“Little brother” is a modern novel, written in 2008. Its author, Cory Doctorow, depicts the nearest future, the main characters of which are young people Marcus Yallow, Darryl Glover, Vanessa Pak, Jose Luis Torrez and others who live in San-Francisco. All of them lived their day-to-day lives: going to school, playing computer games, chatting in the Internet, and hacking programs with their brilliant minds.
But one day someone terrorized the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge. And the fate was so “unfair” that in the very that moment the main characters were in the epicenter of that event, playing one of their virtual games. Agents DHS, hunting you the terrorists, detained all the suspicious people. And the children were also subjected to this suspicion. They were sent to some kind of a prison, where they were cross-examined, tortured, stooped. Then they were released, but the memories and emotions after all those tortures stayed with them. Marcus Yallow, the narrator of the story, decided to avenge himself. He created Xnet, the web, where he get many teenagers of his city together in order to struggle with DHS, who dared to take their and many others’ freedom. This struggle grows into real war between the young people and the secret powers of government. On this background the theme of love is developing: Marcus met Angela and they fell in love with each other. And though they are young and crazy in some way, their love is true and strong.
While reading the story, the reader can’t truly understand who is fully right in this situation, where the truth can be found: on the DHS’s side or on Marcus’. From the one hand, it’s not humane to torment other people, like the DHS did. But from the other hand, the core of their job was right – they tried to find the terrorists, to secure the citizens. Only in the end of the story the reader tends to believe that the boy is right yet: the government actually doesn’t do their duties, the DHS abuses its power, finds all the ways to abase all people, who’ve got into their hands, showing who’s the boss there. And the Good finally won in this story.
Except for the fictional aspect of this story, where there is a particular storylines, heroes, there is also a very strong and no less important scientific aspect. Reading the work, the reader gets to know a lot of facts about working of computer technologies, coding systems and other things which are real now or will be real in our near future. The book is regarded to be a Young Adult Novel, and it is really so: it’s didactical and interesting not just for kids, who will find a breathtaking plot and brave teenagers there, but also for adults, who will draw materials about technologies, social system from it.
