Cory Doctorow’s newest book, Homeland, is a sequel to his earlier novel Little Brother(my review). It follows the continuing adventures of Marcus (M1k3y) Yallow, accidental thorn in the side of Homeland Security. The book, like all Doctorow books, reads as part YA love story and part technology essay. And, while I love Doctorow’s stories, his essays sometimes overwhelm the story. So, let’s see what’s happened here.

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Cory Doctorow is one of the better YA science fiction writers being published today. His books are intelligent, thoughtful and do a great job capturing youthful thoughts and actions. The characters come across as actual teens, instead of miniature adults. And this is the root of why his books consistently piss me off. The writing and characters are so good and the plots so interesting, that the book just grinds to a halt when characters climb up on Doctorow’s soap box and rant. This problem happened, again, in Doctorow’s latest novel Pirate Cinema. The story gets completely derailed by Doctorow’s rant (which he inserts into the various character’s mouths) and makes the story a lot less interesting. It’s almost as if Doctorow doesn’t trust his writing to get the point across without ham-handedly inserting rants that distract from the narrative and do a worse job getting the point across. Let’s see what happens.

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For The Win by Cory Doctorow is another polemic novel, this time about economics and unions. Doctorow isn’t my favorite writer, but his stories are well paced and well written. There is rarely any confusion about who the characters are and what they are doing. But Doctorow has a habit of dropping in a chapter which reads like it came out of a textbook when he wants to introduce a topic. Unlike other books which work the school lesson into the plot, Doctorow just puts in a chapter which covers the topic and drops you out of the novel. So how was the economic text novel.

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Eastern Standard Tribe by Cory Doctorow is similar in tone to Little Brotheror Makers in that there is a bunch of cool ideas surrounded by a mediocre story. The book moves along fast and furiously, but at the end there isn’t much there. I did enjoy the book, but was left with a feeling that the book could have been done much better by a different writer.

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Little Brother by Cory Doctorow is part novel, part manifesto. It’s been called an updating of 1984 or a call to arms for openness in the digital world. But it’s mostly an above average novel, that is designed as a primer on internet technology and security systems. Doctorow is a big believer in these things and it shows through in his novel. The novel is aimed at a high school age audience and uses many pages to explain the whys and hows of the internet era.

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Makers by Cory Doctrow (author of Little Brotherand Eastern Standard Tribe and co-editor of the Boing Boing website) is almost a pre-history of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (exploring the history surrounding the creation of the Matter Compiler).  Or it’s a political screed on the virtues of free access to intellectual property.  But either way, it’s a quick fun read, although a generally mediocre book.

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