John Hattaway » Cory Doctorow http://www.johnhattaway.com Everyone is entitled to their secrets, even if those secrets are obvious. Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:32:11 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Generally Speaking http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/02/generally-speaking/ http://www.johnhattaway.com/2009/02/generally-speaking/#comments Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:03:58 +0000 smokingpen http://www.johnhattaway.com/?p=1707 I sat down yesterday and started to write a review of Cory Doctorow‘s Little Brother. Truth told, I don’t think the book is worth the money. Definitely not from a hard bound, pay out the nose, expense. It came across as too perfect and too much a community project for me to really enjoy and on top of that I think that Doctorow decided to ignore a lot of things, including technology and security concerns, that he wrote about which were out of date before he wrote this book AND implied that we’d hit a static point in development sometime around 1999. Of course, since Doctorow is an advocate of the Open Source software movement, not necessarily a fan of Microsoft, and decided to imagine a world where Microsoft would give away XBox‘s rather than just subsidize them (marketing professionals will tell you not to give away the cow and hope people will pay for the milk) makes the story rather implausible in my mind and difficult to read. With all of that said, Doctorow wrote an amazingly tight book about some rather pertinent things, but did so in a way that demonized organizations and people in a way that, quite honestly, extends the realm of believability too far. More, he set his story in San Francisco and made terrorists attack structure’s that had no significance or meaning to the entire country, further negating the plausibility of argument.

Long point short (e.g. less than the 3000 words I wrote last night), I think, even in light of the many and varied positive reviews Doctorow has received, this book will disappear into the aether of oblivion within the next couple of years and only people like me who remember odd titles like this will remember what Doctorow wrote. All-in-all, Little Brother is a completly, and rightfully so, forgettable book and should be avoided. And, if this is the kind of things I can expect to read from author’s who all seem to rotate in the same literary circles, I may need to find other literary circles to read about and explore.

The only positive thing I can or will say about this book is I am glad I didn’t pay for it.

John Hattaway | smokingpen | Alicia Grey | Clockwork Princess | Cassandra West

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