Despite having the terrifying feeling that I may have not understood entirely about one fifth of the book because of my general computer illiteracy, I should say that I am extremely pleased to have Little Brother as the first sci-fi book I have read in my life. Before reading Little Brother my honest opinion about sci-fi books, comic books and so on was that the story has to happen on another planet and the main characters must be from outer space. And I have to admit that I approached this book with a good deal of prejudice, but I am glad that didn’t stop me from picking it up in the first place.
Truth be told, this is one of the best books I have read lately. Even though the narrator is just a teenager, the main topic of the book is quite serious, and the approach towards it is very mature and smooth and natural. Have I thought that Marcus was crazy for going against the government? Hell, even his best friends thought so! But there is something very important we can learn from Marcus, and that is - no one will do for us what we need to have done. If you want something, have the guts, the bravery and the brains to go out and get it for yourself. It may not be something as grand as freedom - it could be the simplest of things, but still, there is no other way but to get it yourself.
Little Brother has a little bit of everything. A little bit of genius, a little bit of romance, a little bit of friendship, a little bit of war. We have a very clear conflict and even though most people wouldn’t act like Marcus in that kind of situation, I think that it becomes very clear why Marcus does what he does, and so the character becomes very easy to identify with.
Another amazing feature of the book is that it doesn’t matter so much if you’re a computer programmer or a simple mortal like myself who barely knows how to write computer codes. There are plenty of explanaions about what Marcus does and how he does it, so I didn’t feel stupid or left behind - for the moment while I was reading I did understand everything that he was doing (although it’s a totally different question whether I can repeat it for myself). It’s just that Doctorow writes in such an interesting manner that even the most complicated things to grasp felt good and normal and not chokingly difficult. The bibliography in the end of the book also gives a thorough image of what you need to do, read and learn in order to at least get started at programming and hacking, and now I’m thinking even I may actually give it a go.
Perhaps I liked Little Brother so much because it is much more than just the story within the book. It really made me think not only of security systems, wrongful governments and hacking the net - it made me think about the overall society we live in and the privacy that we think we have.
I definitely recommend when reading Little Brother to read everything. And I mean everything. In my opinion, there is not a single useless word in the entire book which only comes to show what great of a writer Cory Doctorow is. And even though Little Borther is the first book I’ve read by him, it will definitely not be the last one.
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