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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/
1/">https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/...
https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/cory-doctorow-virtual-lecture-series/
1/">https://read.macmillan.com/torforge/...
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/
3/">https://lithub.com/cory-doct...
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& #39;t rudeness - it was respect. The kids weren& #39;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& #39;ve got an ugly kid. Even if it& #39;s true, it& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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& #39;t have a monopoly on reason has a corollary: kids don& #39;t have a monopoly on failures of reason.
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The realization that adults don& #39;t have a monopoly on reason has a corollary: kids don& #39;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& #39;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& #39;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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