Little Brother In The 21st Century

The Impact of Little Brother in the twenty-first century Cory Doctorow’s realistic and rousing novel, Little Brother, is the perfect example of a dystopian and futuristic approach to the twenty-first century and its events. Little Brother takes the readers on the journey of seventeen-year-old Marcus Yallow who faces the consequences of skipping class with his friends when they are captured by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as suspects after being caught in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. After being interrogated, tortured, and threatened mercilessly for several days, they are released, but their friendship breaks apart with one friend missing and the others distancing themselves away from Marcus, who decides to rebel against
the DHS by creating the Xnet under the screen name ‘M1k3y.’ Marcus leads his fellow Xnet users in various feats to stop the DHS’s tyranny with success, while experiencing romance, fear, and torture simultaneously. Through Marcus’s experiences, Cory Doctorow shows realistic dilemmas and conflicts anyone living in a devastated city can experience, such as paranoia, distrust, and lack of freedom. Little Brother is relevant to the world today because of its parallels to terrorism, its significant use of technology, and its theme of oppression. First, Doctorow relates his novel to terrorism in a major way because terrorism is a factor when it comes to why the story was the way it was. In the text, Marcus and his friends get captured by the DHS briefly after a terrorist attack occurs. If this part was not in the text, the plot would have been completely different. For example, the DHS would have little to no significance to the plot. This is proven when Marcus uses the Xnet for the sole purpose of shutting down the DHS since “It’s [the Xnet] the last way to communicate without being snooped on by the DHS.” (Doctorow 164)