Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow (a coeditor of Boing Boing), is the book that I would have thought a lot of people would have written in the post-9/11 world.  The book tells the story of Marcus, a/k/a w1n5t0n, a/k/a M1k3y, a computer-geeky teenager in San Francisco who is with his friends in the wrong place at the wrong time when a terrorist attack hits their city.  The Department of Homeland Security moves in and takes over the town, and Marcus and his friends are detained as suspected terrorists.

While it’s difficult to tell actual fact from (Marcus’s) perception in the book, some of the events that take place in the book make it feel like martial law has been imposed on San Francisco, and that DHS has been given carte blanche to do whatever it wishes to restore order in the city (including some pretty nasty stuff to Marcus and his friends).  As the story unfolds, it becomes clear that Marcus feels the need to take a principled stand in the battle between the protection of civil liberties and an over-reaching Federal government.  While Marcus’s parents aren’t aware of everything that’s happened to Marcus or the things he’s doing to correct the situation, his father’s response upon learning that Marcus has been suspended from school for arguing with a teacher sums up the tension that exists:

Look, son . . . You’re going to have to learn to live with the fact that we live in a different world today.  You have every right to speak your mind of course, but you have to be prepared for the consequences of doing so.  You have to face the fact that there are people who are hurting, who aren’t going to want to argue the finer points of Constitutional law when their lives are at stake.  We’re in a lifeboat now, and once you’re in the lifeboat, no one wants to hear about how mean the captain is being.

Marcus uses his knowledge of computers and networking to build an underground resistance movement using a network of XBoxes that can’t be traced like the normal Internet.  Doctorow clearly knows a thing or two about a thing or two, but in his acknowledgments he also makes clear that he got some help from some experts that allowed him to talk about this stuff the way he did.  And I was absolutely fascinated at the way Doctorow was able to tell the story so credibly from the vantage point of a teenager, yet was able to discuss technical stuff so matter-of-factly without losing character.

As Marcus undertakes his quest, he meets more people and learns more things about what the government is doing.  It’s downright scary to think that some of this stuff could actually happen, but the story is so believably told that you get caught up in it and can’t help but wonder what Big Brother is up to.

Also:

Read Tim’s review of Little Brother