Young Adult Literature; Dystopian Literature; Science Fiction
Doctorow's Little Brother is written about teens, for teens, and it's full of teenage rebellion and romance. YA Lit Box: check.
The dystopian literature box's a little more challenging, but we still give it a checkity-check-check. Instead of imagining a future far away or in a completely different time—what's up The Hunger Games, 1984, Brave New World?—Doctorow's book imagines an only slightly different 2008.
The technology is slightly different, but the debates are the same. And that has the effect of making this novel doubly chilling—the events in Little Brother could happen to us.
And speaking of tech—Little Brother's technology, like ParanoidLinux, makes us classify this novel as science fiction, too. But again…the tech isn't all that different from what we have today.
Ugh, now we're scared.