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This is the second and final week of "The Attack Surface lectures," a series of 8 bookstore hosted virtual events exploring themes in the third Little Brother book, Attack Surface.
https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-doctorow-virtual-lecture-series/
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https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-doctorow-virtual-lecture-series/
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On Weds, Oct 21, the theme is "Little Revolutions," AKA writing radical fiction for kids, with guests @TochiTrueStory and @BCMorrow; you see, Little Brother and its sequel, Homeland, were young adult novels, while Attack Surface is a novel for adults.
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That fact, and the upcoming event, have me thinking about the difference between fiction for teens and for adults. @Litquake were kind enough to publish my working-through of this thinking in a new essay called "Kids Use Reason, Adults Rationalize."
https://lithub.com/cory-doctorow-kids-use-reason-adults-rationalize/
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https://lithub.com/cory-doctorow-kids-use-reason-adults-rationalize/
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I can pinpoint the exact moment I decided to write for teens: it was when @KatheKoja - herself an accomplished writer in multiple genres - guest-lectured at a Clarion writing workshop I was teaching.
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Koja described how, on school visits, kids would argue passionately with her about her books, and how this wasn't rudeness - it was respect. The kids weren't reading her books as mere distractions; they were treating them as possible roadmaps to a complex and difficult world.
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Before then, I was with @StevenBrust: "Telling someone they wrote a bad book is like telling them they've got an ugly kid. Even if it's true, it's too late to do anything about it now, and anyway, they did everything they could to prevent it."
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But Koja convinced me that when it came to teens, an exception was warranted. Little Brother and Homeland were, in effect, bets on that proposition. The bets paid off: countless now-adult readers have approached me to tell me how those books shaped their worldview.
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Some became activists or cryptographers or hackers or tech workers, but even the readers who DIDN'T go into tech tell me that the books made them aware of both the liberatory power of technology, and its power to oppress, and the importance of taking a side in that fight.
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Spending a decade+ in contact with young readers has changed my worldview, too. It's made me realize that while the power to reason is often present in very young people, the context - the stuff to reason ABOUT - takes time to accumulate.
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There are some disciplines that lean heavily on reasoning and have relatively little context: math, computer science, chess. Learn some basic principles, apply your reasoning, and you can build up towering edifaces of work and expertise.
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Other disciplines - law, medicine, history - simply require so much KNOWLEDGE as well as reason that just packing in the reading takes years and years, no matter how good you are at reasoning. That's why there are child chess prodigies but not child history prodigies.
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Fiction is part of that context-acquisition process.
The realization that adults don't have a monopoly on reason has a corollary: kids don't have a monopoly on failures of reason.
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The realization that adults don't have a monopoly on reason has a corollary: kids don't have a monopoly on failures of reason.
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Indeed, there is a distinctive form of failure-to-reason endemic to adulthood: long-term rationalization, the process by which one makes a series of small compromises, one at a time, that add up to a catastrophic moral failure.
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That's the crux of ATTACK SURFACE, whose protagonist, Masha, is having a moral reckoning with a career spent in mass surveillance technology - a career she has managed to square with her moral sensibilities through careful rationalization and compartmentalization.
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My bet in this book is that adults who feel hopeless and nihilistic about the future will find a new kind of story: one in which the unitary hero whose personal actions save the world is replaced with a narrative of mass movements, political will, and collective action.
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Rebuilding our digital infrastructure for human liberation is a vast task, but it's only a step on the road to a far larger and more urgent task: rebuilding our physical world and its energy and infrastructure to survive and address the climate emergency.
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"The climate emergency demands a moonshot, but the moonshot wasn’t undertaken by science heroes working in their solitary labs: Neil Armstrong walked on the moon because of the collective, state-sponsored efforts of millions of people.
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"If we hadn’t gotten to the Moon, the fault would have been with the system, not with Armstrong’s failure to build a rocket ship."
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