Little Brother (novel)

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Little Brother is a novel by Cory Doctorow . It was released in 2008.

The theme of this story is the modern surveillance state , using the fictional example of San Francisco , which becomes a police state after a terrorist attack . Both the consequences for people and the ways in which you can defend yourself are shown on the basis of a student.

main characters

  • Marcus Yallow alias w1n5t0n (pronounced Winston), later M1k3y (pronounced Mikey)
  • Angela Carvelli (Ange for short), friend of Marcus
  • Jose Luis Torrez (Jolu for short), friend of Marcus
  • Vanessa Pak (Van for short), friend of Marcus
  • Darryl Glover, Marcus' missing best friend
  • Barbara Stratford, investigative reporter
  • Carrie Johnstone aka Mrs. Circular Cut, Department of Homeland Security Soldier

action

Marcus Yallow, a 17-year-old student who attends a school in San Francisco and deals with security systems, witnessed a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge . He and his friends are then arrested, interrogated and tortured by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS for short) because he is a hobby hacker and refuses to reveal his private passwords .

When he reveals the passwords after a few days and nothing suspicious can be found on his cell phone, he is released. He returns home and notices that his laptop has been tampered with and that from one day to the next he has become a transparent person . In response, he told the DHS the war . In addition, his friend Darryl, who was injured in the panic after the attack, is still missing.

Using a distribution of Linux (ParanoidLinux, fictitious at the time the novel was first published), Marcus founds the so-called Xnet , a communication network that enables the resistance movement (Xnetter) to communicate in encrypted form. Since the entire city is continuously monitored by a surveillance system, Marcus quickly finds a weak point: If too many false alarms are given , triggered by unusual movement profiles, the system collapses. And so he publishes instructions on how to provoke such false positives (namely by reading out and changing the FasTrack cards - a kind of "automatic city toll card") on Xnet.

As the collapse is imminent, the DHS realizes the sabotage and tries to take action against the Xnet, which are now also viewed as terrorists. The Xnet is infiltrated by DHS agents and also monitored, which forces Marcus to change the medium: He sets up a Web of Trust .

Marcus only has one choice: he has to publish his story. After a first failed attempt, in which his statements are interpreted at the discretion of the respective newspaper (much to his disadvantage), he asks Barbara Stratford, a reporter and old friend of the family, to publish the truth.

With Barbara Stratford's help, Marcus finally manages to free the city from the DHS and his friend Darryl from the captivity of the DHS.

Others

Cory Doctorow has released this work under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license , which allows anyone to freely distribute and edit the work as long as it is not commercially available and under distributed under the same license.

Using this license, Christian Wöhrl made a German translation of the novel. From this a fan audio book project was created.

Another translation (by Uwe-Michael Gutzschhahn ) has been published by Rowohlt Verlag .

The title is based on Big Brother mentioned in George Orwell's 1984 . Also the name w1n5t0n is based on the main character from 1984 , Winston Smith.

continuation

The sequel to Little Brother was released under the original title Homeland in February 2013. The German version was published on September 30, 2013 under the title Little Brother - Homeland.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cory Doctorow: Little Brother: Download for Free ( English ) Retrieved on 13 September 2011th
  2. ↑ Fridtjof Küchemann: America's Public Enemies 1 to 4. In: faz.net, March 2, 2010 (book review)
  3. ↑ Cory Doctorow: Cover for Homeland, the sequel to Little Brother ( English ) Retrieved on 5 July 2012 found.