Little Brother by Corey Doctorow: a book review

I finished reading Little Brother and I felt my personal knowledge of the writer would give me insight into the novel that the general public didn’t have.
My association with the author goes back to high school where he and I attended Alternative Independent Studies Program, otherwise known as A.I.S.P., together. Having spoken to him on occasion my opinion of him was simple, he was a genius. Corey was a punk rocker who wore a black leather jacket with a white spider on the back and sported an odd looking jewfro that made his head look like a mushroom. I knew little of his activities outside of high school other than the one time that he mentioned he attended an anarchist demonstration, mostly because the female demonstrators got naked. His mother was also my kindergarten teacher.
I’ve read all of his published fiction writings and attended the book launch for Little Brother in the summer of 2008 at Lillian H. Smith library. His previous writings could best be described as odd little pieces about Toronto, Kensington Market, dumpster diving and collecting antiques which he calls crap hound, there was also a component of anthropomorphism to his writings with one character whose father was a mountain and whose mother was a washing machine and another time about sentient machines, or A.I.’s with one A.I. being a yacht for diving off Australia. I was attracted to Corey’s writings because I knew him in high school, but none of his writings exemplified the genius teenager I knew, in fact his stories sucked!
Then along came Little Brother and it seemed Corey may be on to something, Corey was raised around computers by his father and the plot centers around hacker subculture. It seemed Corey may finally become something of a success, so I dusted off the dust of past failures and sat down with an open mind hoping to find that greatness had finally sprung from the fertile mind of the genius I knew in high school. I read and I started to be encouraged by what I saw there, there was praise for the democracy protesters in China as well as for George Orwell’s telling of the story 1984, a damning account of the brutal repressive policies of the Soviet Union and from which the title Little Brother got its name, was Corey changing his political views and adopting a more towards the center political philosophy, I was excited. As I read I noticed the story was based on the United States war on terror (a war I favour) and seemed to be about its response to a terrorist attack on the Bay bridge in San Francisco. The Department of Homeland Security played a main role as the antagonist to the novel’s protagonist Marcus Yallow. Marcus Yallow and three friends, age 17, were arrested and detained by The Department of Homeland Security after the terror attack and placed in Alcatraz Island for no reason. Marcus and two of his friends were eventually released but one of his friends stayed in jail throughout the book and his family was left to think he died in the terrorist attack. As he leaves the jail a female guard puts her finger to her lips and says “Don’t Tell”. Marcus then blissfully carries on with his life as though nothing had happened, but he also becomes a leader in a cyber rebellion against the Department of Homeland Security’s invasion of privacy like, war on terror, policies.
This is an example of a thought experiment, Marcus, his friends as well as the other U.S. citizens detained by the U.S. government are being used to represent the terrorists being held in Guantanamo Bay, in fact Corey specifies this fact in his book by calling the place where they are held as Guantanamo by the Bay. This is similar in style to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale a novel about a young woman growing up under the repression of a Christian fundamentalist government. Now this is my complaint, Corey is a left of center, some could say a communist with a small “c, writing a story about one of the greatest countries in the world whose citizens enjoy unparalled freedom and liberty and Corey is portraying that country as though it is as oppressive as Stalinist Russia. The pot calling the kettle black as some would say. Corey’s communist beliefs don’t exactly endear him in the genuine department either, it sounds more like a left wing pinko just simply resorting to name calling. This sort of thought experiment I could see being used by an expert on Constitutional law whose background is libertarian, but when used by a person whose background is Trotskyist communist it comes across as plain old propaganda. It is sort of like a conservative such as myself writing a story about North Korea, am I going to write about North Korea in a positive light? Ofcourse not and no one should expect me to! My only chance of success would be to expose some sort of eternal truth about the regime and try to interest the readers with my honesty and sincerity, in a similar manner to the way George Orwell did in 1984 and not, to use as a bad example, the way Margaret Atwood did in The Handmaid’s Tale. Margaret Atwood made the same mistake as a feminist writer when all she did was simply state the obvious viewpoint that feminists hate Christianity, as if readers would expect her to say anything else. Her inexperience on the subject of Christianity was evident in the taking out of context the passage;
Genesis 30:1-3 (King James Version)
Genesis 30
1And when Rachel saw that she bare Jacob no children, Rachel envied her sister; and said unto Jacob, Give me children, or else I die.
2And Jacob's anger was kindled against Rachel: and he said, Am I in God's stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb?
3And she said, Behold my maid Bilhah, go in unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.
Which was extrapolated upon outrageously to become the policy of a right wing Christian government’s attempts to repopulate the planet. A more George Orwell in the vein of 1984 style criticism of Christianity would have saw Margaret adopt the policies of Jerry Falwell’s moral majority and incorporate them into a Christian governments attempts at repression, or at the very least set it in the past as an historical revisionist account of the Catholic inquisition. That’s how George Orwell did it and that’s how I would do it. Corey adopts a lot of the hacker persona in his hero and it is amazing in its use of the current jargon and cultural mores of the day, but the use of exaggeration to alter the perception of the public’s view on The War on Terror is a slander that makes Little Brother nothing more than a biased piece of propaganda.