If you haven’t heard about Little Brother by Cory Doctorow then you will, I am sure, be hearing a lot about it over the coming weeks. Many of the books in the library are older children’s classics which I might have thought twice about before ordering them for our school. Well written they might certainly be, but I am far from convinced of their relevance to and appropriateness for a group of children living in the Czech Republic in the twenty first century (and having Czech and Russian and German and French as their first language). Little Brother is different. It may be set in the future but, like many works of science fiction and that subset of dystopias set in a near (or indeed, a not so near) future, it is unmistakably about now; about the lives we live now, and the way we live them. Most importantly, it is about being a kid now, growing up with technology; indeed, about a generation growing up with technology as the single most significant feature of their lives, touching everything from the culture (music, video and “film”,¹ even books and the written word) to a significant minority at least of their interactions with others.
But then I think it would be easy too, to exaggerate the differences between Little Brother and many of the older classics of children’s literature alluded to above. When Scott Westerfield, the author of Uglies, Pretties, and Specials, a series cataloguing another dystopian world known to some of you, describes Little Brother as “A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion”, his words are in fact little different from those used to describe quality children’s literature for generations. Substitute a different modifier for that “techno-geek: and you could be talking about characters from so many children’s books which are more or less universally held to be classics that it would be a nonsense to name them.
The thing is that perhaps people have exaggerated the differences between Little Brother and other children’s books, and that they have done so in a way that has led to it being banned (or as good as banned) in some schools. Having read the book, I think this is a little silly, but I think it points to a common problem: people fear what they do not understand. It is one thing to have books taking as their subject rebellion against the school rules, even against the rules of society, as so many of our heroes of children’s literature (and literature of all kinds) have done over the years. It is something else, it seems to me, when the way they choose to do so involves something so little understood by many people my age, let alone older.
The way I personally look at things is that there is never reason to fear what you don’t understand. There is almost, in fact, reason to celebrate. If you know how to find information, how to distinguish what is useful from what is not – to extract the signal from the noise – then discovering something which you do not understand, but which you wish to understand, is as much a challenge and an opportunity as a stretch of white water after three days of rain to a kayaker, a crag to a climber.
I never really took to being given information pre-processed, just the same as I never took to processed food. I would rather cook a meal myself than have something served up to me that has been through countless factories and complex processes since it resembled anything like plant or animal life, and I would rather find out information for myself than have it placed in front of me with no clear sense of what has been done to it, by whom, and how and how far it has travelled to get to me. It is natural to me that if I don’t understand something, and it seems interesting or useful to me, I will dig around and ask questions until I find something out. Right or wrong, it seems to me that I have learned much more in my life through this process than I learned at school or even university. Everything I know about anything I know anything about – literature, nutrition, neuro-developmental disorders like autism and ADHD, computers, Czech, comes from this very fondness for, and curiosity about things I do not yet understand. I want you to leave school with that same drive.
Perhaps what I’m describing here could be described in simpler terms. “I am a geek” says much the same thing. And Cory Doctorow’s characters are geeks it seems to me, far more than they are rebels. What’s more, the characters in the book, I think, would be geeks in any society, but are rebels only in the society he describes – a society which threatens them with loss of the freedoms we all wish to enjoy, a society which aims to know everything about them in the way Communist and fascist societies in the twentieth century aimed to do.
There are people who may be scared of you reading the book I will give away in this first competition, and I will argue that those people are scared of what they do not understand: what happens when children go into imaginary worlds for long periods of time. It is easy, I think, to exaggerate the differences between this and what happens when adults go into imaginary worlds for a long time. It is possible for adults to read books about private detectives who fight, drink, and gamble their way from one case to the next and still turn up to the office every day to sell real estate, and nobody ever seems to think this odd.
There is one thing I think will be next to impossible if you do pick up Little Brother and read and enjoy it from start to finish, and that is to be passive, to fail to ask questions, to sit around and accept everything you are told or read in the newspapers. That doesn’t make you into a rebel, or an anti-authoritarian, or I don’t even know what else is suspected of those kids who might be corrupted by a book. It makes you into a democratic citizen as defined by Vacláv Havel, T. G. Masaryk, or anybody else who has thought about what an open, free society needs and involves. It makes you into somebody who won’t be taken for an idiot. Specifically, when we think about Little Brother in particular, it makes you into somebody more likely to use technology than be used by it.
Believe me, that is something you are going to need to be.
That now is why you might choose to read this book. All that leaves is how you could win yourself a physical copy in the first Park Lane Library competition (open to Park Lane students, of course, from year 6 up). You’re going to have to geek yourselves up some, but I think you’re good for it.
¹ I use the scare quotes here because film is very rarely now shot on film. It begins and usually ends its life as digital video.
The book pusher of Lesser Town 