Я тут какое-то время назад обещал подобрать немного негативных отзывов о Little Brother Кори Доктороу. Наконец-то удалось насобирать цитат. В основном, конечно, книгу хвалят, потому отрицательных рецензий немного, но те, что есть, от моих любимых снобов-британцев, потому имеют тройной вес.
Little Brother? Part of me feels bad saying this, since Doctorow’s novel is in the fullest sense a righteous book—it contains a whole bunch of stuff that people, especially young people, really ought to know. And it’s been really successful, and a lot of young people are reading it, which is superb. And Doctorow is a lovely, lovely human being. But as a novel Little Brother is a mediocre piece of writing: stylistically dull; too formally stilted in execution; too monologic tonally. The novel’s drama is construed in a fatally one-sided a manner, with nothing to suggest why the bad guys do what they do apart from the fact that they are bad guys. The torture sequence at the end pulls it punches. Orwell’s Big-Bro bad guys are a thousand times nastier than anything here, no punches are pulled, and yet Orwell’s villains have a comprehensible, if repellent, rationale. It’s not good enough to say ‘but this is a YA novel’. The best YA novels are more than capable of covering all this stuff; and most young adults know the world is not a 2-D cartoon. I read Nineteen Eighty-Four when I was a teenager, for instance, like a great many people. I loved it. So Little Brother’s righteousness—and I’m not being snarky when I use that phrase—does not save it from being mediocre as a novel.
(Это вообще пост о Хьюго, там 147 комментариев, текст когда-то вызвал большой резонанс, так что читать полностью. Да и вообще всего Робертса надо читать.)
Мартин Льюис, reviews editor журнала Vector, да и вообще толковый критик (возможно, скоро про Vector напишу подробно):
Following a terrorist attack on San Francisco Marcus and his school friends try to resist the Department of Homeland Security occupation of their city. Little Brother is quite explicitly — technically and ideologically — a manual for this civil disobedience. You have to admire Doctorow for producing such a brazen work of propaganda aimed at children.
This does mean it isn't very satisfying as a novel though. In her review [info]fjm notes: «I have always regarded SF as a didactic literature and regarded that didacticism as a good thing.» I can't agree. In Little Brother the narrative always takes second place to instruction:
(did you know that it's really easy to fake the return number on a caller ID? There are about fifty ways of doing it -- just google «spoof caller id»).
There are dozens and dozens of chunks like that and not just on security issues but geek arcana like LARPing. It is less a novel than an entertaining lecture on Doctorow's prejudices
Plotwise things are broken early on when Marcus decides to keep the fact he has been kidnapped and interrogated by the DHS secret because then reality would intrude on Doctorow's rebellion plot. The politics are fairly cartoonish and the characterisation pretty light (Marcus's dad — the voice of unconcerned America — in particularly.) And in the end the good guys win by being smart and right and having a journalist on their side. It is a curiously old fashioned, even naive, conclusion.
Нил Харрисон, reviews editor журнала Strange Horizons, редактор журнала Vector, блогер (вдумчивый, но слишком словоохотливый критик, в отличие от Льюиса коротко написать вообще не способен):
So if it’s too didactic and infodumping to appeal to me through the politics and ideas, what about the rest of the story? Here it fares a little better – Marcus is likeable enough if a little too competent at everything he does, and his dilemmas at whether his tactics are causing as much trouble and harm as those of his opponents ring true. I could have done without the revelation that Marcus’s long-time female friend turns out to have feelings for him, especially when I was pleased that they’d managed to do the “hey, my nerdy female friend has grown up and become h4wt!” scene without it turning into a relationship. Marcus’s actual romantic interest is smart and geeky and cool, and basically a female Marcus but I can live with that. There are some neat ideas which have small but important twists on our world – using Livejournal quizzes as an information-gathering tool, the revolution will take places on X-Boxes running Linux, using flashmobs to cause a distraction in the real world. The writing is straightforward and functional, which mostly works – it falls short of conveying the terror of Marcus’s capture by Homeland Security early in the book, but the later scenes (I’m thinking of when Marcus meets Darryl’s father) work better.
Я скорее на стороне снобов.