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Cory Doctorow's 2008 YA novel arrived at a moment when post-9/11 surveillance anxieties were hardening into policy, and nearly two decades later it still reads less like a cautionary future and more like a reasonably accurate recap. Seventeen-year-old Marcus Yallow, who hacks his high school's monitoring systems for sport under the handle w1n5t0n, is swept up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge, detained without charge by the Department of Homeland Security, interrogated, and eventually released into a San Francisco that has been quietly converted into a panopticon. The novel is his counter-insurgency, waged with cryptography, Xboxes, and teenage stubbornness.

What Doctorow does astonishingly well is make the plumbing of dissent exciting. Public-key encryption, RFID cloning, gait-recognition countermeasures, onion routing - the book treats these as adventure-story apparatus rather than lecture material, and the technology is, with one or two near-future exceptions, entirely real. The plotting is taut, the San Francisco geography is vivid and specific, and the moral questions at the centre of the book - how much privacy you should trade for how much safety, and who gets to decide - are posed with unusual clarity for a novel pitched at teenagers. The conclusion is satisfying without being tidy, and the pacing rarely slackens.

The flaws are the flaws of advocacy fiction, and they are real. Marcus too often stops being a character and becomes a lectern; entire paragraphs of Jeffersonian rhetoric sit awkwardly inside a seventeen-year-old's mouth. The voice can feel like an adult's impression of how teenagers talk rather than how they actually do, and the wisecracking register sometimes undercuts the gravity of the events on the page. The moral palette is aggressively two-tone: Marcus and his allies are principled and competent, the security state is populated almost entirely by thugs, and the genuinely difficult arguments about liberty versus security are mostly voiced by straw opponents who exist to be demolished. Readers who already agree with Doctorow's politics may not mind; readers who want the case stress-tested will notice.

It is, in other words, more polemic than literary novel, and it knows it. That honesty is part of its appeal. The didacticism is not a bug Doctorow is trying to disguise but the engine driving the whole project, and the book's real ambition is less to tell a perfect story than to radicalise its readers into learning Linux, reading Bruce Schneier, and asking harder questions of the authorities around them. On that measure it succeeds remarkably; it has put more young people onto encryption tools and civil liberties organisations than almost any other work of fiction from the period.

As a character study or a piece of prose craftsmanship, Little Brother is uneven. As a gateway drug into cyberpunk, a primer on the mechanics of a surveillance society, and a genuinely gripping thriller about a teenager outthinking the state, it has aged into something close to essential. Recommended, with eyes open.