little odd for a Hugo-nominated novel, especially a best-seller.
I should qualify that a little: I really do mean good. Not "OK", not "adequate", but actually good. Nicely settled into the top quarter of published fiction. Just not in the top 1%, like Scalzi and Pratchett.
But the point of the book isn't the writing. Like Starship Troopers, Little Brother is really a handful of essays wrapped around a plot. Unlike Starship Troopers, this book actually works as just an interesting story, which means the essays are a lot more powerful.
There are two main things the book harps on. The more obvious one is modern security systems and the myriad ways they suck. Like airport security that hassles people about hair gel but forget to lock the side doors, modern security systems do essentially nothing to curb crime while greatly inconveniencing ordinary people. Doctorow covers security systems and related technologies, ranging from histograms to encryption, in a way that non-nerds should be able to understand.
The real underlying theme of the book, though, is liberty. The premise of the book is that a major terrorist attack hits San Francisco, and the city's essentially placed under martial law. Patriot Act II is passed, and suddenly citizens find themselves kidnapped and illegally detained by their own government. One of them, after being released, decides to fight back, and the rest of the book follows his struggles to take down the Department of Homeland Security. To me, the book was chillingly realistic -- there were no moments where I thought, "No, I can't imagine the Bush Administration doing something like that if they had the opportunity."* And, realistically, none of it is that far out from where an Obama administration could find itself in a few years. The price of freedom really is eternal vigilance, and Little Brother makes that very clear and very personal.
So now the question is, between this and Zoe's Tale, which would I prefer to see win the Hugo?** Hard to say. They're both very deserving, and I would be quite happy to see either of them win. Zoe's Tale was better written, but Little Brother is more informative. Little Brother is a potentially society-changing book with broad social ramifications that might help redefine the public's relationship with their governments, but Zoe's Tale is a story of profound personal growth with depth that Little Brother just doesn't match.
In other words: holy crap this is a banner year for science fiction. And then some. And that's only the first two books out of the nominees!
* Yes, I realise Bush is gone. But most of the folks who really ran the show are still around and will still be there in three years... and another four years past that...
** Yes, there are other contenders. But I haven't read them yet.