Attack Surface is the third in a loose trilogy that started with Little Brother. I’ve only read the first, Homeland passed me by. Attack Surface was readable and it stood well on its own as a story. Like the others, Attack Surface is a cautionary tale on how technology is being misused.
Attack Surface

The protagonist is Masha, a tech savvy woman from the bay area. She sold out and joined the DHS in Little Brother. Since then she’s worked for private contractors providing surveillance know-how for governments. When we first meet her she’s working both ends in Slovstakia, a semi-fictional former Soviet satellite state with a repressive regime. Her employer is giving the government technology to spy on its protesting citizens. Masha has adopted some of the protestors to assuage her conscience.

Attack Surface is part morality tale, and part horrible warning. Most of what we see in the story is very real, although perhaps not quite happening in the way that it’s presented. At least I think we’d like to hope not. Masha ends up back in the US. She gets caught up fighting her former employers as they spy on Black Lives Matter organisers and anyone that comes into contact with them.

Worth reading
Overall the book gripped me strongly. There was a great story that I just wanted to keep reading, with plenty of twists and turns to keep me guessing a bit. The only reason it didn’t quite rate five stars was there were a number of fairly noticeable information dumps in the earlier parts of the story. While I get that a technology driven story needs readers to understand some of the detail, it got in the way for me. It was noticeable in the afterword that Cory Doctorow shed 40k words in the edit. That suggests perhaps these were the more necessary explanations. However I’d rather have footnotes I could dip into if I didn’t understand.

I gave this book a quick try, and ultimately decided to DNF -- my tastes have changed since I requested this. Many thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book!

Attack Surface is timely and important. As someone who uses tech but doesn’t know cryptography or how mass surveillance works, this was an eye-opining, often uncomfortable read. I actually paused twice while reading this to delete old apps from my phone and check privacy settings.
I hadn’t read the previous Little Brother novels, so the characters were new to me. I liked Masha, though she didn’t feel like any woman that I knew, she seemed to have no inner life, which is unusual. I also felt that the novel was too easy of Masha becoming rich off of enabling dictators to ruin people’s lives. Sure, she feels a bit bad about that by the end of the novel, but she should really feel much worse. The ‘if I’m not enabling them then someone else will’ argument is weak, and even if Masha recognises in the end I wanted more acknowledgement that her behaviour was monstrous, even if her bosses were more so.

While Attack Surface ultimately is a hopeful look at how hacktivists can use protest to push back against mass surveillance, the novel has a huge blind spot. The characters in the novel talk about how protest against mass surveillance has resulted in laws to curb the use of surveillance, and acts as if that is the end game. In reality, the creation of thoughtful, evidence-based law that enhances freedom and privacy requires a politics and political apparatus that values those outcomes.

In order to ensure those outcomes, the public need to be fully engaged with representative democracy at all levels, voting in every election (local and national), responding thoughtfully to public consultations on new policy and critically evaluating proposals. To get us to a better politics, the public will also often be called on to make suboptimal choices between two candidates that are imperfect. That many people disengage from politics when their progressive candidate fails to achieve nomination/election is part of the problem.

I know that Cory is actually excellent at critiquing policy ideas, particularly his thoughtful ideas on how more rigorous use of competition law would be a better way of regulating the internet than laws that potentially restrict what can be freely published on the net. So I was just a bit disappointed that Attack Surface doesn’t detail how important it is to engage with the administration of politics and policy ideas.

This is the first Cory Doctorow book I have read and entered on a fast paced journey into geekdom. I love the style of writing (slightly irreverent) and the premise that the main character Masha works for a cybersecurity company who contract services to some very dodgy targeted surveillance for governments of any stripe. She likes to stir the pot by helping dissidents in countries to work around the surveillance and enlighten them on how to protect themselves from detection.
I enjoyed the storyline however I did miss out the tech nuances which if you are that way inclined would provide added depth and glee to your read. I have learnt more about the various ways our privacy is invaded and how much data I put out there – it really is Big Brother come to life.
Talking of nuances I missed the relevance of the title Attack Surface and was clued in by my personal tech support guru:
“The attack surface of a software environment is the sum of the different points (for "attack vectors") where an unauthorized user (the "attacker") can try to enter data to or extract data from an environment. Keeping the attack surface as small as possible is a basic security measure.
This title encompasses the premise of the book. I would definitely read more by this author and I feel I will learn something in the process.
Thanks to Netgalley and Head of Zeus for the ARC.

Attack Surface: “The sum of the different points where an unauthorized user (the “attacker”) can try to enter data to or extract data from an environment. Keeping the attack surface as small as possible is a basic security measure.” (Wikipedia)

In today’s world of cyberterrorism and technology, in terms of ‘freedom of information’ and human rights, I think that you pretty much know where Cory Doctorow these days.

Just in case you didn’t, this one confirms where the author stands before you even start the book – in Attack Surface’s dedication Cory lists a number of ‘whistleblowers’ “who listened to the voice of their conscience and spoke the truth” and finishes with “especially Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered for doing her job.”

This is one of those stories about someone who works under the radar. Masha Maximow initially works as a counterterrorism expert for a transnational cybersecurity firm named Xoth Intelligence, whose work is mainly creating hacks for organisations and governments to monitor dissidents in faraway police states. It’s complicated, requires skill and pays very well.

In her spare time, Masha works almost as a double agent, helping those same dissidents, whose causes she feels are just, to evade detection. For the thrills, the excitement, the danger – and to severely annoy her bosses.

When she is involved in a street riot in Slovstakia (where she has been helping local protestors against a dictatorship), Masha quickly finds herself without a job and having to go on the run.

She ends up working for Zyz, a military intelligence contractor who used to be the opposition but is now working covertly for the US military, and now finds herself in places such as Iraq and Mexico City secretly developing software that is used to covertly spy on those others feel need watching. Throughout all of this, the sassy (and rather sweary) Masha is monitored and promoted by her mentor Carrie Johnstone, a boss who is never far away from the centre of what is going on.

Whilst Masha finds herself travelling in luxury from military camp to military camp, enjoying a fast-paced life of parties, alcohol and sex, as well as repeatedly telling us that she is very well paid, she also now finds herself being passed information from people in the CIA who risk everything to do so in the hope that one day she will be able to make the information public – evidence of government torture, covert ops, rape and murder.

More worryingly, Misha finds that some of the work she has been developing is used against her friends and family. To add to Misha’s woes, back home, her lifelong friend Tanisha is involved in a Black Lives Matter type protest group named Black-Brown Alliance. Masha offers to help Tanisha despite being told by Johnstone that that Tanisha’s group may be (unbeknownst to her) partly supported by the Russians. Masha continues to help her friend, as part of her doing what is right, and this puts them all in danger.

Much of the final part of the novel finds Masha juggling so many different and at times conflicting elements where any mistake could have consequences for all involved. It also shows her wrestling with her conscience, making choices where no answer is easy and realising that her decisions affect others that know her.



As expected, Attack Surface is detailed with current cybertech terminology and vocabulary, a state of the art, super-contemporary novel of what may be happening now. As I type this, I’m looking at news headlines about Belarus, where a recent election have led to people protesting on the street. At the same time, various governments around the world have accused other countries of meddling with their previous political elections. This book could take place in any of them.

It helps that the book is filled with the sort of high-density ultra-smart dialogue that you’d expect cyberhackers to talk about. Cory clearly knows his stuff, and this adds a convincingly realistic feel to the context of the plot. Here’s a typical example:

“Second, make sure your IMSI-catcher countermeasures are up to date. They just bought an update package for their fake cell towers and they’ll be capturing the unique IDs of every phone that answers a ping from them. The app your phone used last week to tell a fake tower from a real one? Useless now. Update, update, update. Check every signature, too.”

I’m not particularly technical, but it could be intimidating for some readers. However, Cory does enough to explain such terms to even allow non-Internet dweebs like me to follow what’s going on.

It’s also a whip-smart techno-thriller, engagingly told with humour and some degree of peril for the characters. Masha is a complexly intelligent and endearingly sweary character who makes choices and finds her moral compass being subverted by what she is asked to do, to the point where she almost becomes amoral. I realised that I shouldn’t like what she does, and yet liked her enough to be interested in reading what happens to her, and how the plot plays out. In the end her choices, good or bad, affect lives.



For those who want a story that feels real, and that could be happening now, with enough technical detail to make what happens sound plausible, Attack Surface is a cracking read, even if a little scary. The three (yes, three!) afterwords – one by the founder and director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, one by someone who works in cybersecurity (and who could be a template for Masha) and Cory himself give a valuable background to the context of the novel.

However, if the idea of this is to reassure you at the end of the novel that it is just fiction, it doesn’t work! Even if you weren’t worried about the amount of reliance we all seem to have in our gadgets, this book might just make you think again. Never mind phones, I’m off to turn off my Kindle and Alexa now….

Taking us back to his Little Doctor and Homeland series, Doctorow has produced a near-future novel of scarily astute possibilities. Written from the point of view of a SIGINT specialist with a compartmentalised conscience whose day job is to help corrupt regimes set up spyware and analysis tools to infiltrate and stop any uprisings, protests or activists any way they deem necessary. Her “evening” job is to try to educate said activists into protecting themselves against such data breaches. Ironically, considering it’s a very strong female cast, there is a huge amount of mansplaining involving an array of data security subjects such as cryptography and binary transparency.
This is a book that makes you think twice about the technology you use and how it can so easily be used against you now, never mind in the future. An eye-opener.

I haven’t read Little Brother and Homeland – though given they are set in the same world and Marcus Yallow makes more than a walk-on appearance in this story, I’m going to track them down. But that didn’t prevent me from thoroughly enjoying this thought-provoking read about some of the consequences caused by our love of social media and mobile technology. And exactly how repressive regimes can use this technology to keep their population under their boots…

Masha is a smart, edgy protagonist whose brilliance has led her into working for some murky organisations. I love the fact that she isn’t presented as some helpless, bewildered victim who has been coerced into making her dodgy decisions, but realises all too well that what she is doing has bad consequences. I also enjoyed her pride in the money she’s making and the status she’s accrued – after all that is the American dream, right? Her mother struggled all her life to provide sufficient money to educate her clever daughter, so it’s not surprising Masha highly values her wealth and the ability to buy the best. It makes her struggles with her conscience more plausible and visceral – and snagged my sympathy far more effectively than if she’d somehow been bamboozled into putting her brilliance to work for people who are now not on the side of the angels. Though given that this is aimed at the YA market, I’m intrigued to see how this plays out with that age-group, given that teens tend to see things as more black and white.

As for the technology – inevitably there needs to be a fair amount of explanation about what some of the programs Masha is dealing with can do. I’m guessing that youngsters probably won’t have to flog their brains into following said explanations as hard as I did, because they’ve been born into this world. However, I didn’t find it unduly hard to follow what was going on and neither was it a problem – because it was far too chillingly plausible and made for instructive reading.

Science fiction can provide the escapist fun of the far future, but it can also sound warnings about where we’re headed and provide scenarios to show the consequences of what will happen if we don’t change our ways. Cli-fi has been doing this for years. This is another of those books that shows how technology designed for our convenience and ease of communication can be put to far darker use. More imaginatively though, Doctorow also provides a solution to the problems he raises and this book ends on an inspirational, upbeat note that left me feeling empowered and slightly buzzed. This would be an excellent book to be studied in schools, as it raises all sorts of issues our youngsters will be grappling with for years to come – as well as suggesting how they should be dealt with.

Highly recommended for fans of thought-provoking, near future sci fi – though do be aware that Doctorow’s politics and views won’t be for everyone. While I obtained an arc of Attack Surface from the publisher via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
9/10

Masha Maximow is a hacker in the employ of Xoth Intelligence, an InfoSec company that sells its services to the highest bidder. The novel opens with her posted to the fictional country of "Slovstakia" (which could be any number ex-soviet republics, perhaps one of the Stans in Central Asia, or an Eastern European or Baltic nation) where she helps its corrupt government with surveillance tech to crackdown on pro-democracy protesters. She has a conscience though and has befriended some of the protestors on the side to try and help them, but her efforts are no match for Zoth and the day job.

After her employers discover her moonlighting and she’s fired, she returns to the United States where she rejoins childhood friends who are protesting against oppressive policing in California. Here a previous employer, Zyz, forces her to work for them to suppress the protestors. Through chapters that flashback we learn how Maximow was first employed by Zyz to work in Iraq using her hacking and surveillance tech against insurgents. She was then recruited by Zoth. We learn too, of all the compromises that she has made down the years.

This is the third book in a loose trilogy (though it stands alone, and you don’t have to have read the previous titles to read this), each focusing on tech and oppression, and on the protestors who try to fight it. It’s marketed as science fiction/speculative fiction, but it’s very much near-sci-fi; in fact, I think the genre is misleading, much of what’s included in the book is already current as any reading of the Snowden revelations would reveal.

This is a book that is very heavy on the technical detail, however, and the author is keen to show exactly how realistic the events he depicts are. Unfortunately, I thought this dense knowledge was too much and the book often got bogged down under the weight of it. The book felt far too long as well, the author cramming much too much in one title.

That all said, I was never tempted to stop reading and this is a compelling story with an interesting character arc. It will also have the reader never looking at their phone in the same light. We all know that smartphones can be used to track us, and Attack Surface really brings this home. It also proves the lie to those who say “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” and those who believe that the loss of privacy that social media has ushered in is no big thing.

3 out of 5 stars

I don’t know if this is a dystopia technological thriller or a fictionalise depiction of the world we’re living in, I just know it’s a very interesting and quite terrifying story. It’s hard to read and think “this is fiction” and assume you are reading about a parallel world where technology is used as a mean to control people behaviour and to repress dissent.
I work in high tech and I know what are the technologies being developed or already existing. All the technologies in this book are already existing and some cases when they were used to control political opponents appeared on papers in recent times.
But this is also the story of Masha, of her friend and of hope that comes from people joining forces and fighting for a better world.
Masha isn’t a likeable character and I found hard to warm up to her. She works for security companies that use the technology to monitor people. She’s an excellent technician but she’s also a damage person who must compartmentalize her life in order to survive.
I met some people like her, people who work to develop technologies that can be in a moral grey area. It’s not hard to see how they are considering their activities as business as usual and avoiding to reflect on the moral implication.
Even if I think it’s a bit unreal that a highly specialised tech guy have a Damascus moment and decides to take side with the good guy it was also a moment I loved because it was hope in quite bleak story.
There are good guys and there are bad guys in this story. At the end of the day all the main characters are women. They are brave and they fight and even Masha, who is morally grey, is able to change and grow.
The technical aspect is interesting and Doctorow did an excellent job in explaining the different technologies and helping people to understand what are the implications and how they can be used.
The plot is quite gripping even if it drags sometimes. It’s not heartwarming and I’m still quite terrified by what I read. I’m a bit paranoid about connected devices and this story did affected me as it made me wish to go back to a very simple phone with no internet connection.
There’s hope at the end to this story but there’s also the message that the power can affect the persons and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I don’t know if my review is logical or what else, I just know that this book should be read by a lot of persons as we need to know how technologies can be used to manipulate and control us.
I strongly recommend it because, even if it’s not a perfect book, it’s important to know.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine

If you're interested in technology, specifically cybersecurity, internet privacy, and/or technological surveillance, then I have a feeling that this may be a good book for you!

Masha Maximow is a computer hacker employed by the government to spy on non-conformists and dissidents. However, what her employers don't realize, is that Masha also aids the people she spies on by ensuring that they remain hidden from the very surveillance that she is hired to do. Things become even trickier when these systems start targeting her friends, forcing Masha into choosing a side.

Now, I went into this not realizing that it was the third book in a series, but it honestly didn't hinder the experience. There were a few conversations that would have probably made more sense had I read the other books, but this was only minor. I loved the tech aspects that were discussed in the story and thought that the messages of this book were very strong and timely given the state of current global affairs. Tech lovers will love this, and it really does raise some crucial questions with regards to data privacy. The timeline jumps around quite a bit and, while this doesn't usually bother me, I just wish that these jumps were made a bit clearer as it got a tad confusing at times. I thought that the final 25% was fantastic. The story really came together and I found myself unable to put the book down! Had the remainder of the book been paced like that final quarter then I think I would've enjoyed it more!

This may not be a book for everyone, but I encourage lovers of technology and/or sci-fi to give it a shot!

Many thanks to the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I read this for a blog tour.

This feels like a very prescient novel, with its protests and dodgy tech companies and complicit governments. It feels very 2020 minus the virus that's killing people and the fact that governments are no longer pretending to care about people more than money.

Masha has been building spyware and surveillance for tech companies to sell to dangerous and unstable governments, to watch their own citizens and turn righteous anger at injustice into terrorism charges and making people just disappear.

She becomes steadily disillusioned by this and realises she's on the wrong side of history and what's right.

I don't even pretend to understand how some very clever people can do all these things with computers, but I can see that there needs to be more checks and balances in place. Things need to be more transparent and honest, governments should remember they work for the people, not against them.

While this is taken to extremes in the book, some of the scenes of police brutality we've all witnessed in the last few years, and especially the last few months, aren't far off the grim future Masha and her friends are living through and trying to fight against.

Incredibly powerful, insightful, and actually quite funny, this is very much a book that speaks to our times and reminds us all to pay attention.

If you’re at all familiar with Cory Doctorow, it’s probably through his writing for websites like Boing Boing, where he tackles issues on cybersecurity, privacy on the internet and the importance of transparency for corporations and government agencies (amongst, I’m sure, many other topics). If you’re a bigger SF/F fan, then at the very least you would have read some of his novels, all of which tend to deal with very similar topics as his articles, set in a near-future world that seems closer every day.

Attack Surface is no different. Billed as a sequel to his previous novels Little Brother and Homeland (neither of which I’ve read but I might own on my Kindle), it follows the story of Masha Maximow (who I understand is actually a side character in a previous novel), a programmer who works for a corporation selling surveillance software to autocratic regimes. However, by night, she tries to help those same dissidents avoid the very surveillance systems that she programmes.

Doing this in regimes where she has little loyalty for either side is fun, and the pay is obscene. But when the targets are closer to home, when the noose starts to tighten around the very people that Masha cares about, she is confronted with the need to make a choice. Unfortunately for Masha, it’s not a choice without consequences.

The first thing that really threw up about Attack Surface is how much technical jargon there is. Now I should give credit to Doctorow here, because he does really explain all the concepts and never really falls into the trap of overexplaining and infodumping on the reader. Masha’s voice feels at times pedantic in these explanations, but it works because she is a pedant when it comes to technology and opsec. So it makes sense and I actually didn’t mind; if anything, it provided me with a lot of context for both Doctorow’s politics and if anything, it really taught me a lot about how easy it is for any malicious actors (or even garden variety crooks) to get access to devices. Not least of all because people are really poor about their security and people are lazy and trustworthy - they believe they will never be on the receiving end of the government’s surveillance and control.

Masha herself is an interesting character: she’s upfront about the fact that she’s doing the work for the money and it makes for a far more conflicted and interesting dynamic. She’s not perfect by any means (nor does she pretend to be), but it humanises her in a way that you don’t see a lot of in SF/F books, or at least not for female characters. She fucks up, she makes mistakes, she makes poor choices and she can be brutal in her assessments of what is and is not achievable. I really empathised with her and she straddles the line of paranoia and being right with ease. The two timelines, one where we learn about her career, and the other set in the “present”, where she needs to make her choices, make for very interesting reading, at times veering near the breakneck speed you’d expect of a cyber thriller.

I understand that Little Brother was more young adult, but if that’s the case then Attack Surface very much is not. It’s an adult novel, dealing with issues that are happening to us right now, and Doctorow clearly believes that it’s up to all of us to push back against this intrusion into our privacy, that we can and should keep these corporations and governments accountable at every step, that we should continue building communities and lifting up those without as much social and political capital in the fight against capitalism, white supremacy and fascism.

This is not just a novel about the future, this is a novel about the now and I urge you all to read it.

Doctorow’s Attack Surface is a striking, scary insight into a never-far-removed-from-our-current-dystopia dystopia. A thriller at its heart but with a message that was strong, educational at times, and urgent, Attack Surface felt like an important read that played with the boundaries of fiction.
It’s an interesting book, and the characters—especially Masha—are multifaceted, imperfect, and all the more believable for it. There’s parts that hit heavy on the infodump (I felt like I learned a lot tech-wise), but for the most part these sections serve to enhance the importance of considering technology and how we interact with it and the sacrifices we (perhaps unwittingly) make for its uses.
Attack Surface is a great read that prompts you to consider the digital world we live in, and the nature with which these tools may be used.

Disclaimer: I would like to thank the publisher, Head of Zeus, for providing an advanced review copy of this book.

Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow adroitly plays three roles: First is a very entertaining international techno-spy-thriller with quite believable characters. Second, it is an educational primer on actual information security that any member of modern society who cares about privacy should understand. Third, it is philosophical discussion of the social and political implications of technology and social change. Above all it is an exciting and thought provoking novel.

Readers that enjoy authors like Neal Stephenson and Charles Stross will find Attack Surface enjoyable. Though, these readers are probably already reading everything that Cory Doctorow publishes. As a technologist who has done time as an international road warrior, I definitely appreciated the well described details about working in the high tech field, especially the parts I have not encountered, as I have no experience as a spy. The philosophical warnings of authoritarian and corrupt governments is extremely relevant now. It gives the thoughtful reader an opportunity to contemplate what kind of society and government is desirable, as well as the benefits and risks of using technology to achieve these goals. This book is certainly an excellent addition to the "Little Brother" series.

Cory Doctorow's Attack Surface is a standalone novel set in the world of New York Times bestsellers Little Brother and Homeland. Most days, Masha Maximow was sure she'd chosen the winning side. In her day job as a counterterrorism wizard for a transnational cybersecurity firm, she made the hacks that allowed repressive regimes to spy on dissidents, and manipulate their every move. The perks were fantastic, and the pay was obscene. Just for fun, and to piss off her masters, Masha sometimes used her mad skills to help those same troublemakers evade detection, if their cause was just. It was a dangerous game and a hell of a rush. But seriously self-destructive. And unsustainable. When her targets were strangers in faraway police states, it was easy to compartmentalize, to ignore the collateral damage of murder, rape, and torture. But when it hits close to home, and the hacks and exploits she’s devised are directed at her friends and family--including boy wonder Marcus Yallow, her old crush and archrival, and his entourage of naïve idealists--Masha realizes she has to choose. And whatever choice she makes, someone is going to get hurt.

This is a speculative science fiction novel set in the near future and a time not too different from our own. Doctorow draws on what were once conspiracy theories about surveillance capitalism and data as a commodity but that now are known to be true. He introduces us to the idea of companies using technology to collect our data before storing it away to use in the future, something which is very much happening right now with the likes of Facebook and Google. I wondered whether it was a slightly more dystopian world or, the more likely thought, it is representative of our direction but has been pushed to the limits here that it could quite possibly reach in reality without the right checks and balances in place to stop companies abusing their power. A timely, fascinating and compulsive read, Doctorow’s plots always challenge you to remove the rose-tinted spectacles and see people, big tech and our internet obsession as having potentially negative consequences as well as positive. Compelling, accessible with a memorable cast, this is well worth your time. Many thanks to Ad Astra for an ARC.

I am not someone that goes in for Conspiracy Theories, I just don’t have the energy for them. Take for example the idea that nanobots are being injected into people so that the Deep State can track our every move. Why would they spend trillions of pounds on such technology when we are all pretty much logging our own moves via Smart Phones and Social Media? These shadowy entities are better served building vast storage warehouses and harvesting all the data. It is now a case of interpretating that data for their own nefarious needs. Sounds farfetched to you? Cory Doctorow’s new future allegory Attack Surface thinks otherwise.

Masha Maximov is a great programmer, but she knows she is not the best. Her abilities lie in being able to interpret data and understand how best it can be used. At first, this was for the US Government but as data became the new Gold Rush the private sector became involved and offered Masha a lot of money for just a small part of her soul. Years later, Masha does not have much of a soul left and the technology she has helped create now tracks us all and not just the bad guys. Can Masha find her way back home to her old friends and family, and does she even care anymore?

As a Juvenile Literature Librarian back in 2008 I was given the privilege of reviewing Doctorow's debut outing in Little Brother and to this day I still find myself pondering about that book. It blended the idea of science fiction, instead acting more like an alternative version of our own world. That book was written for teenagers but never talked down to them. Since this Doctorow’s writing has matured alongside his reader and characters. Attack is the third in the series and is once again eerily like the world in which we live in today.

The book is told entirely from the perspective of Masha and almost acts like an autobiography of an imaginary life. It leaps back and forth in time, touching upon events in previous books but also creating a lot of new content. The structure is such that you are not required to have read the earlier books to enjoy this one. Fans will have a little more insight, but the main thrust works on all levels.

You could almost describe Attack as Cyberpunk, but that means that we are now living in a Cyberpunk world. Doctorow is an author and activist. One of Doctorow’s aims is to inform and empower people about online safety. This book is a fictional call to arms and is jam packed with real life exploits that the authorities can and do undertake. You can read the book as an enjoyable techno-thriller, but you should really listen to what the author is trying to say. The authoritarian way of life found within the pages of Attack is only one or two more steps along our own path.

As someone who works with IT and technology, the heavy use of technical language was fine for me. But I tested one paragraph on my less computer literate partner, and they struggled to understand. I consider that Doctorow has an almost poetical handle on technical speak and you can enjoy the rhythms, even if you cannot understand the words fully. His style of writing has a sense of disruption like that of Chuck Palahniuk.

What pushes Attack above other near future and technothrillers is its social consciousness and Doctorow’s commitment to knowing his subject matter. I don’t think I have read another piece of fiction that has informed me as much as this one about real-world technology. The writing style and character development is enough to satisfy any reader of speculative fiction but for those that like their fiction tech heavy, they will love it.

Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow is more timely than ever before. I read this on the heels of Permanent Record, Edward Snowden’s autobiography, and this work’s uncanny resemblance to reality is downright scary! Often the phrase - history is told by the conquerors is thrown around - but in this book Doctorow reveals how with the right technology one can foretell the future! And it’s doable by the powerful!

Full review coming soon (in about 10 days) to coincide with the release date in the USA.

‘Attack Surface’ is the third instalment of the ‘Little Brother’-series. Marcus Yallow, main character in the previous books, is a side character this time. Now, former side character Masha Maximow is the one who gets all the attention. The story is set approximately ten years later in time and the characters are no teenagers anymore. Logical consequence is that ‘Attack Surface’ is not a YA book but is intended for an adult reader audience. It’s a hard and very technical dystopia in which Cory Doctorow tries to make people aware of the dangers that threaten our digital privacy. The question is how fictional the book actually is. When following the news related to this topic, or when reading non-fiction about it, you discover that the story is not really diverting that much from what is already happening around us without us noticing it (or caring about it, which is actually a lot worse). It makes perfect sense that Doctorow has dedicated the book to the whistle blowers who risk(ed) their freedom and sometimes even their lives while trying to kick some awareness into the ignorant users of all this digital technology.

The story is fun if you know a thing or two about computers, networking and software. Those who don’t probably won’t even pick up the book or give up before it really becomes interesting. We get an insight on the kind of work Masha does, while flashbacks show which professional paths she walked before ending up where she is now. Flashbacks and present are smoothly integrated with each other and the transitions between timelines make sense. It’s clear though that the style and content of his books limit Doctorows audience. On the other hand, there is no point in telling this in any other way. When it becomes too much of a fictional fairy tale, more readers will like it but more of them will also dismiss the urgency of the message hidden inside the story.

Message? It probably should say messages, plural, because besides the digital privacy and surveillance story, there is also one about people standing up against a repressive regime, and one about #BlackLivesMatter. Doctorow has included a variant of the latter in the book, called the Black-Brown Alliance, which is an important game changer for Masha. I found the privacy issue the most compelling though. The other two may change how Masha thinks about the life she’s leading and what is important to her, but she’s too easily convinced. These story lines could have used a bit more personal drama and some resistance from Masha. Nevertheless, Doctorow knows how to wrap very real (political, ethical and social) themes in a (mostly) believable way into a fictional story. It is definitely worth the read.

Synopsis:  Masha Maximov works for a cybersecurity company "Xoth" which offers targeted surveillance services to governments, starting with the city of "Bltz", the capital of "Slovstakia" (obviously European Slovakia). In her free time, she helps out dissidents in Slovastakia who usually don't know how to protect their mobile phones, how easy it is to get inside and compromise the whole connected group. When autonomous cabs start hunting those dissidents, Masha understands that the firms she's working for are really bad. But it is only the start and friendly fire is hitting ever closer to her home. 

Review: The dystopian, oppressive governments in this SF novel are not far away from our current situation, and everything in there could happen in a few years in our slice of reality. Doctorow's projection is absolutely relevant: BLM riots are happening right now, some of the technological surveillance techniques are used these days, and government are on the verge of falling to this fascist, rassistic, oppressive nightmare - including the U.S.A. or some EU countries. 

Masha's character is only a vehicle for the author's message using first person point of view. In the second half of the novel she develops a history and emotional basis for her own. When she grew out of her super-hero status as a genius hacker girl, I grew very fond of her and loved to read her whole story. I found it enormously interesting to have a main character not on the good side but being engaged in the bad side and watching her figuring out which side she really should choose. But I had to question some of her decisions when she switched allegiances which felt unrealistic. I see the need to drive the plot forward and introduce some twists, but on the other hand it could have been less meandering and more focused, avoiding some complications.

While the novel is set in the same series as Little Brother and Homeland, I had no problems following the narration, as the dependencies seem to be sparse.  I wasn't able to really connect to some side characters like Marcus who played a more important role in the previous novels, but that only means that readers who are already familiar with the setting will love it even more. The most important difference is that this novel is not YA anymore.

The plot could have been tighter, and the author needs loads of infodumps to transport his message to the reader - I was able to skip most of the explanation, because I know too much already about the inner workings of encryption or signatures for example. Casual readers might feel overwhelmed, though. But Doctorow made a fabulous job of combining those techniques and embed them in his dystopic vision. The thriller sometimes drags, but his message always works: People have to act now in order to prevent mass and targeted surveillance in our world. EU GDPR is just a start, Apple's privacy restrictions hurting Facebook and Fortnite are heavily needed everywhere. 

The narration's structure jumped between several timelines quite often and sometimes I had difficulties orienting myself, leading to a somewhat stuttering reading experience. The logical connections between the timelines became obvious quite late, but I highly enjoyed it when I noticed the many interleavings. 

This stuff is scary, it is relevant for the public discourse, and we need to act now. Highly recommended for fans of near future SF who don't shy back from complicated technology - not only as a fascinating reading but also as room for thought on the value of privacy and the role of governments.