Rating: 
(25 reviews)
Author: Cory Doctorow
Publisher: Tor Teen
Product Description
Marcus, a.k.a “w1n5t0n,” is only seventeen years old, but he figures he already knows how the system works–and how to work the system. Smart, fast, and wise to the ways of the networked world, he has no trouble outwitting his high school’s intrusive but clumsy surveillance systems.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
But his whole world changes when he and his friends find themselves caught in the aftermath of a major terrorist attack on San Francisco. In the wrong place at the wrong time, Marcus and his crew are apprehended by the Department of Homeland Security and whisked away to a secret prison where they’re mercilessly interrogated for days.
When the DHS finally releases them, Marcus discovers that his city has become a police state where every citizen is treated like a potential terrorist. He knows that no one will believe his story, which leaves him only one option: to take down the DHS himself.
5 Comments
I think the boingboing website is fun. I was a little annoyed how much the webmaster used it to promote his novel, but I guess it worked, because I went over to read the free version online.
Quite frankly, the author writes at the level of a not particularly talented amateur. The novel is written in the first person, but the character constantly talks in stocatto one-sentence paragraphs, is constantly glib and annoying, constantly sounds like the mouthpiece of a 35 year old who views free source as a *cause* rather than an real person, constantly uses slangs not appropriate to a young San Franciscan, and basically is not for a second believable or interesting or anything but annoying.
For that matter, none of the characters are interesting, the plot isn’t interesting, the near-future universe isn’t believable, and it’s all about as self-righteous as a novel can get. I guess this is written as a kid’s book, with the idea that being a little more didactic is OK. But even for children, I think this book is too extreme - and are children really going to identify with a kid who is basically the mouthpiece of some long-winded adult who loves diving into tangents about historic freedoms? I think the target audience is adults who are full of themselves? Perhaps their teenage nephews are given this book as a gift.
At the least, download the novel first, because most people won’t want to keep reading past page five.
In some ways, this book harks back to the juveniles of fifties as written by some of the great masters of sf, most especially Heinlein. Like those earlier books, it portrays teenagers that are intelligent, resourceful, game-loving, and confrontational, but are still at times prone to making stupid mistakes in the name of peer-group status. In other words, they are real teenagers.
The setting is the near future, when some ill-defined terrorist group decides to blow up the San Francisco Bay Bridge. Marcus, our hero, and several of his friends are picked up in a rather wide sweep by Homeland Security forces as possible suspects. And therein lies the tale, as the actions of the security forces clash violently with Marcus’s idea of what is right and proper in the supposed land-of-the-free America. What Marcus decides to do about this situation is an instructional manual to the reader in just how personal freedom and privacy have been restricted and what can be done about it in today’s very high-tech world of security cameras, RFIDs, cryptography, computer databases, and the insidious insinuation of propaganda both at our schools and into everything we see and hear on the internet and our TVs and from the mouths of our political leaders.
The story bubbles with suspense, and the actions that Marcus takes are very believable as something a seventeen-year old could actually do. It is very easy to identify with Marcus and become very sympathetic to his cause, while the situation itself is stark enough to frighten the daylights out of the reader as being all too possible. The info-dumps along the way not only impart some very necessary information to the reader, but are handled very much the way Heinlein did it, as things that are necessary for the hero to either know or learn about to accomplish his desires, making them easy to swallow. The techniques and technology presented are real, as some of the afterword material to this book details.
The other characters of this book, while not presented with the detail that Marcus is (almost a given in any first-person narration), are both intriguing and in some cases frightening. Marcus’s father is a major case in point, as a man with liberal leanings who nevertheless finds himself driven to support the majority view out of fear for his son, and Marcus’s social studies teacher, who is very reminiscent of some of the `mentors’ of Heinlein’s books, as her willingness to engage her students in free-wheeling debate and attempts to get them to think for themselves leads to a very plausible and ugly fate. It is just such touches that make the whole situation ring with that touch of reality that marks excellent science fiction.
The politics of this book are decidedly left-wing. The Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security come in for some merciless beatings, but the reasoning behind such depictions is carefully laid out and form a clarion call to all Americans to look carefully at just what we are giving up in the name of `security’. Perhaps it should be compared and contrasted (as one of those infamous school assignments I don’t fondly remember) with something like Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders, which presents the right-wing rationale of why and when the government should be allowed to exceed the boundaries of the Constitution and its amendments.
Unlike the YA material of the fifties, this book does not ignore an item of great concern to almost every teenager, namely sex. I found the presentation of this material both appropriate to the characters and handled realistically without being too graphic. However, it might make this book inappropriate for pre-teens.
Teenagers should find this book a riveting read, with characters they can identify with, and like all really good YA books, adults should find this book just as riveting, with concepts and philosophies presented that require thought and contemplation. This is the best book I’ve read out of the 2008 crop so far, and I’d be very much surprised if it doesn’t at least make the 2009 Hugo nomination list, if not take the award itself.
— Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)
Fightback by the Bay.
A deliberate Orwellian title, for a deliberate Orwellian scenario. A supposed terrorist attack in San Francisco leads the US Department of Homeland Security - a title George himself could easily have thought up - into serious overreaction.
Kidnapping and torture of children, massive staff increases, random no reason searches of people taking a different train than they used to, that sort of crazy thing.
A novel about a tech-hip angry teenager, and his friends and family, as he puts it on the line to do something about the fascists in charge who are way worse than any terrorist goes.
Saw some people say that this is Doctorow’s best novel, and they’d probably be right. This sort of hip nearish future tech and political exploration certainly would seem to be his forte, that and the short story.
I think I saw Nancy Kress say on her blog that she didn’t quite buy it, as her government might not go that far. I think that is part of the author’s point, so that they won’t. Especially for somewhere that is indulging in anti-Constitutional prevention is worse than the crime antics currently, with such a prison-as-growth-industry area. There there are the illegal phonetaps, and Echelon/Carnivore and all that fun stuff reading all your email.
So while they may not be carting off 14 year old whiteboy hackers and waterboarding them, how about the brownboys or girls? An issue the author brings up. Some of the abuses being talked about do happen already, so clearly some cautionary tale-telling at work.
Not to mention detaining an Australian for several years in just such a place as one of those Doctorow mentions.
Presumably the actual terrorists are sitting around laughing their arses off at all the wastes of money.
Some interesting other bits - Doctorow puts in little plugs for his favorite bookshops before each chapter, but he manages to write it in a way that doesn’t sound like shilling.
There’s an afterword by an actual security expert who deals with things like the security technology on display in the book that Marcus, the protagonist and friends are involved with.
A fine work, with some notes on further reading to go along.
A book with important information for anyone to know, but unfortunately intertwined with a flawed story.. Perhaps being local to the bay area, i could catch these flaws easier than most. That being said, they’re not that big a deal, but the path of our protagonist seems to be laid out in a way that he is able to get out of trouble as easy as he gets into it. Still a great book and should be on every young adult’s required reading list. Good luck getting this one on the recommended reading list at schools tho. I am also a full-blown adult so i am not the target reader.
This book should be required reading for any technologically inclined teenager. And just about everyone else, for that matter. It not only presents a chillingly believable near future where our government has continued to exploit and expand our fears to reduce our civil liberties much further, but it restores the good name “hackers” had originally, before those same forces presented all hackers as vandals at best or criminals at worst. The fact is that most hackers are just kids who enjoy the challenge of beating the technology, and they serve a very useful purpose in finding holes in that technology. Very, very few are trying to steal, or to deface web sites. But the ones that do get all the press. In a society where technology is increasingly used to invade our privacy and deprive us of our remaining civil liberties, hackers are one of our last hopes. As Cory Doctorow says better than I. Read it.