Book Review - Attack Surface

A potent and powerful warning for today and tomorrow!

Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow, coming from Tor Books in October 2020

I received an advance copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I’m not going to recap all the plot points of this book, blurbs exist for a reason. I am going to express my opinions on the story, the writing, and the message. 

Attack Surface is potent and powerful in its message and extremely timely given current world events. This book will scare the crap out of you, in a good way, because it’s meant to wake you up. To make you think about the ways technology is being used and manipulated, to use and manipulate people. A very plausible and frightening warning of where this world could be a few weeks from now. 

But I also had some real problems with this book: I found it very frustrating to read until I was in the last 25%. Basically, when the author stopped jumping backwards in time to earlier parts of the main characters life, and stuck with the main story and the action that was happening on the current timeline, then I was really more engrossed, but that feeling of being sucked into the story not wanting to stop turning pages came very late for me in this book.

Honestly, if I hadn’t committed to giving an honest review of this book I’m not sure I would’ve ever finished reading it. About 20% of the way into into the book I didn’t want to keep reading. I did not like the main character. I did not like the continual interruption in the current action which WAS interesting, to spend what seemed to be inordinate amounts of time explaining how the main character got to where she was today; all the work that she did, her misery, her ridiculously wealthy and hedonistic lifestyle, which was not helping me feel sympathetic towards her even though it was a plausibly accurate portrayal of how military-contractor cyber security experts can be paid and treated. The pace felt like I was trying to run underwater: I want my legs to go faster, but I can’t!

Yes it is vital to the story to understand the main characters’ relationships with her two former bosses. But I still feel like we could’ve saved about 50 pages by tightening up all the expositions of her past and moving more quickly forward with the present. 

The author had to do an incredible balancing act to reach a wide target audience, which I’m sure is his intention. Personally, as someone who has spent decades in a day job in the information technology and networking fields, I fully understood all the technology features that featured prominently in the story, and the author took great pains to explain. But I’m not sure he will hold the attention of the common person who does not fully grasp things such as: programming, networking, WiFi, cell phone network logistics, operating systems, cryptographic systems, Internet security certificates, and many other things like these. There were several occasions where the author spent several pages explaining one of these technologies in a way to attempt to make them understandable to the layperson. These info dumps took me out of the story, and sometimes still didn’t feel he was successful in explaining these very complicated things in a down-to-earth way. People in the tech industry, or who are tech savvy, will eat the story up and get it. But I’m afraid that the sheer volume of technical jargon and real, or soon to be real, technologies, which are practically their own character in the story, will feel very overwhelming for your average reader. 

The book attempts to end on a hopeful note, that the world can be changed, that this person who did so much wrong to others could grow a conscience and change herself, and that politics and technology must work tandem to affect good change. But I kept wondering why these EvilCorps were not disappearing Masha in the end, locking her away forever in some blacksite hellhole? If she wouldn’t cooperate, she was a dangerous liability. Had she not already violated her non-disclosure agreements, and would likely again? Is it harder to make someone disappear if they live in a foreign country, than from America? 

In the end I identified more strongly about Masha’s cynical side. Even if good regulations and protections are enacted and constantly reviewed and revised, people still haven’t changed themselves on the inside. Money still talks, most people still have a price that will buy their support or their silence, even relinquishing rights and freedoms for a feeling of security. And no human, no government on this planet has ever or will ever find a solution to corruption, greed or hate. Those things lie in the human heart. 

I believe this is an important book for this world. 

I just didn’t love it.

Rating: 6 out of 10 galaxies

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Attack Surface is also available on IndieBound