Little Brother is it a vision of our future?

I read Little Brother a great book by Cory Doctrow that reads like a dystopian vision of our future but is really a look at just a few years down the line when a terrorist attack in San Francisco causes the city to be literally taken over by the Department of Homeland Security. This book is filled with technology that I only partially understand and yet Doctrow writes about the human aspect of the characters that overshadow the tech that could take up and over the book.

I loved the characters and the ambition and while many of those characters are my children's age it gave me a sense of pride that perhaps the younger generation would know what to do if the government went too far in "protecting" American lives such as monitoring all our movement, eavesdropping and grabbing people off the street just because their movement patterns are irregular. I know many of these things have happened on a limited scale but Doctrow amped it up and twisted it for us to enjoy.

I'm not going to write a big synopsis of the book since for the most part if you stumbled across this you have an interest in this book and want to know what other opinions are of it, suffice to say it is a great read. You first meet the teen hacker w1n5t0n who later know as Marcus and is taken into custody by the DHS after the attack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and basically is subtly tortured into revealing bits of himself until he is eventually released with threats against his family and freedom without any information about his injured friend Darryl.

Marcus then uses his tech savvy to wage war on the DHS and the terror that our own government is imposing on the city. Recruiting others to his cause through technology and trust Marcus uses his intelligence and his tech to keep one step ahead of the law and the teen spies that are out to get him. This book is a history lesson and warning all in one with all the drama, spy tech, intrigue and just a little romance. Pick it up, read it, wonder about it and try to realize what it might be like in the near future world that is upon us.