My introduction to Doctorow came through his speculative adult fiction publications For the Win and the four excellent short stories in Radicalized, and I really appreciated the vision, tone, and maturity of his style. I picked up this double-dip into the world of Marcus Yallow to follow up with Doctorow's other popular work, but it didn't hit me in the same way. Naturally, it's mostly because Little Brother and Homeland are written for young adults and both carry a different pace and style altogether. But while it's rougher and plainer prose, it's also more diluted, less detailed or even careful, harder to swallow, and – playing the biggest part in my disappointment – features way too much Cory Doctorow in the larger story.

Both books are obviously based upon many of the author's personal experiences in tech, security, and maker culture during the cresting of the San Francisco Otaku scene in the late 1990s, and Homeland is particularly rife with it to the point of being precious in a self-referential, Scalzi-like manner. Half of the second book is an advertisement for Burning Man and Noisebridge, and I'm honestly shocked at the amount of space he spends explaining how cool it is to participate in what I've come to consider to be pretty nauseatingly self-important communities. I was likewise annoyed by the main character's repeated and unnecessary proselytizing of coffee snobbery and his obsession with Wil Wheaton, both of which are obvious idiosyncrasies of the author, added to all of the other SF techbro tropes that I actually lived through quite intimately in precisely the same space. This all comes off like a personal Doctorow manifesto about what all young people should be doing to be considered cool, and then they can eventually save society with that newfound jurisdiction.

It's perfectly okay that these books weren't for me and I'm totally clear that my personal experiences play a part in this reaction. I'm confident that if I'd read them as a younger person on the search for meaning and community and a subversive (Cory says it's righteous) cause, I'd have been all over them. In a way, that's concerning, because I don't think Marcus Yallow is much of a hero, and therefore not a great role model for young adults to be emulating, like Doctorow and his guest writers urge readers to do in both the foreword and afterword. Yallow is really not much more than an intellectually brilliant but remarkably petulant and self-involved, generally unlikeable adolescent who dreams himself into an epic of public heroism that nobody over the age of twenty-five can possibly understand or achieve. Casting binary tropes in this way runs the danger of broadening the generation gap at a time when power appears to be more equitable to youthful hackers flying drones, organizing flash-mobs, and trading sensitive information on the darknet. Meanwhile, the wizened politicians are raising the stakes of what constitutes real power, and we all continue to be thralls to that system. Burning Man won't save us from it.

I'm down with Snowden and Swartz (RIP), but Yallow and, through him, Doctorow, isn't really speaking truth to power with this brand of youthful rebellion. He's only partitioning it. Yet I'm all aboard to continue exploring Cory's other speculative fiction in the hopes that, like with his brilliant vignettes in Radicalized, he leads with less of his personal Hipster ethos. ( )