'Little Brother' Comes Out Fighting

By John Sellers, Children's Bookshelf -- Publishers Weekly, 1/24/2008

“We’re living in a world in which it’s instantly assumed that anybody with a security badge is authorized to demand government ID from you. It fuels the desire for stories like this.” So says Patrick Nielsen Hayden at Tor Books, who edited Little Brother (Tor Teen, May), the first YA novel from author/blogger/activist Cory Doctorow.

Months ahead of its pub date, Little Brother and its author have been attracting attention—particularly on the Web. Neil Gaiman posted a lengthy, praise-filled entry about the book on his blog, and Gawker Media’s science fiction blog included the book in a round-up of 10 anticipated books for 2008. And for the second year in a row, Forbes magazine included Doctorow (no relation to author E.L. Doctorow) on its Web Celeb 25 list, which gathers the Internet’s most influential figures in a given year.

Doctorow’s book, while immersed in hacker and tech culture, is largely politically driven. This is not unexpected from someone who has been active in the Internet for many years, and someone who has a history of activism (Doctorow was twice arrested for civil disobedience before he turned 18).

Nielsen Hayden, senior editor and manager of SF at Tor, knows Doctorow from science fiction chat circles in the 1990s; since then, the author has been an advocate for digital rights, having served as European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation for four years, and he currently co-edits Boing Boing, the fifth most popular blog on the Internet, according to Technorati, a blog search engine.

In Doctorow’s book, set in San Francisco in the near future, teenage hacker Marcus Yallow is detained and interrogated by the Department of Homeland Security at an offshore location (“Gitmo-by-the-Bay”) in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack in the city. The DHS suspects his involvement because of the heavily modified electronic equipment he has with him, but they eventually release him—though not his best friend, Darryl, and numerous other detainees. With San Francisco overrun by cameras and surveillance, Marcus won’t accept sacrificing personal liberty as the price of “security,” so he and a legion of underground hackers (motto: “Don’t trust anyone over 25”) decide to fight back.

Nielsen Hayden believes that SF writing for any age group is best when it takes a stand on an issue. “It’s inherently a critical and subversive genre,” he says.“Even if written as entertainment, it has a point to make. In that sense Little Brother is very much centered in a long tradition of political and science fiction writing. It’s also really entertaining.”

The editor also worked with Doctorow on his three previous adult novels with Tor (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe and Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town), and Nielsen Hayden says he has encouraged several of his authors to keep younger science fiction fans in mind. “I have been concerned about the aging of the science fiction demographic,” he says. “SF readership used to be [people in their] high teens-low 20s, and now it’s high 20s-low 30s and up.”

So Nielsen Hayden recalls being “particularly delighted” when the proposal for Little Brother landed on his desk. He signed the book up in late 2006, offering Doctorow more than for his previous novels because Tor hoped to break him out to a larger audience. Nielsen Hayden points to Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series as the type of success they hope to emulate. “I think that all SF has a strong appeal to kids who feel they’re on the outside and are trying to find their place,” he says. “One of the basic businesses you’re in when you’re a young person is to figure out how the world works. [Fiction] is a tool for prying apart the gears of the world.”

Little Brother offers more in the way of circuit boards than gears, and could almost be read with a laptop in hand. Marcus frequently makes reference to hacks (ways to reprogram computers and other devices to suit one’s needs), Internet history (such as the protocols that make email work) and privacy-protection programs (like The Onion Router, which allows users to access Web sites that might otherwise be blocked by censorware), all of which beg to be looked up on Google or Wikipedia. In addition, Doctorow makes use of Internet slang known as “leetspeak” (Marcus describes a female friend as “totally h4wt,” and notes that some of his attempts to interfere with the DHS surveillance might be considered “a little aggro,”as well as acronyms for activities that range from “ARGing” to “LARPing” (participating in Alternate Reality Games or Live Action Role Play).

“One thing I admire is that everything he talked about in the book, he explained—at least to the extent you could get an idea of it,” says Jordan Gower, a bookseller at Harry W. Schwartz Bookshops in Milwaukee, Wis. “But he didn’t do it in a way like he’s trying to teach a child. It was more like he was just spreading his information.” Nielsen Hayden believes that Doctorow “nailed” the book’s language (at least according to his nephews, he jokes), though he also admits that there’s always a danger of slang becoming outmoded. “The Internet speeds up the process by which kid language and slang evolve and change,” he says.

Becky Anderson, owner of Anderson’s Bookshops in Naperville and Downers Grove, Ill., thinks that though this is officially Doctorow’s first YA book, tech-savvy teenagers are likely to be familiar with his adult titles, as well as his Web presence. She also believes that teens will be particularly receptive to Little Brother’s political message—especially in an election year. “I think that in this generation there’s a lot more activism that was maybe lacking in the past,” she says. “[Eighteen-year-olds] will be able to vote this November, and this kind of thing can make a difference. I think it’s perfect timing—we needed it yesterday.”

Anderson’s will host Doctorow for a pre-pub dinner on March 18 at the site of their W.W. Wickel wholesale company in Aurora, Ill. The store’s previous dinners with children’s authors have featured Dean Lorey (Nightmare Academy), Katherine Hannigan (Ida B... and Her Plans to Maximize Fun, Avoid Disaster, and [Possibly] Save the World) and Michelle Paver (the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series), among others. The events include children as well as educators and librarians, a format that Anderson believes is particularly well-suited to Little Brother, which teachers (and adults in general) may find as appealing as teens. “I think it’s a book we can sell equally well to high school or upper middle school [students] or an adult,” she says.

Tor’s marketing and publicity campaign for Little Brother aims to take advantage of the book’s crossover appeal, in the hopes of reaching as broad an audience as possible. “The tricky thing with the book is that it’s chock full of these political, social and tech issues—there are so many things to talk about,” says Dot Lin, senior publicist at Tor. “But at its heart it’s an adventure novel. We are presenting it as a very entertaining novel with smart characters that don’t talk down to teens.”

Despite Doctorow’s busy schedule, which includes public speaking and media commentary on tech and privacy issues, writing op-ed columns, extensive blogging and more, he will tour to support Little Brother in selected cities, including New York City, Seattle and San Francisco, as well as make appearances at ALA and corporate tech events, at Google and other companies. “I think the biggest thing with Cory is to bridge his YA and adult audiences,” Lin says. “For Seattle, he is doing a big event at the Science Fiction Museum, so we’re looking into doing a tie-in with a school visit or a children’s bookstore.”

Additionally, Doctorow will tap into his online fan base through events at Teen Second Life (a version of the popular online community, for 13- to 17-year-olds), and Tor hopes to court socially aware teens via the ACLU’s teen division and other progressive organizations. And the DIY Web site Instructables will offer Little Brother-related gadget instructions before and after the book’s release.

Time will tell if the book’s political awareness and tech-savvy will resonate with readers (teen or otherwise), but Nielsen Hayden hopes that it will inspire them to become more active and involved. “It’s not a call for anarchy in the streets,” he says, “but it is a call for a more reasonable social order.”

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow (Tor Teen, $17.95 ages 13-up ISBN 978-0-7653-1985-2; May)

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