Flight into Fantasy

In which I review a seriously overhyped YA SF novel.
Title: Little Brother
Author: Cory Doctorow
Genre: science fiction
Excerpt: You can actually download the whole thing here
Reason for Reading: It had been on my radar for quite a while, but it wasn’t until Thea reviewed it that I decided to try it.
Synopsis:

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.

My Thoughts: If you go to the Amazon page linked above, you’ll see lots of critical acclaim for this book. That’s how it got to my attention, so I eventually knew I had to read it to see if the hype amounted to anything. To be fair, there’s a lot going for this book, not least of which is the fact that it can be downloaded for free from the author’s site. I also really like what Doctorow has to say, but the fact is, when I read, I want relatable characters, and Little Brother didn’t provide. Not only that, but I just felt like there was too much Doctorow in the story and not enough Marcus.

Little Brother is set in that famous science fiction construct, Twenty minutes into the future. It’s a future that is not unlike our present, and from what little googling I’ve done afterword, seems likely to happen. Unfortunately, this trope will probably make the book seem dated in a few years. At least, one hopes. When terrorists attack San Francisco, Marcus Yallow and his friends are at the wrong place at the wrong time and are picked up by Homeland Security and interrogated. They’re suspicious of Marcus because he doesn’t give the passwords he’s got on all his technology right away. After a humiliating interrogation, Marcus and his friends are released, minus one of their number, and Marcus is determined to fight against the injustices perpetrated by the DHS.
What really worked for me about this setup was the use of technology. It all seems so very plausible that I half want to find myself an XBox and see if I can use it to get online. If anything, I learned a lot about what technology can do, and Doctorow’s extrapolations about where it can go from here are fascinating.

Unfortunately, as I said, the characters leave something to be desired. Marcus is likeable enough, but he’s so encumbered by Doctorow’s message that he’s never quite allowed to escape and become a three-demensional character. The few moments of vulnerability he experiences are quite moving, but then he figures out how to solve his latest problem, and I was never left in any doubt that in the end he would prove victorious, since he was basically the author’s self-insert. His friends aren’t given much more depth, either, though I did quite like his love interest. And the less I say about the DHS goons, the better.

Speaking of self-inserts, there really are a lot of them in this book, and I mean that literally. Doctorow dedicates every chapter to a different bookstore. This brought me out of the book every time it happened, and while I’m sure that the information is excellent, it seems like highlighting his favorite bookstores is maybe something he should have done somewhere else. In addition to all that, Doctorow takes the opportunity to engage in massive amounts of fillibustering on everything from technology to politics and the threat to our rights to privacy. While I agree with most of his positions, this was seriously annoying after a while.

When the plot is allowed to happen, it is engaging, and there were moments where, despite massive eyerolling in the beginning, I enjoyed it. The climax, while rolling along about like I thought it would, had me glued to the edge of my seat, and I liked the end, which was positive without wrapping things up too neatly.

Final Verdict: Pauses in the action for the author to air his political views and characters who were flat and bland made this book’s interesting premise fizzle without ever getting a chance to work properly. My grade: A C-. Then again, I guess I get what I paid for.

Well, I miscounted, so I didn’t get my 50 book challenge for last year, but oh well. I started early with finishing something at any rate.

And the year begins on a downward note because I really disliked this book. It’s basically three interconnected short stories about the founding of a Parapsychic Research Center, and the integration and acceptance of people with parapsychic gifts (or Talents) as actual members of society. It was written in 1973 and takes place at the very end of the century, and so obviously it’s quite dated as a reader coming to the book 30-some odd years later.

The story would have been much better told had someone else written it. Often, I felt that with the format McCaffrey used, she did a lot more telling than showing, which is something any good writer knows to avoid. And let’s not discuss the silly, vapid creatures that McCaffrey thinks are modern women. Really, let’s not. It will cause me to go into apoplexy. Also, it’s apparently not OK for the general public to be hypocritical assholes, but McCaffrey’s talents display as much hypocrisy and assholishness. I felt that some of McCaffrey’s villains in this book raised amazingly good points that McCaffrey chose to bluster over with self-righteous moralism rather than answer definitively, which disappointed me, because I’m one of those readers that generally likes to root for the heroes, not the villains.

Overall, give this one a pass. Read Zenna Henderson instead for a much better take on the paranormally psychic.

So, for once, when I’m making an entry about a book I will avoid the snark.

This collection of short stories was, for the most part, very well-put-together. All of the stories were at least interesting, and while there were a couple that I didn’t like as much, overall the collection really does contain good work Connie Willis has written.

If you like screwball comedies and science fiction (and they go together way better than you’d think) you’ll enjoy this book. Willis is also a wonderful social satire writer. Even though the book was written nearly fifteen years ago, most of the issues she discusses are relevant.

My favorites in the collection were “Even the Queen”, which deals with an issue faced by all women, “Spice Pogrom”, which is a seriously, seriously screwball story about aliens and miscommunication which actually portrays cute little girls as bratty, “Time Out”, which deals with motherhood and midlife crises and the chicken pox, “Chance”, which is about regrets and how one little event can change a person’s life forever, and “At the Rialto”, which I’d read before but which was just as funny the second time around.

As I said a couple of days back in my journal, I think Kit Reed is an awesome writer who more people need to be familliar with. This collection of twenty short stories is a good retrospective of her work from 1958 to 1998.

All of the stories in this book are, on some level, creepy. Even when Reed’s being funny or satirical, that creepy factor is still there. Most particularly creepy are her stories dealing with motherhood, in particular “Chicken Soup”, in which devoted motherhood is taken to the extreme, “The Mothers of Shark Island”, and “Mommy Nearest.”

That being said, I love Reed when she’s making social commentary. “In Behalf of the Product” is a speech by a pageant winner that is just very, very not what you’d expect. “Like My Dress” is a nice commentary on the media and what people will do to get fame. “Cynosure” and “The New You” are also a bit satirical, but the twists at the end are the kind that make me rub my hands together with glee.

It says something for Reed that I zipped through all these short stories in only a matter of days, whereas the collection of the Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror that I have out from the library has been languishing for months.

Reed is definitely an author to check out if you like weird stories!

So I had a lot of time to read, and so I did. Here’s what I managed to finish.

I’m not going to post reviews because I read a lot and don’t really feel like doing more than summarizing.

Book 13: Sea of Silver Light: Otherland, Volume 4 by Tad Williams. A great way to close out the series though it did go on a bit too long.

Book 14: Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell. Quite funny and full of interesting facts delivered in a droll, witty style which I liked very much.

Book 15: Deerskin by Robin McKinley. An interesting story. The climactic moments of the book seemed very weird to me, and they didn’t make much sense, and the main character was something of a Mary Sue, but she gets raped by her own father, so I guess that’s a compensation.

Book 16: Dolores Claiborne by Stephen King. Definitely not King’s usual style, but a gripping read nonetheless.

Book 17: Trader by Charles de Lint. The things I hated about Onion Girl> and Spirits in the Wires weren’t there. It was a very well-told story, although I think I may be one of the few De Lint readers who could really despise his character Joe Crazy Dog, known in this book as Bones.
Book 18: Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire. I really enjoyed this book. Not enough to pick up any of Maguire’s other titles, but it was an interesting story anyway, and makes me think of Oz in a completely different light. I didn’t really identify much with Elpheba, the main character and the aforementioned witch, but I didn’t despise her the way I did several of the other characters.