Attack Surface was published by Tor Books in October 2020. Masha Maximow appeared in both Little Brother and its YA sequel Homeland as an ambiguous figure — a brilliant hacker who worked for the DHS while secretly helping the resistance, motivated by self-interest as much as principle. In Attack Surface, she is the protagonist, and Doctorow uses her moral complexity to explore the most uncomfortable question in the surveillance debate: what about the people who build the tools?
Masha works for Xoth Intelligence, a private military contractor that sells surveillance technology to governments. In Iraq, she helped build a system that tracked and suppressed insurgents. In the fictional Eastern European country of Slovstakia, she deployed similar tools against pro-democracy protesters. She tells herself that she’s just doing her job, that the technology is neutral, that if she didn’t build it someone else would. Then she returns to San Francisco, where the Oakland police are using surveillance tools derived from her work to monitor Black Lives Matter protesters, and the rationalizations stop working.
The novel is Doctorow’s most morally complex fiction — Masha is neither a hero nor a villain but a person with genuine technical talent and genuine ethical failure, and the book takes both seriously. The technical details are, as always, meticulously researched: Doctorow explains how surveillance systems actually work, how they can be defeated, and how the arms race between surveillance and counter-surveillance shapes the political landscape.
Collecting Attack Surface
First edition (Tor Books, New York, 2020): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $10–$25
- Very good/very good: $5–$12