Little Brother
139 Installments—Entirely free
(Preview)
Members' Rating:
from 13 Ratings and 8 Reviews
Tags: Contemporary, Novel, Science Fiction, Technology
ISBN:0765319853
"A scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent Americans. A teenage hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic freedoms." (Bunnie Huang)
Praise for Little Brother
"A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion, as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane."
– Scott Westerfeld, author of Uglies and Extras
"I can talk about Little Brother in terms of its bravura political speculation or its brilliant uses of technology -- each of which make this book a must-read -- but, at the end of it all, I'm haunted by the universality of Marcus's rite-of-passage and struggle, an experience any teen today is going to grasp: the moment when you choose what your life will mean and how to achieve it."
– Steven C Gould, author of Jumper and Reflex
"I'd recommend Little Brother over pretty much any book I've read this year, and I'd want to get it into the hands of as many smart 13 year olds, male and female, as I can. Because I think it'll change lives. Because some kids, maybe just a few, won't be the same after they've read it. Maybe they'll change politically, maybe technologically. Maybe it'll just be the first book they loved or that spoke to their inner geek. Maybe they'll want to argue about it and disagree with it. Maybe they'll want to open their computer and see what's in there. I don't know. It made me want to be 13 again right now and reading it for the first time, and then go out and make the world better or stranger or odder. It's a wonderful, important book, in a way that renders its flaws pretty much meaningless."
– Neil Gaiman, author of Anansi Boys
"Little Brother is a scarily realistic adventure about how homeland security technology could be abused to wrongfully imprison innocent Americans. A teenage hacker-turned-hero pits himself against the government to fight for his basic freedoms. This book is action-packed with tales of courage, technology, and demonstrations of digital disobedience as the technophile's civil protest."
– Bunnie Huang, author of Hacking the Xbox
"Cory Doctorow is a fast and furious storyteller who gets all the details of alternate reality gaming right, while offering a startling, new vision of how these games might play out in the high-stakes context of a terrorist attack. Little Brother is a brilliant novel with a bold argument: hackers and gamers might just be our country's best hope for the future."
– Jane McGonical, Designer, I Love Bees
"The right book at the right time from the right author -- and, not entirely coincidentally, Cory Doctorow's best novel yet."
– John Scalzi, author of Old Man's War
"It's about growing up in the near future where things have kept going on the way they've been going, and it's about hacking as a habit of mind, but mostly it's about growing up and changing and looking at the world and asking what you can do about that. The teenage voice is pitch-perfect. I couldn't put it down, and I loved it."
– Jo Walton, author of Farthing
"A worthy younger sibling to Orwell's 1984, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother is lively, precocious, and most importantly, a little scary."
– Brian K Vaughn, author of Y: The Last Man
"Little Brother sounds an optimistic warning. It extrapolates from current events to remind us of the ever-growing threats to liberty. But it also notes that liberty ultimately resides in our individual attitudes and actions. In our increasingly authoritarian world, I especially hope that teenagers and young adults will read it -- and then persuade their peers, parents and teachers to follow suit."
– Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media
Extended Copyright Information
Copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow.
This work, Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, is distributed under the following Creative Commons License: Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0
Originally published by Tor Books.
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About the Author
Born in 1971 to a Canadian family whose values included political activism, Cory Doctorow devoted much of his youth to activist and social justice causes. After leaving college without a degree, he went on to serve pivotal roles in the field of copyright in the electronic and internet age. In 2003, he published his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, which was greeted with much success from the science fiction community. A sought-after lecturer, Doctorow recently held the inaugural Fulbright Chair in Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California. He has since published other works, among them a short-story collection entitled A Place So Foreign and Eight More, and a novel, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.
Like this author? Check out the list of books by this author available on DailyLit.
Back to topOpening Lines (Experimental)
Every chapter of this file has been dedicated to a different bookstore, and in each case, it's a store that I love, a store that's helped me discover books that opened my mind, a store that's helped my career along. The stores didn't pay me anything for this -- I haven't even told them about it -- ...
Back to topCopyright
Copyright 2008 by Cory Doctorow.
License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
Back to topMember reviews
5/5
Reviewed by bossmare on Nov 26, 2008
Loved it.
This story is great! Loved the characters and it could happen just like it went down in the book.
5/5
Reviewed by cee2 on Nov 18, 2008
Makes me want to read more Doctorow
This book caught my attention right off and held it all the way through to the end, so much so that I caught myself frequently ordering up the next several installments immediately after I finished reading the scheduled installment.
It's a frightening tale of a Dept of Homeland Security run amok. I'm not very computer savvy so can't say anything about whether the computer parts are accurate for now or extrapolated for the future, but they seemed believable to me within the story. And I really cared about the characters. This was my first Doctorow book, but I'll be reading more.
4/5
Reviewed by pgscott on Oct 16, 2008
engaging read
so far I am really liking this.... tech details are pretty accurate and timely, character gets you involved right away...thanks! looking forward to the rest of the installments....
5/5
Reviewed by skimmel on Oct 11, 2008
Paranoid thrills
A paranoid trek through post-terrorist attack San Francisco in a not-so-far-fetched future, with the city is under siege by US forces in the name of Homeland Security. Like The Fourth Realm trilogy, this story is about the battle waged between subversives and a corrupt power, with the battlefield occurring in the streets, in the media and, especially, on the Web. The message is clear: we must take an active stand in our governance, otherwise the power-hungry few will terrorize the conservative many, and completely marginalize the powerless. Taught, suspenseful and completely believable, this will appeal to marginalized, tech-savvy and forward-thinking teens and adults.
5/5
Reviewed by Khyarete on Sep 18, 2008
If you're like I was, this will change your views.
Corey Doctorow has created yet another wonderful book. I have read every book that daily lit has by him but none have touched me quite as personally as this one. The political commentary that is rampant in this book is not the regular forced down stuff that Ive heard all my life, but so much more personal. I may not be a tech geek or know how the internet works and I just take it for granted, but this book taught me so much. Politics didn't matter to me because in my mind I did not see how it affects me personally. In this glimpse of what could easily be, the reader is startled into awareness. This book is compelling and wondrous at the same time, full of things for old and young readers to appreciate. I highly recommend it.
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Ratings for 'Little Brother' by Doctorow, Cory
| bossmare | ![]() | Read review | 2008-11-26 |
| cee2 | ![]() | Read review | 2008-11-18 |
| dsmerf214 | ![]() | 2008-10-01 | |
| felynbelarra | ![]() | 2008-11-04 | |
| Henrik | ![]() | 2008-10-26 | |
| Jasmino924 | ![]() | Read review | 2008-08-25 |
| Khyarete | ![]() | Read review | 2008-09-18 |
| lisamiljenk | ![]() | 2008-09-08 | |
| Niel | ![]() | Read review | 2008-08-24 |
| pgscott | ![]() | Read review | 2008-10-16 |
| rostendorf | ![]() | 2008-10-07 | |
| skimmel | ![]() | Read review | 2008-10-11 |
| vedus | ![]() | Read review | 2008-09-12 |
Little Brother
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