Joshua Klein describes himself as a “mobile, personal, and future technology specialist,” which, when it’s at home, means he’s a computer guy. (Does that make me a printed-word — past, present, and future — specialist?) In any case, he wrote this book and decided to release it under a Creative Commons license; it’s apparently never been the traditional publishing route. He works as a consultant to some giant companies, but at the end of his bio, he says that he’s first and foremonst a hacker — someone who takes things apart in order to put them back together better. I don’t actually see that he’s written any other fiction than this book, but considering his bio against the work (which is available through DailyLit.com, as well as at Manybooks.net and various other websites), Roo’d is so personal and all-encompassing that a second work might not work quite as well.

Anyway, Fed is eighteen, living in a near-future society run by corporations. All he wants is to get into MIT or a similarly-good school to study coding for four years, so he can get a degree and go straight into a nice cushy corporate job and be set for life. He has an older brother, Tony, who dropped out of MIT, and he hasn’t heard from him since. When, all of a sudden, one of his mother’s boyfriends mentions his brother and that he’s back in town, Fed absolutely feels he needs to go find him. He does, and it turns out that Tony’s career hasn’t really been affected too much by leaving MIT — before, Tony was working on biotech; now, he’s working in the underground body-modification scene, as well as doing his own sophisticated research. Unfortunately, there’s something that Tony would like to do, but he doesn’t have the computing power. Fed can get him the computing power by writing a virus to use other people’s computers — but at what price? His future? His life?

This is not a book for children. The underground (or even above-ground) body-modification scene (bodmod, or mods) is kind of gross. Nowadays, body-modification means tattooing, piercing, or possibly branding/scarring; in Fed and Tony’s world, it includes everything from spikes and horns to kangaroo-like legs — hence the title. Fortunately, that only forms a portion of the plot, and while Mr. Klein draws parallels between hacking computers and hacking the human body, I seriously doubt that the underground scene has enough momentum and funding to put titanium plates in people’s heads, for example. Those with a low tolerance for blood, guts, and gore may want to skip this novel; there’s one particularly gory scene where Tony (by then called Tonx) cuts a modification out of a (dead) guy’s hand — by cutting off his arm and skinning it.

The coding and network part of the book — what makes it cyberpunk instead of splattergore — is significantly more interesting, especially to readers who have a basic knowledge of, say, things like viruses (virii), networks, hacking, and possibly even coding. (If one needs a primer on these things, there’s always the movie Hackers.) Yes, it is quite possible, within the constraints of Mr. Klein’s novel, to do exactly what Fed and Cessus (another character with expertise in breaking into networks) do. I, of course, would expect no less from a mobile, personal, and future technology specialist, but it’s always nice to have a near-future novel that predicts the future in ways that I find logical and consistent.

I was kind of discouraged by a constant dependence on 20th and early-21st-century pop culture. For example, bubble tea is apparently in fashion for the third time (the first time, as far as I can tell, was about five or seven years ago, for us). A lot of the music, if it isn’t described generically, is a remake of an old song — “ancient British punk” and a White Zombie cover are two that I can remember easily. One Goth subculture active in Texas (which is a Goth state, apparently) is Neos, because apparently The Matrix is making another resurgence. A group of young men in China all dress like James Dean, and call themselves the Classicals, and another group floating around China is the Goth Lolitas. To be sure, things don’t change that fast, and I don’t know exactly when Roo’d is set, but these bumps back to my time occasionally jarred me out of the story.

Fans of Cory Doctorow will certainly enjoy this novel; there’s some of the same feel. Although it’s definitely intended for an older audience than Little Brother, I’d say there are a lot of parallels. The difference, of course, is that in Little Brother it’s the government of the U.S. who’s the bad guy, and in Roo’d it’s both the corporations (which seem to own the U.S. government) and the government of China who are the antagonists. Apparently Mr. Klein is also a friend/acquaintance/associate of Neal Stephenson; although I haven’t read anything he’s written, it might be fair to guess that fans of Mr. Stephenson might enjoy this novel as well. 4/5 stars.