The f2f Sci-Fi book discussion group at Politics and Prose met this last week. The book was "Little Brother" by Cory Doctorow. It's a young adult book. A San Francisco high school student and his friends, skipping school to follow the next clue in an internet treasure search, are caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Terrorists have just blown up the Bay Bridge, and they are scooped up in a Homeland Security dragnet, held and interrogated. On release, the protagonist finds that a semi-police state has taken over. He vows to fight this by means of his computer skills.
It's a good job, suspenseful, and with lots to say about personal freedom and privacy and the idiocy of collecting too much data about people to analyze properly.
It amuses me to see how I fit into this group. Most of them are totally wired, reading a lot of their stuff online. Some of them are quite young, capable of laughing about the details Doctorow got wrong about teenagers in SF in 2008. There are some older people, and a few middle-aged and even grey-haired, but I'm by far the oldest. But they treat me as an equal, and take me seriously. They're pretty thoughtful people, too, and widely read.
