All reviews copyright 1984-2014 Evelyn C. Leeper.
"I, Robot" by Cory Doctorow:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/19/2006]
I guess this is the Year of the Robot. In the novella category we had "Identity Theft" by Robert J. Sawyer, and in the novelette category, we have "I, Robot" by Cory Doctorow (THE INFINITE MATRIX, Feb 15, 2005). Doctorow's story is set in Toronto, which is also where Sawyer lives, so maybe it's something in the air in Toronto. This is probably best described by Doctorow himself, who says, "Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of FAHRENHEIT 451 to make FAHRENHEIT 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the totalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."
LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow:
[From "This Week's Reading", MT VOID, 05/01/2009]
LITTLE BROTHER by Cory Doctorow (ISBN-13 978-0-7653-1985-2, ISBN-10 0-7653-1985-3) is a Hugo nominee. It has gotten a lot of good reviews. I thought it was awful.
First, the basic premise: Marcus is a sixteen-year-old hacker who gets caught up in a DHS sweep after a terrorist attack in San Francisco. After he is held incommunicado for a week and psychologically tortured, he is released, but becomes the leader of a movement to reverse the Orwellian tactics of the government. (It's no accident that his handle at the beginning is "w1nst0n" and that the novel is called "Little Brother".) Doctorow is in the forefront of the current "personal freedom" movement, and his agenda is showing--not just showing, in fact, but lit up with searchlights and announced with air raid sirens. I have in the past accused Heinlein of being unsubtle, but I realize now that there were whole new levels.
But there are other problems. I'm all in favor of a well-written, well-placed info-dump, but this book seems to be almost a third info-dump. (Someone claimed that Doctorow wrote this by stringing together a lot of his "Boing-Boing" columns with a minimal plot.) Most of the characters seem fairly thin--I realize that this is a YA novel, but even so....
The odd thing is that many of the things that I object to in LITTLE BROTHER I loved in Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH. I assume it must be the writing style. Stephenson tended to isolate his info-dumps via the character of the Librarian, rather than have the narrator pontificate, and his characters were more complex. It's odd, I suppose, that there should be so much similarity between two books that are at opposite ends of the spectrum for me, but there you have it. I really expected to like LITTLE BROTHER, but it was a massive disappointment.