Little Brother

Cory Doctorow’s science fiction novel Little Brother is set in San Francisco and imagines the aftermath of a terrorist attack — and specifically a group of hacker teenagers who have their civil liberties cruelly and arbitrarily violated by a series of government interrogations. The book’s social commentary may be too crude and topical for it to be a lasting work — Doctorow clearly intends this to be a criticism of post-9/11 America — but Doctorow absolutely nails the modern hacker/nerd subculture in a way that only he could.