A review by nachof
Lawful Interception by Cory Doctorow
4.0
Alright, let's get the bad things out of the way first.
First of all, stop it with the stupid coffee. Yeah, Marcus likes coffee, and he's a coffee snob. We get it. Shut up about it already. In the longer stories of the series (Little Brother and Homeland) it worked better because the longer format allows time to expand on it, so you get a couple of pages of why cold brewing is great, how it works, and why it works, and you end up wanting to try your hand at it, even if, like me, you don't like coffee. In Lawful Interception, however, Doctorow can't afford to spend a couple of pages rambling outside of the story, because of the format. So you get a few "coffee is good, I make awesome coffee, everybody likes my coffee". After the third or so such line is starts getting repetitive fast.
Next, the ending was not good. The main storyline gets abandoned just to add a pointless scene. What happened to everything that had been building in the story? We don't know, but at least we get romance in there.
But worst of all is the fetishization of the nerd culture into something that, at least in my experience, it most definitely is not. In this series the nerd/hackerspace culture is inclusive, community oriented, anti-capitalist, and proto-anarchist. As much as I would like that to actually be true, the fact is that in my experience, other than a few exceptions, I see a lot more right wing "libertarians" "really-conservative-but-I-won't-say-it-because-I-want-to-be-edgy" types than the leftists Doctorow seems to find in nerd culture.
But still, this is a Little Brother book, and that's awesome, because I loved Little Brother, I loved Homeland, and I really liked Lawful Interception, even over those flaws I talked about.
It took me a while to realize why I love these books so much. I mean, they're just young adult fiction, with teen romance, simple storylines, and all that. But I think what sets them apart is that they're set in the real world. By that I don't mean just that the places are real world places, I mean that the characters and motivations make sense. You see, in most fiction the antagonists are positively evil, they just want to screw you because they're evil, and if you could just remove the evil guys from power things would just work out, and that's where the hero comes in, and they are so incredibly awesome that they single-handedly remove the evil guys and everybody lives happily everafter.
In the Little Brother world people are not evil. They are just doing their job. They are just covering their own asses. It's not the evil guy on top who's the problem. It's the whole system that is rotten. It's not the guy on top wanting to see you suffer. It's the whole system that's indifferent to what happens to actual people. If you remove the guy in charge, whoever it is, you don't get to live happily everafter. Instead, someone else takes over, and things continue just like they were. And then there's the hero, who doesn't just go singlehandedly against the world and wins and changes the world. Instead, Marcus does just small parts, just technical details on what is always a huge mass movement. The XNet in Little Brother, the whole network of people analyzing the leaks in Homeland, Occupy Seneca in Lawful Interception. Marcus isn't the lone hero fighting against the machine, he's just one more person inside a big community fighting for change. Even when he nominally leads, he's not the fearless leader with absolute authority you imagine in most books. At most, he's just primus inter pares, but really, he's just one more guy doing what he feels must be done. And the evils he fights again are not the creepy dude wanting to take over the world. Rather, the more real issues of capitalism destroying everything it touches.
There's one other angle that makes me like the Little Brother series a lot, and that's its relationship with technology. Most science fiction is of the "science and technology are inherently dangerous and they are destroying our world as we knew it" variety. Doctorow says yes, sure, technology can do that, but really, our world as we knew it was crap, and we can (and should!) use technology to bring it down and replace it with something better. Marcus uses technology not to directly bring down the evil government, but to build and strengthen the community that fights against the systemic oppression. And in the end, the government doesn't come down, there isn't a huge revolution, the system is still in place, and all that happened is that the world got a little better. Not much. The world is still mostly shit. But just a little less shit that it was before.
First of all, stop it with the stupid coffee. Yeah, Marcus likes coffee, and he's a coffee snob. We get it. Shut up about it already. In the longer stories of the series (Little Brother and Homeland) it worked better because the longer format allows time to expand on it, so you get a couple of pages of why cold brewing is great, how it works, and why it works, and you end up wanting to try your hand at it, even if, like me, you don't like coffee. In Lawful Interception, however, Doctorow can't afford to spend a couple of pages rambling outside of the story, because of the format. So you get a few "coffee is good, I make awesome coffee, everybody likes my coffee". After the third or so such line is starts getting repetitive fast.
Next, the ending was not good. The main storyline gets abandoned just to add a pointless scene. What happened to everything that had been building in the story? We don't know, but at least we get romance in there.
But worst of all is the fetishization of the nerd culture into something that, at least in my experience, it most definitely is not. In this series the nerd/hackerspace culture is inclusive, community oriented, anti-capitalist, and proto-anarchist. As much as I would like that to actually be true, the fact is that in my experience, other than a few exceptions, I see a lot more right wing "libertarians" "really-conservative-but-I-won't-say-it-because-I-want-to-be-edgy" types than the leftists Doctorow seems to find in nerd culture.
But still, this is a Little Brother book, and that's awesome, because I loved Little Brother, I loved Homeland, and I really liked Lawful Interception, even over those flaws I talked about.
It took me a while to realize why I love these books so much. I mean, they're just young adult fiction, with teen romance, simple storylines, and all that. But I think what sets them apart is that they're set in the real world. By that I don't mean just that the places are real world places, I mean that the characters and motivations make sense. You see, in most fiction the antagonists are positively evil, they just want to screw you because they're evil, and if you could just remove the evil guys from power things would just work out, and that's where the hero comes in, and they are so incredibly awesome that they single-handedly remove the evil guys and everybody lives happily everafter.
In the Little Brother world people are not evil. They are just doing their job. They are just covering their own asses. It's not the evil guy on top who's the problem. It's the whole system that is rotten. It's not the guy on top wanting to see you suffer. It's the whole system that's indifferent to what happens to actual people. If you remove the guy in charge, whoever it is, you don't get to live happily everafter. Instead, someone else takes over, and things continue just like they were. And then there's the hero, who doesn't just go singlehandedly against the world and wins and changes the world. Instead, Marcus does just small parts, just technical details on what is always a huge mass movement. The XNet in Little Brother, the whole network of people analyzing the leaks in Homeland, Occupy Seneca in Lawful Interception. Marcus isn't the lone hero fighting against the machine, he's just one more person inside a big community fighting for change. Even when he nominally leads, he's not the fearless leader with absolute authority you imagine in most books. At most, he's just primus inter pares, but really, he's just one more guy doing what he feels must be done. And the evils he fights again are not the creepy dude wanting to take over the world. Rather, the more real issues of capitalism destroying everything it touches.
There's one other angle that makes me like the Little Brother series a lot, and that's its relationship with technology. Most science fiction is of the "science and technology are inherently dangerous and they are destroying our world as we knew it" variety. Doctorow says yes, sure, technology can do that, but really, our world as we knew it was crap, and we can (and should!) use technology to bring it down and replace it with something better. Marcus uses technology not to directly bring down the evil government, but to build and strengthen the community that fights against the systemic oppression. And in the end, the government doesn't come down, there isn't a huge revolution, the system is still in place, and all that happened is that the world got a little better. Not much. The world is still mostly shit. But just a little less shit that it was before.