Reviews: YA
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother: Available for free download. I wish I didn’t so often find Doctorow’s works too didactic for my tastes. I love how he explains why he’s making his books freely available under Creative Commons licenses: “If I could loan out my physical books without giving up possession of them, I would. The fact that I can do so with digital files is not a bug, it's a feature, and a damned fine one. It's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place. It's like watching restaurant owners crying down their shirts about the new free lunch machine that's feeding the world's starving people because it'll force them to reconsider their business models. Yes, that's gonna be tricky, but let's not lose sight of the main attraction: free lunches!” The book is in some ways an instruction manual as much or more than a story; there are lots of pauses to tell us how the characters pulled off one feat or another. Research is fun, and sometimes infodumping on the readers is part of the point, though we’re not often fans of that technique in fanworks. (I liked brown_betty’s apt comparison to Heinlein juveniles.) It’s the fictional version of Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, except Zittrain is much more ambivalent about the dangers posed by freedom from government control on the internet.
Anyway, a couple of years from now, in a high-surveillance society, a privileged teenage boy gets in trouble with Homeland Security because of spectacularly bad timing. But because Marcus has hacked his technology to make it more private and more flexible, he’s technically a criminal, just like almost anyone else his age. This makes him more emotionally and practically vulnerable to his captors’ psychological (and only incidentally physical) manipulations. Outraged by his treatment, he vows revenge. Sympathetic characters are allowed to articulate the arguments for surveillance, while the people on the protagonist’s side are often people that neither he nor I wanted on our side, so that was nice, though there’s never any real doubt where Doctorow wants our sympathies to lie. Brown_betty pointed out “this is one of those books which really could only have been written by a white man. It has that touching faith in the adequacy of cleverness and nerve to meet any situation, and that casual acceptance of the recognition of his peers. However, and here is why it may be worth giving it a shot even if you find that tremendously aggravating, this book knows that it could only have been written by a white man…. [W]ithout his parents’ connections, without their money, without being white while mouthing off to cops, this book would be about a kid who is sentenced to jail and never gets out because he can't quite make himself shut up.”
Scott Westerfeld, Midnighters: The Secret Hour: Every night in Bixby, Oklahoma, time stops for an hour and only the dark things-and a few special teenagers-move around. When a new girl comes to town, she shakes up the midnighters’ accommodations with their strange world. If she’s going to survive, she needs to convince the others that she’s worth helping, and given that their powers have made them all fairly maladjusted, that won’t be easy. Solid teen supernatural hijinks, though I think Westerfeld fell into the trap of offering too much explanation for why funky things happened-his attempts to explain only highlighted the moments of nonsense. Less explanation = more suspension of disbelief, in many cases.
Anyway, a couple of years from now, in a high-surveillance society, a privileged teenage boy gets in trouble with Homeland Security because of spectacularly bad timing. But because Marcus has hacked his technology to make it more private and more flexible, he’s technically a criminal, just like almost anyone else his age. This makes him more emotionally and practically vulnerable to his captors’ psychological (and only incidentally physical) manipulations. Outraged by his treatment, he vows revenge. Sympathetic characters are allowed to articulate the arguments for surveillance, while the people on the protagonist’s side are often people that neither he nor I wanted on our side, so that was nice, though there’s never any real doubt where Doctorow wants our sympathies to lie. Brown_betty pointed out “this is one of those books which really could only have been written by a white man. It has that touching faith in the adequacy of cleverness and nerve to meet any situation, and that casual acceptance of the recognition of his peers. However, and here is why it may be worth giving it a shot even if you find that tremendously aggravating, this book knows that it could only have been written by a white man…. [W]ithout his parents’ connections, without their money, without being white while mouthing off to cops, this book would be about a kid who is sentenced to jail and never gets out because he can't quite make himself shut up.”
Scott Westerfeld, Midnighters: The Secret Hour: Every night in Bixby, Oklahoma, time stops for an hour and only the dark things-and a few special teenagers-move around. When a new girl comes to town, she shakes up the midnighters’ accommodations with their strange world. If she’s going to survive, she needs to convince the others that she’s worth helping, and given that their powers have made them all fairly maladjusted, that won’t be easy. Solid teen supernatural hijinks, though I think Westerfeld fell into the trap of offering too much explanation for why funky things happened-his attempts to explain only highlighted the moments of nonsense. Less explanation = more suspension of disbelief, in many cases.