I didn't really get on with Attack Surface. The premise could have been really interesting, a cautionary tale about the dangers of all pervasive state and corporate surveillance, but it just wasn't a particularly interesting read.
Part of me not liking the book is almost certainly down to personal preference. Doctorow's writing is very 'American' in style. The book is littered with cultural references that I didn't get, and has a gritty 'realist' style of narration where the no nonsense protagonist regularly makes snarky remarks about everyone around her. It's a style of book that clearly appeals to many, but I tend to find crass and rather unimaginative.
Leaving aside personal preference, however, there were definite areas where I felt the book was lacking. While probably not strictly hard sf in the traditional sense of the genre, Attack Surface very much felt like a hard sf novel. Doctorow is clearly enraptured by technology (though very much aware of its dangers) and technology takes centre stage in the novel; there are frequent and long info dumps explaining how digital security works, and the various ways in which bad actors can exploit it. Doctorow has some very good things to say about our reliance on the internet and the dangers that it can bring, but the story itself suffers from this taking centre stage.
No more is this evident than in the choice of protagonist. Masha, the book's heroine, is an independent and clever hacker who doesn't take bull from anyone, but is also quite happy to earn enormous amounts of money doing things she considers morally questionable. The arc of the plot is clearly designed to show her slowly coming to terms with the consequences of her actions by seeing their affect on people first hand, but she is so blandly unlikeable for most of the book that I felt no attachment to her at all. The supporting characters are little better; thin stereotypes that exist merely to express different points of view (often, also in the forms of long info dumps) and nudge the protagonist down the correct path.
Attack Surface is a book with something to say, a channel, perhaps, for the Zeitgeist of USA hacker culture. It's just not a particularly good novel, and would probably have been far more interesting as a piece of journalism, without the story pasted on top.
