Thomcat
4/26/2013
Reread, longer review. Great story and reaction, but the technology explanations sometimes get in the way. This 15 year old work only loses relevance with the ubiquity of smart phones.
I read this first in 2013, 5 years after it was released. Now 10 years after that, my rating is unchanged. Marcus is a solid character, if a little short sighted. This allows Doctorow to explore both an idea and its drawbacks. Privacy and freedom are the key focus of the novel. The original attack is a MacGuffin - excusing the abuses while never resolved.
Still a lot of parallels to present day, where we continue to give up freedoms for the "enemy" - though terrorists have mostly been replaced with immigrants and pandemics. Bruce Schneier makes an excellent point in the afterword - "Trading privacy for security is stupid enough; not getting any actual security in the bargain is even more stupid."
The first sequel was published five years later, 2013. I read it in 2016, and am not sure I will reread. There are a few Tor short stories connected with this, and a more recent sequel of sorts, Attack Surface, published in 2020. This is being marketed as a standalone, so it is probably here I will dive in next.
2013:
A quick enjoyable read; the technology was very accurate.