Little Brother (2008)

Little Brother (2008)
by
Cory Doctorow
read by Kirby Heyborne
___

What a pleasant surprise. I've read two novels by Doctorow now (you know that audiobooks counts as reading, right?) and I didn't know anything about them going in. But, that's okay. He's now become an author that I will seek out all the audiobooks I can find, which I think is limited to the two I've now heard, but I'll look.
I decided to give Little Brother a try because my friend asked me if I was excited about the sequel dropping - must have been a month or two ago by now. She'd read and like it and thought I might as well. You know what? She was spot on.
Interestingly this is a "YA" novel. Which I never would have guessed until I was told so in an afterwards by the author at the very end. This book dealt with some pretty weighty stuff, and while I'm not saying young adults can't deal with that, it's just more than I expect from one of the YA genre. Sure, Rowling and Pullman deal with some very adult issues including death, unlawful imprisonment and torture, but they've never had a scene of a main character being tortured in a real world method in one of their books. Unlike someone, say Riordan in his Percy Jackson books that casually mentions death and then may or may not mention that Percy is a little sad, Doctorow puts it right up front so that the characters have to deal with it, and they do so in a very human manner, which is to say not perfectly.
I bet Cory Doctorow is a very smart guy, and I bet he either was/is a teacher or wanted to be one. I say this because in, "For The Win", I learned a lot about macro-economics, a topic not unfamiliar to me, but never before explained so well. NPR could take notes on how well Doctorow explains a country fiscal policies, especially their currency policies. In "Little Brother" we learn a lot about network security and various different internet-related terms and actions, like what 'tunneling' actually is. Again, this area is not something new to me, but if I had learned this from Doctorow, it would have been very clear years ago and taken much less time to boot.
I do wonder why this was a YA book and "For The Win" wasn't. The protagonists of each are young people, the bad things that happen in each are graphically detailed, but not glorified. I'll have to look into it, maybe they're both YA and I just didn't notice. Which is okay, because it just happens that I am quite fond of YA.

Audiobook available at Amazon.com

For the Win

For the Win
by
Cory Doctorow
read by
George Newbern

This is a science fiction novel? This is a science fiction novel. But it didn't have to be, in fact the sf bits of it are around the edges and largely incidental. There are four or five MMOs mentioned which to the best of my knowledge do not exist but for the most part actually sound like fun to play. There is no date given for when this story takes place, but it's not today, it's a day when Coca Cola is a big gaming company and there close to 4 billion people in China and India and retinal scans to start cars. But like I said, it was incidental. This story could have been one that took place now.
This story is one of the best explanations of macro economic forces and how monetary markets work that I've ever heard. At the same time, it manages to be a story that would warm Karl Marx's heart, wherein the workers of the world do rise up to demand the same privileges as the bourgeoisie.
But really, it's a story about characters and their struggles, their friendships, their loves - with a few lectures on economics sprinkled in. And I do mean lectures - a couple of times the narrator is talking directly to the listener/reader, other times it is an economist lecturing one of children he is working with.
Bad things happen to good people in this story, and some bad things done by bad people go unpunished, just like real life. Fortunately just like real life, some of the bad things happen to bad people and some of the good things happen to good people. In all, the characters seemed very three dimensional and humanly fallible.

Oh, and almost completely unrelated to this story, a particular phrase, "It's turtles all the way down" was used in it, which is not the most common of sayings, but one that just happened to pop up in a graphic novel I was reading at the same time (Fables #16 Inherit the Wind) and in a television show (Castle) that I watched during one of the days I was listening to this book, not to mention the previous audio book, the wonderful non-fiction account of the periodic table, "The Disappearing Spoon". What kind of synchronicity is at work here? There must be something important about this message? But, is it the message, that is turtles all the way down, or is it that fact that in the context the statement was originally uttered, it is wrong? Something for me to ponder for sure.