Feed vs. Little Brother: The Same, Only Different

Selecting books to teach in a college level young adult literature class is always a negotiation. Required reading should be race, class, and gender equitable; represent the old and the new; and engender the kinds of critical, analytical discussions appropriate for a literature class. With this balance in mind, even smart, interesting pieces of young adult literature can miss the cut semester after semester. This was the case for me with Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother, a teen-populated nod to Orwell’s 1984.

The content and style of Little Brother would fit perfectly in a class like mine. It is a science fiction novel about a young man coming of age in a technologically saturated, panoptic society that no longer protects—or trusts—autonomy and individualism. The more the young man recognizes the control technology has on everything from emotions and opinions to life and death, the more he fights the system that works to confine him. The more he fights, the more he becomes disillusioned: Is it too late? Are we too invested in technology to think for ourselves? At its core, Doctorow’s novel attends to the ways in which society itself creates the complicated narratives surrounding teens and it asks citizens to be more critical of and thoughtful about the world around them. Through the novel’s implicit warning, the imagined reader—the savvy Generation Y’er, raised to accept technology as a natural part of life—is invited to re-evaluate the current moment through the framework of the protagonist’s world. But while these issues are important to include, I already have a go-to novel that does all of these things: M.T. Anderson’s Feed, a science fiction novel about a young man coming of age in a technologically saturated, panoptic society that no longer protects . . . you get the picture.

At first glance, the two books serve too similar ends to both be included in one class. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized just how different the two books are. In Ideology and the Children’s Book, Peter Hollindale notes that in all texts there exist—sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory—surface and passive ideologies. Surface ideologies are the values and ideas that the author has attended to that the reader is supposed to understand (plot, theme, and lessons, for example). The passive ideologies are equally present, but are left unexamined by the author and easily ignored by the uncritical reader.

The surface ideologies of Little Brother and Feed would suggest that the two are very similar texts, but passively the two books speak to similar topics in fundamentally different ways. While both authors work from the premise that technology can be productive or destructive, Doctorow does not long for a time when we did not have technology. Instead, he considers how technology can corrupt, but how it can liberate, too, and it is technology-savvy teens who are the heroes of the story. Anderson’s “connected” teens are almost entirely vapid. Feed ends with the repeated sentiment, “Everything must go” (300), as if to say that starting from scratch is the only answer. While Anderson longs for a time without technology, Doctorow endeavors to promote a critical eye toward our technology-centered society.

Next semester I will teach both books in one class because central to building a critical toolbox is seeing beyond the surface of a text to the passive ideologies that inform it just as powerfully. When students can unpack the ideologies of a text, they are on their way to a more critical way of reading the rest of their world, literary and mediated alike.